By Lilia Lopez

As election-day looms closer, Mexico's politicians aren't holding anything back and taking their increasingly dirty fight to the television airwaves.

PRD

With less than 100 days to go until the elections on July 2, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) looks to have a good chance of holding on to its lead in the race to take the Mexican presidency. But, that doesn’t mean its going to be an easy last stretch of the race for the party’s candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador: rather the opposite.

In recent weeks, both the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) and Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) have gone on the attack, throwing out new ads painting the leftist candidate as dishonest, corrupt and authoritarian. While the candidates have been playing anything but nice for many months, some of the latest television advertisements released by the PAN and PRI are particularly blunt and personal. Calderon´s people have released one juxtaposing statements made by López Obrador with those made by Venezuela’s fiery leftist leader Hugo Chavez.

PAN

One could say the Partido Acción Nacional has resorted to pulling out all the “spots.” In its latest move against leading candidate López Obrador, Vicente Fox’s party released a series of television spots satirizing the appearance of Mexican writer Elena Poniatowski, who appears in a recently released commercial supporting López Obrador. Ponatowski, who is a highly respected Mexican author and journalist whose work regularly appears in La Jornada, also serves the PRD campaign as a cultural adviser

The ad debuted Sunday during the hit program, “Cantando por un Sueño, (Singing for a Dream) and featured Poniatowski commenting on the good government of López Obrador during his mayor ship of Mexico City. She notes the “honest” and “cost-saving” manner in which both the freeway improvement and a pension program for the elderly were undertaken during López Obrador’s administration. The spot then cuts to secretly recorded videotape footage of two former PRD city officials stuffing large amounts of cash into a suitcase and gambling recklessly in Las Vegas.

PRI

The Partido Revolucionario Institucional candidate, Roberto Madrazo has not been playing clean either. Madrazo is also involved in the recent spot controversy surrounding his fellow candidates as his party has sponsored several controversial ads, attacking the PRD’s López Obrador. According to Madrazo, he was forced to engage in this kind of campaigning because López Obrador has refused to participate in an open debate with the other two candidates. Madrazo declared, “Debate is the essence of democracy, and you, López Obrador refuse to debate. As a result, I have to do it this way.”

In response to these newest spots, López Obrador’s campaign filed an official complaint with the Instituto Federal Electoral (Federal Election Institute) which they declared to be defamatory. In one spot, López Obrador is quoted as saying it would be very simple to hold several debates between the three presidential candidates, even proposing up to 12. Because the words used in the ad are indeed those of the former Mexico City mayor, the basic veracity of the remarks are not in question and do not give the IFE grounds to call for the removal of the ads. The Instituto Federal Electoral declared the spots do not contain false information and therefore are not defamatory and can stay on the air