FILE PHOTO: Elba Esther Gordillo, leader of Mexico’s teacher’s union, addresses the audience during an event in Puebla May 25, 2011. REUTERS/Imelda Medina
December 15, 2017
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The powerful former leader of Mexico’s largest teacher’s union, Elba Esther Gordillo, will be let out of jail under house arrest more than four years after her detention on embezzlement charges, government and judicial sources said on Friday.
Gordillo, 72, was unexpectedly arrested in 2013 in the first year of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, in what appeared to show the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) taking a stand against corruption.
But the attorney general (PGR) this week stopped fighting Gordillo’s lawyer’s attempts to get her out of prison, and a tribunal approved, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The judicial source said that in a matter of hours or days she would be allowed to go home.
The decision to let Gordillo see out her trial under house arrest came as the political party she founded, the New Political Alliance Party (Panal), said it would back the PRI in the 2018 election.
(Reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez and Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Christine Murray)
