In Alfonso 'Poncho' Romo's darkest hours, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gave his former chief of staff a boost by asking some senators to expedite the appointment of economist Alfredo Navarrete to the Institute for the Protection of Bank Savings (IPAB). The process began this Tuesday in the Senate and is supervised from the office of Senator Alejandro Esquer, a man of all confidence from Palenque. Sources in the Senate tell LPO that the directive is to fast-track Navarrete's appointment. The economist comes from working at the Ministry of Finance and has a past working under Romo at the brokerage firm Vector, which was shut down last year due to sanctions from the Department of the Treasury. Romo is going through a complex moment. Annoyed with the government of Claudia Sheinbaum (in 2023 he bet on Marcelo Ebrard), with problems paying salaries at his university in Monterrey, and now as the protagonist of an intense social media campaign that seeks to establish that he has some kind of legal problem in the United States, something his circle denies. The origin of that black campaign is unknown, but in the circles of the ruling party, a rumor is gaining strength that links Romo's adventures with the explosive Tabasco plot starring businessmen friends of Andy López Beltrán. The stories of Amilcar Olán and Andy have unthinkable collateral effects, from the vicissitudes of politics in Nuevo León to geographies closer to Tabasco such as Quintana Roo, where the Green Party uses that plot to erode any possibility for Rafa Marín, who last week tried to land in Cancún but, after a strong maneuver by the party allied to Morena, barely managed to reach Mérida as a delegate of Segob.
