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Moved to Saturday.
By Chris Covert
After holding his position as head of the Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) for less than a year, Humerto Moreira Valdes resigned Friday, according to Mexican news accounts.
Moreira submitted his resignation at the 38th Special Session of the PRI today.
In his place, Cristina Diaz a former Nuevo Leon state mayor and previous general secretary of the PRI, has assumed leadership on an interim, presumably temporary basis.
Moreira has come under severe criticism, both within and outside PRI for his role in the massive expansion of Coahuila state government spending and debt assumption during his term as governor.
The ensuing scandal which began last August has caused four top officials with the Coahuila finance ministry to either resign, go to trial or has simply disappeared. Much of the debt acquired during his term had been fraudulently contracted using falsified docuemnts and allegedly forged signatures. News reports indicate the fraud goes back as far as December 2009.
Moreira's record as leader of the PRI has been nearly exemplary, save for the Michoacan elections last month in which the PRI barely eked out a win in the governor's house by less than 63,000 votes, and fail to get a majority in the state Chamber of deputies. All the other state elections during his brief tenure were marked by crushing wins over the opposition both in the legislatures or in municipalities, continuing the near clean sweep by his predecessor, Beatriz Parades Rangel, during whose term the PRI flipped or retained 11 of 14 state houses.
During the last few months as the scandal grew clearer, calls were raised by the leadership within some of the PRI's internal organizations for his resignation, calls which he fiercely resisted, claiming the scandal was about politics.
A protest began last week including PRI members in Tabasco state and elsewhere within the national PRI structure threatened the internal cohesion of the party which was uniting behind former Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto, who is widely considered to be the frontrunner for president of the republic. Mexican presidential elections take pace the first Sunday in July, 2012.
At issue was the way Moreira rammed the coalition among PRI, Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico (PVEM) and Convergencia through.
Although Mexican news accounts fail to report on it, it is possible the removal of Sonoran Senator Manilo Beltrones from consideration for PRI candidate as president may have also played a role in forcing Moreira's resignation.
Senator Beltrones had demanded at least an explanation from Moreira for his role in the debt scandal in Coahuila in a public speech earlier last month.
A few days later a contrite Beltrones removed his name fron consideration citing the need for party unity.