PVEM Politicians Lead Silent Rebellion Against Morena
This article by Montserrat Antúnez originally appeared in the September 21, 2025 edition of Sin Embargo.
Mexico City. Ahead of the 2027 electoral process, the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM) has begun opening negotiations to define whether it will compete in alliance with Morena, as in the last two presidential elections, or alone in several states.
Given this scenario, one of the authors of the book La mafia verde: traición, política y escándalos del Partido Verde [The Green Mafia: Betrayal, Politics and Scandals of the Green Party], explained that the decisions will fall on profiles that for years have played the role of bosses in the party: Senator Manuel Velasco Coello, and politicians such as Arturo Escobar y Vega and Jorge Emilio González, who, despite not holding public office for years, maintain an important leadership although with a lower profile.
“The Green Party is a shadowy plant. It’s a party that, especially in recent years, has chosen to maintain a very low profile in terms of media exposure. It’s a party that we can see emerging in electoral processes, flooding us with publicity, and then sitting back for two and a half years. In reality, the issue of leadership hasn’t changed much in the last 10 to 15 years.”
“Güero [Manuel] Velasco, Escobar, and “Niño Verde” [Jorge Emilio González] himself still have a lot of influence,” Vázquez Sánchez said in an interview.
Manuel Velasco, coordinator of the Green Party in the Senate, recently questioned whether they would compete in a coalition with Morena in the 16 states where governorships will be renewed, although, like PVEM spokesperson Karen Castrejón, he reiterated that he will support President Claudia Sheinbaum until the end of her administration.
The Green Party currently governs San Luis Potosí, while Chiapas is governed by Eduardo Ramírez, who until 2018 was a member of the Green Party and served as Secretary General of Velasco Coello’s government. Not only that, but after the 2024 federal election, the party surpassed the PRI in representation, placing it behind only Morena and the PAN in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
The Green Party currently governs San Luis Potosí, while Chiapas is governed by Eduardo Ramírez, who until 2018 was a member of the Green Party and served as Secretary General of Velasco Coello’s government. Not only that, but after the 2024 federal election, the party surpassed the PRI in representation, placing it behind only Morena and the PAN in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
“If an enabling environment for alliances to be built isn’t created, then alliances shouldn’t be forced; they should be built. I support restraint and a constructive spirit, but local authorities won’t be put in a straitjacket,” stated Manuel Velasco, the first governor of the PVEM party and who competed in the Morena presidential election for the 2024 presidential nomination.
Velasco Coello’s influence is such that he recently worked in the Senate to modify the bill for the anti-nepotism initiative submitted by President Claudia Sheinbaum so that it wouldn’t take effect until 2030, with the intention of facilitating Senator Ruth González’s assumption of the governorship of San Luis Potosí.
The co-author of the book La mafia Verde also recalled that the legislator has benefited from the alliance with the ruling party and one example is that the accusations against him for simulated operations worth 500 million pesos carried out between 2019 and 2021 through six “ghost” or invoicing companies during the time he governed Chiapas remain unpunished, which led to an investigation by the Tax Administration Service (SAT), as reported by the newspaper Reforma in 2021.
Like Manuel Velasco, the Green Party has survived in the political scene over the years thanks to its negotiations with the ruling party. In 2000, it supported the presidential campaign of Vicente Fox Quesada of the PAN; in 2006, Roberto Madrazo Pintado of the PRI; in 2012, PRI member Enrique Peña Nieto; and in 2018, José Antonio Meade, also of the PRI. It later joined Morena.
“It may seem surprising to us, but if we look at the newspaper archives, we can find that the Green Party says this during the electoral process because it’s their first way of opening negotiations. They say, ‘We’ll go it alone anyway.’ From there, they begin to negotiate what, where, when, how, and with whom it’s best to form an alliance. There are places where they’ve actually grown enough to be able to go it alone. It’s part of how the Green Party handles its negotiations. They make these interests public, this idea that they won’t form an alliance, and from there, all their negotiations begin,” said Paula Sofía Vázquez.
Green Chiefdoms
Karen Castrejón, spokesperson for the PVEM, Manuel Velasco as the party’s coordinator in the Senate, and Arturo Escobar, a member of the Green Ecologist Party’s National Political Council, responsible for approving coalitions with other political parties, have been the party’s leaders in recent years. However, the press has reported that Jorge Emilio González, known as “El Niño Verde,” still maintains his leadership within the Green Party.
“It will always be their party, and they [the Green Party leaders] have a way of participating in the party’s successes that doesn’t necessarily involve political issues. Rather, it involves bidding, contracts, and economics. The Green Party is a party riddled with scandals, issues of illicit financing, direct bidding, and bad hiring; they are interested because they own the business side of the party,” added writer Vázquez Sánchez.
For example, irregular activities mark the political career of “El Niño Verde,” who inherited the party from his father and founder, Jorge González Torres. In 2004, a video broadcast on Televisa showed how investor Luis Lara negotiated with González Martínez a payment of millions of pesos to acquire a property that would allow him to build hotels and golf courses in Playa Blanca and Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, a wetland area.
González Martínez acknowledged that he did have that conversation, although he denied receiving the money. No investigation has been conducted against him in that case. “El Niño Verde” (Green Boy) was a party leader until 2011 and held his last position as a federal deputy until 2019. However, in recent years, his appearances at events related to the alliance between Morena and the Labor Party (PT) have demonstrated the influence he still has within the Green Party.
On June 2, 2024, one day after the election in which Claudia Sheinbaum won the Presidency and a majority in Congress, Jorge Emilio González was captured in the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel, where the Morena member’s team was located, celebrating during a phone call that the Green Party had obtained more votes than the Workers’ Party (PT). “I’m a bitch, don’t mess with me!” the politician shouted, as recorded in a video released by journalist Carolina Rocha.
In September of that year, without holding any official position in the Green Party or the government, he went to the National Palace to meet with the then Secretary of the Treasury, Rogelio Ramírez de la O, to, he said, “raise the need to invest in protected natural areas and in renewable energy to combat climate change.”
Meanwhile, in November 2023, when Morena was analyzing the distribution of candidates for the midterm election, then-Morena Deputy Antonio Pérez Garibay denounced that Jorge Emilio González Martínez announced the results of the internal poll hours before they were announced and asserted that the governorship in Jalisco “had already been agreed upon” with Claudia Sheinbaum and Morena.
In recent months, Arturo Escobar y Vega, another of the Green Party’s leaders, questioned the alliance in Tamaulipas, prompting Green Party Senator Luis Melgar Bravo, a close associate of Ricardo Salinas Pliego, to say that “there have been rats” in Morena.
Despite having a political career marked by accusations of irregular activities, Escobar y Vega is considered a “historic leader” of the PVEM. In July 2009, when he was a Senator, he was detained on the eve of the federal elections upon arriving at the Tuxtla Gutiérrez Airport in Chiapas. He was carrying a Louis Vuitton suitcase slung over his shoulder containing 1.1 million pesos in cash. Although he denied that the money was his, he confirmed that it belonged to another activist, Fernando Castellanos Cal y Mayor. He also acknowledged that the money would be used to pay his representatives at the polling stations.
In 2015, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Electoral Crimes investigated him for electoral crimes when he served as Enrique Peña Nieto’s Undersecretary of the Interior.
“[The PVEM leaders] are incredibly calculated, they know perfectly well what to say, with whom to say it, what little bits of chaos they are going to try to generate to try to generate certain reactions, they are already calculating all the probabilities of what can happen in 2027 […] Ideologically the party has no ideology and so it can grasp absolutely everything, it gets along just as well with business owners as it does with unions, it is a party that is always thinking about its survival at a multi-level,” said writer Paula Vázquez Sánchez about the alliances that the Green Party is already analyzing.
Montserrat Antúnez is a journalist committed to communicating issues related to access to justice, conflicts of interest, and human rights, and host of the program En Defensa del Consumidor and the news program Dos con Todo, alongside Dulce Olvera.
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