¿Quién es mas malo?
As early voting gets ready to begin on Monday, two Miami-Dade mayoral candidates are taking pots at each other in a pissing match about who’s the most corrupt of the pair.
Hint: They’re both losers.
Former Mayor Alex Penelas and current termed-out Commissioner Esteban Bovo have ramped it up 
at the most recent debates, particularly on a Spanish language debate last week on Actualidad Radio.
Bovo inferred, yet again, that the former mayor’s administration was about getting his friends rich. “Alex wants to wipe away the past, the corruption, the cronyism with a wet rag,” he said, and it sounds much better in Spanish. “Here in Miami-Dade, there are a few millionaires,” thanks to Penelas reign.
Penelas shot back with accusations that Bovo participated in the absentee ballot fraud — where ballots were stashed in his district office aide’s car — and that his campaign received money from the Nicolas Maduro regime in Venezuela via former Congressman David Rivera. who has been sued by the new government for breaching a multi-million dollar contract.
Read related: David Rivera’s ‘Maduro money’ spread to Esteban Bovo, Alex Diaz de la Portilla
“Your confidence man, David Rivera, got $15 million from the government and $3 million went to the 
bank account of the woman who handles the finances of your campaign,” Penelas said, referring to Esther Nufer, who, according to sources cited by the Miami Herald, got $3.5 million from Rivera and transferred $2 million from her consulting firm to her personal account.
Bovo returned the $1,000 that Rivera’s company gave to his campaign, but not anything else. Penelas says that donations from out of state political action committees could have come from those funds.
“On several occasions I have asked Mr. Bovo where is the rest of the money. Where is it? Where is the Maduro money,” he asked several times. It should be a hashtag. #whereisthemaduromoney
Bovo was extremely calm on stage, but later he lost it with Ladra.
“For anyone to assume that I, with my dad’s history, would do business with communists,” Bovo said about his father, Esteban Bovo, Sr., who is a Bay of Pigs veteran and local Cuban exile hero. “Fuck Penelas. My dad is on his death bed and we have to be sure he doesn’t see or hear any of this shit.”
He said he has had a relationship with Rivera that goes back years. “Every single person on that stage has had a relationship with David Rivera,” he told Ladra, although I bet that Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava has not.
“As soon as I read the story in the paper, I returned the $1,000 he gave me,” Bovo said, adding Nuhfer told him she was not involved. “I took her at her word. When her name came out connected with this, we parted ways.”
Read related: Alex Penelas bashes Bovo, wins first Spanish-language mayoral debate
It really is sorta ridiculous to tie Bovo to Maduro money. If anybody has been hard on communist regimes while on the dais it’s him. In fact, that this is coming from Alex Penelas is also kind of ironic, seeing as how his supporters have traveled to Cuba and want to open negotiations with the regime there.
Both Mike Fernandez, a healthcare magnate who has given $300,000 to the Penelas Bold Vision 
political action committee, and Freddy Balsera, one of his many campaign consultants, want normalized relationships with the Cuban regime. Fernandez is one of the architect’s of President Barack Obama’s 2014 approach to the Castros. Balsera even traveled there in 2015 to celebrate the reopening of the new U.S. embassy with a bunch of Cuban government officials. The suspicion is that both kind of getting in the front of the line to make money once the restrictions are lifted.
Penelas wouldn’t respond to questions about that double standard when he called Ladra back last week. “I’m not going to get into a pissing match with Steve Bovo,” he said.
Um, too late.
“My comments speak for themselves. When he speaks in public about me and makes these general allegations that I’m corrupt, I’m corrupt, I’m corrupt, I will respond,” Penelas said.
“Why won’t he answer the question?”
Ladra could ask the same thing of him. Also, why is he hitting Bovo when the commissioner supposedly keeps coming in on the bottom in the polls? Do they know something we don’t?
Voters can always make the safe choice and vote for Xavier Suarez instead of either of them. X can only gain from the battle between the Bovo and Penelas.
For Miami-Dade Mayor its Alex Penelas vs Esteban Bovo for most corrupt award added by Ladra on
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