The curious case of the inconvenient in-law

The elections are -- no suprise -- getting nastier. AMLO's folks are claiming Calderón's brother-in-law Diego Hildebrando Zavala Gómez del Campo obtained no-bid contracts from Pemex (Hildebando SA de CV provides data services), suggesting influence peddling and the use of family connections. How much effect this will have is questionable. There are people who assume you're supposed to use your influence to get your relatives jobs. And those contracts may have been perfectly legitimate -- there aren't that many Mexican data service companies, and Hildebrando SA de CV (and Meta Data, controlled by Diego Zavala ) are two of the few large companies that do this kind of work. STILL... Diego Zavala was denying any contracts existed, and was threatening a civil suit against AMLO for "moral damage" (basically, slander) until someone dug them up in the public record. OOPS! The left is having a field day (or course). Diego Zavala -- with a touch of the "deer in the headlights look" was the front page photo in today's Jornada. El Financiero (of course) is ignoring the story. Instead, they have an softball interview with Calderón in which he poo-poos the allegations, and quotes his internal polls, showing him ahead by 7 percentage points. However, a poll cited by Jaime Martínez Veloz in a Jornada opinion piece has AMLO over Calderón 34% to 28%. Martínez is mostly attacking Calerón's market-strategy campaigning style and claiming the polls he cites are a truer picture of the electorate. I don't think anyone really knows anything -- like I said, who's up and who's down is still guesswork. And, with dirty tricks now in play, expect more revelations to surface. AMLO's car accident today might be worth something. No one was hurt (his driver hit a bus pulling out of a parking lot, and AMLO -- being a consumate politico -- climbed on the bus for some impromptu campaigning), but it's an excuse to bring up Nico the driver again (When AMLO ran Mexico City, PAN raised a stink about Nico's salary as a department head, but as a bodyguard, driver and appointments secretary rolled into one -- his salary wasn't all that outrageous). At least he's not a relative.