Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
On September 30, 1938, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, descended from his plane, arriving from Munich, Germany, and declared, “Here is peace for our time”. He showed a document bearing Adolf Hitler’s signature in which he pledged not to initiate hostilities on the European continent. To appease Hitler, Chamberlain agreed to Germany’s annexation of the Sudeten German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia. A year later, the insatiable Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II began. Churchill had long predicted that Germany’s policy of appeasement was doomed to failure. The war was the consequence of misguided policies… of politicians whose short-term interests did not admit the possibility of another war. And who thought, just the same, that they could make a pact with the devil and get away with it.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador thinks like Chamberlain. He offered a policy called “hugs, not bullets” that would produce a “peace for our time” for Mexico. And, now that he is about to finish his term as President of the Republic, he has failed in his supposed pacifist purpose. He made a pact with the diabolical drug trafficker and was deceived, just like Chamberlain. Or he let himself be fooled.
The fact is that AMLO leaves power leaving behind him a country on fire, in a situation of internal war, with the State defenseless and ill-prepared to face a strong and determined enemy before a national Army whose ethics and social prestige are diminished.
The problem is that AMLO, like Nero before him, flatly denies the reality of violence and insecurity in the country. He swears that Mexico lives in a situation of peace like never before. A female charlatan turned into an option to succeed him in power sees and swears the same. To be consistent, she has also accepted the path of negotiation with organized crime to ensure “the peace of our times”.
AMLO is ready to hand over power, but his eyes are blinded by his ideology, which has turned him into a madman loose on the prairie, like King Lear. The fire surrounds him, and in response, he claims that Mexico will continue to enjoy the prevailing peace. His denial is, as in the case of Chamberlain, very close to criminal conduct, for being rulers responsible for protecting the lives and property of their governed. Moreover, his preoccupation with winning elections is matched by his determination to maintain power within the parameters he has set for his intended presidential successor.
It would seem that AMLO has the 1994 electoral process at heart. In what way? That election, we now know, was the first, after a long time of stability, where the government-narco-trafficking relationship was volatile. Until the De La Madrid presidency, the government was in charge of the destinies of the Mexican drug trafficking groups. But with the imprisonment of the three leaders of the Guadalajara Cartel, a new era of detachment of the Cartels from state tutelage began.
Important governmental actors wanted to ensure the continuity of the relationship established with the dispersed drug trafficking leaders, who also entered fully into the cocaine business, which generated profits unimaginable until then. It seems that Colosio, as PRI candidate for the Presidency, was not convinced of the support of that relationship that sectors of the outgoing government wanted to inherit him. His resistance caused the fatal outcome: he was assassinated.
AMLO, aware of all this, does not want to take the same route. As it happened in 1994, he also wants to inherit his relationship with drug trafficking to the next government because he considers it functional in tasks of intimidating social groups and serving as a factor in elections, either to dissuade participation or to force people to vote in favor of the ruling party. His intended successor would be obliged to give continuity to the Badiraguato pact, which, according to his perception, has been highly profitable in all senses.
He had to create the conditions so that his successor could continue the fruitful government-narco-trafficking relationship without the stigma of being a #NarcoPresidenta.
The plan was to create a “fortuitous” meeting between Claudia Sheinbaum and the Sinaloa Cartel in Chiapas. The intention was that the candidate could negotiate the continuation of the same pact with the devil that brought the “leader” to power six years ago.
It would not be credible that she would also disappear into the bowels of Badiraguato to meet with the Cartel. AMLO had already worn out that resource with the publicized greeting to Chapo Guzman’s mother. Finding another place, context, and a way to provoke the “face-to-face” between the candidate and the Cartel was necessary. What better than in the jungle of Chiapas, in a space controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel, without witnesses and in the open.
The strategy was to provoke the meeting without military escorts or state police as witnesses. It was absolutely out of place, given the normal protection and security for a presidential candidate. But so it was: her guards were nowhere to be seen. Obviously, they were instructed to move away from the place and leave the candidate alone to hold the meeting, equivalent to what would be her Acatempan Hug. It was the fraternal greeting between opposing forces that have decided to govern together.
Even when the Sinaloa Cartel checkpoint stopped the candidate’s vehicle, the following vehicles remained parked, as if someone had given the instruction not to get out of their vehicles, which would have been a natural reaction when they realized that the candidate was in danger. But this did not happen. All the people stayed in their vehicles.
The exception was a vehicle accompanying the candidate, but it was not part of the official press motorcade for “critics”, such as Latinus and Imagen. They had not been instructed to move away. But someone from the official retinue obviously warned them to be attentive because “something” would happen. That explains the presence of the Latinus camera and microphone that revealed the meeting between the official candidate and the Sinaloa Cartel. What was going to be the great meeting to seal the devil’s pact between Sheinbaum and the Sinaloa Cartel was frustrated by the presence of a media outlet. Even AMLO had to publicly discredit the meeting, which, in reality, was, for him, the closing of the circle of the perverse pacts that his government wants to transfer intact to an eventual Sheinbaum government.
AMLO remembers perfectly well that Colosio was assassinated because he did not seal the agreement with drug trafficking. Will Sheinbaum defend herself, assuring her life by making a pact with the devil? And what will Sheinbaum’s outcome be in these times when everything ends up being known and judged?
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