Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
In a strictly electoral speech, President López Obrador spoke at a civic ceremony in the Zócalo about energy, continuity, elections, and oligarchs. He mentioned former President Felipe Calderón, pointing out “that it is no longer time for murky ties between the Mexican government and U.S. government agencies”. He said, “Now there is no simulation, and organized, and white-collar crime is truly being fought because there are no complicit relationships with anyone”.
The President has been trying for a week to distance himself from his international image of being an accomplice, promoter, and ally of drug trafficking in Mexico. That is why he spoke so stridently in the Zócalo on that subject because the President knows that a serious study of his government would easily conclude that his administration is not only complacent with criminal organizations, but that even their growing influence has gone hand in hand with electoral agreements that benefit the official party and the cartels alike.
He used the phrase ” murky links,” wanting us to look back to the past and stop thinking about the present. But it is a failed presidential act. It is impossible not to notice the actions of the present, being so present in the collective memory.
The most forceful phenomenon in the present is the mobilizations of elements of the armed forces, active and retired, and their families, protesting the treatment received by their members when they act according to their training manual. The President affirmed that “kill them in the heat of the moment” no longer exists. Still, the manual indicates that if a military checkpoint marks the stop, and if, instead of stopping, the perpetrator flees, the instruction is to finish them off because they are up to something suspicious.
In Tamaulipas, elements of a military checkpoint killed the five young men “in the heat of the moment”. The protest of the Army elements is due to an incongruence in the President’s policy towards organized crime. On the one hand, he insists on the benevolent treatment of members of organized crime “because they are people”. On the other hand, instead of acting like the military, he demands that they pretend to be community policemen. The latter has nothing to do with training or the instruction manual by which the military is guided on patrols.
There is an abysmal difference between the training of a military officer and that of a police officer. They are two different conceptual worlds. In an emergency, an army officer shoots while a police officer investigates. And the soldiers and their families who protest defend the logic of the military training they received.
If the problem to be defined is so clear that even the military base understands it, why doesn’t the President understand it? Indeed he does understand it, but his commitments do not allow him to assume the consequences of sending troops to put themselves in danger and control but not to shoot or defend themselves.
The President has a special relationship with the Sinaloa cartel. He frequently travels, without witnesses, to the region he dominates in Badiraguato, has a personal and written dialogue with Chapo’s mother and brother, and does not want the Army to catch Ovidio. According to U.S. news media, the President sent the Secretary of the Interior to Sinaloa to explain that Ovidio’s arrest was not the President’s fault. And he justified himself to the cartel, saying that it was an action prompted by Biden. Cowardice rides on lies to hide murky links….
When AMLO speaks of “murky links,” he should review who in his entourage maintains these murky relations with U.S. agencies regardless of his instructions. Several in the area of security do not believe in the President’s hypocrisy.
The President insists that his public and national security management is different from what it was in the times of neoliberalism. But every day that passes confirms the falsity of his claims. Everything remains the same, except that he is the only one who profits from corruption and presidential power to move his personal and political interests.
The ” murky links” exist, and they emanate from the Presidential Palace.
[email protected]
@rpascoep
Further Reading: