Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Before the plenary session of the Permanent Commission of Political Parties of Latin America (COPPPAL), Porfirio Muñoz Ledo directly accused the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of criminal association with drug traffickers and of wanting to inherit this association with the next government, which will be elected in June 2024. He called López Obrador’s intention “Maximato”. Muñoz Ledo added that the democratic transition ended in Mexico, and an authoritarian reversion began.
The PRI, PRD, PT, and MC are the Mexican members of COPPPAL. In that forum where Muñoz Ledo went, among friends, to make his denunciation. He coincided, in time, with Francisco Labastida Ochoa, former PRI presidential candidate, who made it clear that former President Enrique Peña Nieto helped AMLO win the presidential election and, like Muñoz Ledo, insinuated that there was an agreement of interests between López Obrador and drug traffickers.
It is good that Porfirio said what he denounced! But what a pity he is saying it so late in the national political process and conditions of so little credibility. His little credibility comes from the fact that he is considered a political showman. A famous builder of sharp phrases, they have always served him to hide his political opportunism. He announced that he had been offered the Cuban embassy, in which case he would have remained silent, but things did not happen as he wanted or thought. There was no such offer, or, if there was, it was not with presidential consent. It is as a result of this last humiliation that Muñoz Ledo breaks, at least for now, with Morena.
It seems that moral flexibility is his forte.
How can we forget the phrase that has culminated Muñoz Ledo’s political career? Being president of the Chamber of Deputies, it fell to him to place the presidential sash on López Obrador on December 1, 2018. After listening to López Obrador’s inaugural speech, he announced, “I see an enlightened man of all seasons”. From where except blindness?
How could Muñoz Ledo, a man supposedly seasoned in “reading the character of men”, as he has said of himself, say that? He had just placed the presidential sash on a man who had no concrete government plan in his head, nor was he ever going to present a government plan except something around his self-exaltation. Many of us knew, even from many years before, that he had no idea of a government project; how can it be explained that a celebrity like Muñoz Ledo is not capable of reading reality?
An essential part of the explanation for his blindness resides in the tradition of courtesanship that rots Mexican politics and culture. In the face of power, there is a habit of flattery and submission rooted in all latitudes of the political spectrum. This extreme flattery seduces the foolish and blinds the intelligent. And as a consequence, public policy becomes idiotic.
And then, blessed privileges also play a role. Each six-year term inaugurated with a different party in power sees the birth of a new bourgeoisie. Salaries, bonuses, and bonuses for all, even if it is said that it is not true. Access to the dispersion of the public budget and the direct awarding of contracts to friends, relatives, etc. It is exciting to live this process, even more so when one is a privileged part of it.
And it also plays another bad habit: to continue living off the udder of the public budget. This practice emanates from the tradition of never doing anything else in life but depending on those who occupy positions and being their faithful and blind followers, all for personal gain.
So, when Porfirio Muñoz Ledo launches himself against López Obrador, it is nothing more than a personal outcry. He does not represent an internal political current of Morena that already understood something. No. It is a very personal act of a subject who wants to cause political damage to the President who did not play according to the strict rules of servility and reward in the winter of his life. Then he belatedly denounces the AMLO-narco association when it was confabulated under his silent presence.
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