Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO governs by fleeing forward. He leaves behind him a trail of destruction, anticipating that people will forget what he did, seeking to reinvent himself at every turn, creating smokescreens and scandal to make it practically impossible to follow in his footsteps.
One day, all that record will reappear in the annals of the country’s history, along with the deceits and lies that are the indelible stamp of his time in Mexican politics. History is past, present, and future.
Today, it favors him to be President, which is the level that most benefits the deceivers of politics. And the mañanera is the perfect space to create a new reality daily, to leave behind yesterday’s lies and prepare the ground for the new ones that will emerge tomorrow. For him, the art of politics is prestidigitation in real-time. It is to create multiple doors and mirrors that play off each other and, thus, keep the country in confusion.
For these reasons, rescuing fragments of memory serves to look back and locate where we are today and helps to look forward as a necessary exercise to judge where the country stands, what it has accepted and tolerated, and what should not be accepted or tolerated from now on.
Here, I recall a situation of August 2005 regarding AMLO’s exercise of power as head of government of Mexico City and how his method of government foreshadowed what would happen today, having the same character in power but now as President.
At that time, AMLO had imprisoned Carlos Ahumada, a businessman, for lending money to important figures in his government, such as René Bejarano and Carlos Imaz. The press had uncovered a corruption scheme within his government, inevitably reminiscent of the Segalmex scheme in the current Obrador government and the contracts awarded by his children to his favorite contractors.
That is to say, corruption is a characteristic sign of his regime amid furious attacks on “the corruption of those before us.” Not the corruption of the present but the corruption of the past.
I wrote on August 5, 2005: “Carlos Ahumada made good on his threat: he sewed his lips shut in protest against the prison conditions imposed by orders of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Given the recent release from prison of René Bejarano…and the never-imprisoned Carlos Imaz, as a result of the political agreement of submission of the Sheinbaum-Imaz couple with AMLO, only one thing was exposed: the Government of the Federal District has a political prisoner”.
Since those times, AMLO has shown his willingness to use the judicial police instrument to persecute those he considered his enemies and to benefit those he felt were his allies, always and only as long as they were subordinated to him. It is the operation of political revenge without any consideration. Today, this is also one of the characteristics of the federal government with López Obrador at its head. The Attorney General’s Office is an instrument of political repression and personal revenge.
In 2005, the possibility of López Obrador being a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic was already being debated. In that same August, I wrote: “But the problem (of the use of State force for political vengeance) is much longer term. It has to do with the possibility of him becoming President of the Republic in 2006, and promoting this “method of government” at a national level. Could it be that the intention is to use the vast repressive apparatus of the Mexican State to ensure not only the consolidation of a political project but also its perpetuation in time beyond a six-year term?
Today, it is evident that López Obrador is trying to perpetuate not only his party in power but also himself, inside or outside the governmental apparatus. Since 2006, it has been possible to grasp his re-electionist intentionality under any modality viable at the time.
In 2006, I observed this danger: “It would be a cruel irony for Mexico and history if the party that supposedly merged Cardenism and socialism now became the murderer of democratic freedoms and, under the most exaggerated historical arguments, justified the repression and imprisonment of its opponents”.
The accelerated militarization undertaken by López Obrador is, without a doubt, the prelude to establishing a new type of political regime in Mexico outside the constitutional precepts. It implicitly projects a civic-military kind of government, or totally military, where democratic freedoms and respect for human rights would have to be severely restricted to the point of extinction. This is in the context of the leftist authoritarianism that is spreading throughout the Latin American continent.
On that date, I also wrote: “Does it sound far-fetched? I don’t think so. Paranoia and distrust have been the hallmarks of local government since 2000. The paranoid security at AMLO’s farewell event at the National Auditorium reflects this, as is the training of the gazelles (his all-female security corps) in Israel to guard AMLO on the campaign trail.”
For Lopez Obrador in the presidency, whoever does not submit to his dictates is considered a life-threatening danger to him. His hatred combines with his terrors to make him a president convinced that he needs to surround himself with the military, as no president has ever done before. But not just any military, but military men mired in corruption as a means to ensure their loyalty until death, even if this is a simple illusion of a paranoid obsessed with his own death.
And the analysis continued in 2005: “Now the political project of the PRD is curiously its self-annihilation. AMLO’s demand, which stems from his deepest terrors, is the need to destroy everything that gave him life to be able to sleep peacefully. But he will never sleep peacefully because he will always perceive that danger once he feels haunted by ghosts. Today, he is haunted by the “ghost” Cardenas, and he will do everything necessary to liquidate him, elegantly if possible, and if it is not possible, he will do it with no elegance”.
Said and done: AMLO finally broke with the PRD and formed his own party where he feels that all ghostly danger has gone away. He owns the party; there is no internal democracy to make him uncomfortable, and he has built it to be absolutely loyal and servile to him.
Finally came the omen for the future. “Ahumada’s stitched lips may be an ominous warning of what is coming for the nation. It warns of the danger of having a ruler who, submerged in paranoia, prefers to attack and imprison his opponents, using for this purpose his submissive, subservient employees, bent and lacking self-thought.”
Indeed, AMLO has now surrounded himself with employees who are “submissive, kowtowing, and lacking thinking of their own.”
Since 2005, it has been possible to visualize what the government would be like with AMLO 18 years later.
In rethinking our history, it was not impossible to foresee the authoritarian, militaristic, and corrupt drift that AMLO would undertake as President of the Republic. Looking at history, we see the future. Now, it is time to change that destination.
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