Who is funding Mexico's presidential candidates?
MEXICO CITY: Mexico’s three leading presidential candidates have not declared a single peso in direct private financial contributions to their election campaigns, federal records show, raising concerns from corruption watchdogs about the potential influence of dark money in a pivotal contest.
Candidates from Mexico’s three main political parties said they relied almost exclusively on money from their parties, which is overwhelmingly public, to bankroll their campaigns, a total of more than 634 million pesos (RM130 million).
That is according to the most recent declarations they have filed with the National Electoral Institute (INE).
Mexicans head to the polls tomorrow to elect their next president in what had been a highly anticipated and hard-fought contest. According to the candidates’ filings, not one of the country’s nearly 90 million registered voters made a monetary contribution directly to their campaigns, and just 70 people had given a total of around 1.4 million pesos of in-kind goods or services.
By law, Mexican parties must rely on public funding for the majority of their financing. Private donations are tightly regulated and have never played an important role in modern campaigns — at least not the modest sums typically declared to federal election authorities. In reality, large, clandestine contributions and illegal vote buying have factored into Mexican elections for decades, corruption watchdogs say.
The latest figures reported to INE strain credibility and underscore the difficulty of cleaning up Mexico’s campaign finance system, said Max Kaiser, an authority on anti-graft initiatives at the non-profit Mexican Institute for Competitiveness.
“Until we stop this cycle, we won’t be able to control corruption in Mexico,” Kaiser said.
The presidential campaigns of Jose Antonio Meade, candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, and Ricardo Anaya of the National Action Party or PAN, both said their public funding was sufficient, so they did not need private money. Representatives for the two candidates said there had been no under-reporting of private donations or campaign spending.
A representative for the frontrunner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, running for the Morena Party, did not respond to a request for comment.
The federal election agency INE regulates campaign finance. INE board member Ciro Murayama said he found nothing unusual in the candidates’ declarations that they had not taken any private money.
“If someone doesn’t believe it, they have to demonstrate it,” Murayama said in an interview. “If someone thinks something, the burden of proof is on that person.”
But Luis Carlos Ugalde, a former president of INE, acknowledged that Mexico’s strict limits on private donations were easily evaded by contributors seeking influence.
“The campaign (spending) limits are not respected,” Ugalde said. “Private donors prefer to give without reporting it to buy access.”
In Mexico’s 2012 federal elections, less than three per cent of campaign financing came from private donors, according to a document on INE’s website.