Mayor forced to walk 20 km for failing to complete paving project

Residents of a community in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, were not pleased with the performance of the mayor, so they made him go for a long and supposedly humiliating walk.

Mayor Pascual Charrez Pedraza, whose term ends this year, has failed to pave streets in Ignacio López Rayón, claim residents, who gathered Monday outside city hall holding banners denouncing the mayor and demanding an audience with him. 

Charrez had promised to pave the streets in 2018, but the work has yet to be completed, the angry crowd said. 

In accordance with indigenous Otomí custom, they forced the mayor to walk 20 kilometers from city hall to their town so he could see the unpaved streets for himself. 

Such a walk is considered a form of humiliation according to the Otomí, the inhabitants of the region before they were subjugated by the Toltecs and later the Aztecs. 

“We come to look for the mayor since a project started in 2019 has not been completed. He is leaving and has not complied,” said one angry resident, who noted that the unfinished paving project is the only thing the mayor has done during his administration

Resident Ángel Martínez Montúfar noted that during his campaign the mayor indicated that he was going to remodel the garden in the main square.

“Pascual Charrez boasted that he would bring a unique marble from Italy, and he even presented the project to residents and the priest,” he said, adding that Charrez had also promised to build a medical clinic with funds from the mayor’s office but neither of those projects proceeded.  

The mayor is the brother of former federal deputy Cipriano Charrez, who is currently incarcerated in a Pachuca jail on charges of attempting to murder Pascual Charrez, who is no stranger to controversy himself.

On June 18 Hidalgo Governor Omar Fayad Meneses linked him and 16 others to the fuel theft ring Los Hades in a presentation to President López Obrador, for which Charrez demanded a retraction and an apology.

“This is slander. Politics is a very complicated environment and there must be a collaborator who does not like me, not everyone does, and someone may have passed a tip on to the governor,” Charrez said of the accusation.

Source: La Jornada (sp), Criterio (sp), La Silla Rota (sp)