Mexico City, Feb 21 (EFE).- The trading of accusations between the two main parties vying for the presidency in Mexico's July 1 election intensified with charges that the sister of outgoing President Felipe Calderon sought to use public money in a political campaign.
Media outlets have broadcast an audio clip in which a woman said to be Luisa Maria "Cocoa" Calderon is heard discussing a plan to manipulate public spending in a bid to become her party's candidate for governor of the western state of Michoacan.
Eduardo Sanchez, spokesman for the main opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, said his organization has asked prosecutors to scrutinize Cocoa Calderon's campaign for the "possible diversion of federal public resources, utilization of social programs, influence-peddling and vote-buying."
She secured the nomination of the conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN, but Cocoa Calderon narrowly lost the Michoacan gubernatorial contest to the PRI's Fausto Vallejo.
In a related development, the speaker of the Baja California state legislature, David Jorge Lozano, delivered to the federal Attorney General's Office an appeal from lawmakers to investigate two of the state's former governors, Ernesto Ruffo and Eugenio Elorduy, for possible links to drug trafficking.
Both politicians belong to the PAN, whose national campaign chief, Jose Espina, said the allegations against Ruffo and Elorduy "are clear manifestations" of nervousness on the part of the PRI and its presidential nominee, Enrique Peña Nieto.
The PRI is worried, according to Espina, because the PAN's Josefina Vazquez Mota is cutting into Peña Nieto's lead in the polls.
Peña Nieto, former governor of the central state of Mexico, claims the PAN administration is pursuing politically motivated investigations of PRI members.
He cites the Feb. 8 arrest in Texas of a Mexican man said by U.S. authorities to have funneled bribes from drug cartels to the PRI's Tomas Yarrington during his 1999-2004 tenure as governor of the northern state of Tamaulipas.
The arrest in Texas and much-trumpeted Mexican federal probes of other former Tamaulipas officials are part of a campaign "orchestrated to discredit the PRI" ahead of this year's elections, Peña Nieto said recently.
A poll published Monday by capital daily El Universal shows Peña Nieto with support from 48 percent of potential voters, followed by Vazquez Mota, with 32 percent, and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, with 20 percent.
As the governor of the country's most populous state, the charismatic Peña Nieto has been in the media limelight for years. He is also married to a popular actress, Angelica Rivera.
Vazquez Mota, meanwhile, is trying to become Mexico's first woman president even as Lopez Obrador hopes to avenge his narrow loss in the disputed 2006 election.
Mexico's constitution limits the head of state to a single six-year term. The PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000, is trying to regain the presidency after two straight losses to the PAN.
