Aguirre’s Cell Phone Conversations Recorded by Opponents

(Iguala, JG 22 January) PRD coalition candidate Ángel Aguirre did not deny that it was his voice on a recorded telephone conversation with PRD senator Claudia Corichi of Zacatecas. In the conversation she offers to send a hundred political operatives to Guerrero to help with the campaign.

PRI coalition campaign workers cried foul and threatened to take the matter to Guerrero’s Election Institute. Aguirre responded that it is not a violation of election laws for political parties to send operatives from other states to help in the election; and if it were, the PRI is doubly in violation, as the embattled Senator Fernando Castro Trenti had sent more than 200 loyalists from Tijuana to help Añorve. Trenti occupies a position in the federal Senate roughly equivalent to Majority Whip. Aguirre declared that the mastermind behind the PRI’s “dirty war” is not Trenti, but rather his “boss,” majority leader Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones Rivera, who has planned tactics that violate the very election law “that he himself sponsored several years ago.”

Aguirre pointed out that the recording of cell phone conversations without the knowledge or consent of one of the parties is a crime in Mexico, and that it is the PRI and not the PRD that is engaged in illegal election tactics. The candidate did not say whether his campaign would file a complaint with the IEEG, but did call upon the authorities to investigate the matter.