More Sunland Park Dirty Tricks?

My kind of New Mexico scandal. Still, anything scandalous anywhere near the border worries me, because the opportunities for really-serious corruption are boundless there:

The race to replace a New Mexico mayor — who once signed $1 million in architecture contracts while drunk — is now plagued with allegations that one candidate tried to set up another by hiring a topless dancer to go to his office, and have the incident filmed.

Gerardo Hernandez of Sunland Park, New Mexico told KVIA-TV that he was meeting with his campaign manager and a job applicant in his office, when a topless woman came in and began to dance for them. “She started dancing and she was suggestive,” he said.

Hernandez claims that the man he was meeting with, a “Mexican national fleeing threats south of the border [who] offered to assist his campaign,” according to the Associated Press, brought the woman to the meeting. He then put on some music and said she liked to dance, which she proceeded to do. “As any gentleman would know, it was a lap dance,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez claims that the woman was sent by his opponent in the Sunland Park mayoral race, Mayor Pro Tem Daniel Salinas, who he says is trying to strong-arm him out of the race by threatening to release a tape of the incident. Hernandez says he was approached by a man who “said, ‘We have a video of you and we’re going to release it if you don’t withdraw from the race.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can release it, because I’m not going to withdraw from the race.’”

“[Hernandez] is going come up with a lot of excuses,” Salinas said. “He’s a married man, so I’d be thinking of a couple of excuses and try to blame this on different people and trying to make up my little story.”