Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Two confessions from President López Obrador in one week, each more fantastic than the other. And in the same week, as if they were an ill-timed justification to explain his decision to establish a political-commercial alliance with the Armed Forces, illegally transferring the National Guard to the Secretariat of Defense.
First, he explained that he had changed his mind about the return of the Army to the barracks. Contrary to the opinion he held for 30 years, assuming the Presidency of the country led him to a transformation in his perception and evaluation of the military and its role in society.
The Fourth Transformation is not about Mexico because the country has not changed. It is about López Obrador: he is the one who has been transformed. This is what he confessed. His second confession explains or tries to explain, his transformation into a believer in militarization.
In another moment of the same week, he confessed that he had not realized how powerful the drug trafficking organizations are and that, therefore, the integration of the National Guard into the Army is justified. The relationship between the fact that he did not know how criminality was in the country and the subsequent integration of the civilian police into the Army is not established, but this is what the President confessed.
In essence, this has been the week in which López Obrador, the same one who has repeatedly said that nobody knows Mexico better than he does, has confessed that he had not realized, and did not know, that organized crime and drug trafficking enjoyed so much power. There are two possible reactions in the face of such a presidential epiphany.
One is to breathe a sigh of relief and think, “good thing he realized the reality”. The next task is to act accordingly, implementing public policies under the “new” situation created by the now recognized and diagnosed organized crime.
The other possible reaction is to consider the lies and hypocrisy of the President’s words and actions since he is the same President who released Ovidio in the act of submission to the Sinaloa Cartel and who has ordered the federal forces not to engage in direct combat with organized crime, during the first four years of his term. And there are only two more years left of his administration. What can change?
He has been a president lacking genuine empathy for the victims of organized crime. The Jesuits murdered in Chihuahua were considered, by the President himself, as victims of a local situation that did not affect the “general peace” that, according to AMLO, reigned in the rest of Mexico.
How do we move from the President’s coldness towards the murdered Jesuits (Catholics, by the way, which is not his preferred religion) to the conviction that he “did not imagine” how “powerful” organized crime is?
Does the best-informed man in the country say so, according to the president’s opinion of himself, or have we gone from the ” best informed” to the one who “didn’t know anything” in a week? It instead gives the impression that we are dealing with a President who does not know what to do about the problem of violence that he thought he could control with charisma and pacts until the problem blew up in his face and threatened to destroy the country.
Confessions are helpful if they can open new ways to solve old problems. But if they will only serve to buy time and deceive his followers (and himself), then the Republic continues on the same slope towards self-destruction.
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