He’s accused of embezzlement but as he prepares to go on trial, a former mayor of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, also has one eye on running as a candidate for his old job.

Mauricio Trejo Pureco, Institutional Revolutionary Party mayor between 2012 and 2015, confirmed last Wednesday that he would participate in the party’s internal selection process to seek to be its candidate in June’s election for mayor of San Miguel, which has been governed by the National Action Party for the past five years.

That announcement came just two days before a state judge ordered Trejo to stand trial on charges he embezzled municipal resources.

The newspaper Reforma, which obtained access to the former mayor’s case file, said that Trejo is accused of putting two “aviators” – people who collect a pay check without actually working – on the municipal payroll when he headed up the local government.

The two municipal treasury “workers,” who Reforma said provided “personal services” to the ex-mayor in the private sector, were paid a combined 778,136 pesos (US $38,850 at today’s exchange rate) between January 2013 and December 2015, money that allegedly ended up in Trejo’s pockets.

In a video message to announce his intention to become mayor again, Trejo denied allegations of wrongdoing but warned that his political adversaries would still attempt to discredit him.

“In recent years I’ve seen that San Miguel de Allende and its residents have been wronged in various ways just as they tried to wrong me in the past five years by inventing legal complaints and inventing supposed frauds that never happened and were never proven because there wasn’t, there isn’t and there won’t be anything illegal in my conduct,” he said.

“All these affronts … oblige me not to be just a spectator and that’s why I’m going to participate in my party’s [candidate selection] process. This decision will frighten and annoy those who are in government today and they’ll attack my daughters, the mother of my daughters, my family, my friends and me with false information, with audio and video taken out of context as they usually do … but I’m not scared,” Trejo said.

The former mayor claimed that “everything worked a lot better” in San Miguel de Allende when he was in office and asserted that there were “great achievements” in the areas of the economy, tourism and security.

“… I don’t have the slightest doubt that we’re going to recover San Miguel de Allende from those who are selling it and those who are killing it. … Let’s together recover San Miguel de Allende, San Miguel without fear,” he said.

Source: Reforma (sp)