Manuel Suárez Mier †
*This was originally published in Spanish on November 3, 2017, by Dineroenimagen.com.
AMLO is Russia’s ideal candidate to create problems for the US in these hectic times of nationalist renaissance.
The big scandal of the week in Washington was the revelation of the formal accusations by special prosecutor Robert Mueller against close associates of Donald Trump in his campaign to reach the White House for having conspired with Russian agents to interfere in last year’s presidential election.
After months of effective and stealthy work in which there has not been a single leak to the press, unlike the chaotic circus in the White House, the charges against Paul Manafort, campaign manager, and his associate, Rick Gates, as well as former foreign affairs adviser, George Papadopoulos, were made public on Monday.
The breadth of the charges, ranging from colluding with Russia against the US, money laundering, and making false claims, surprised the commentariat, especially in the case of Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, which worried the White House, as he has been cooperating in the investigation for three months now.
It was leaked that Trump spent part of Monday morning watching the news in his rooms and yelling profanities to the TV sets, while panic set in among his aides – many of whom have already hired lawyers upon being implicated in the scandal – who heard their boss squawking “in a state of increased agitation.”
Russia’s interference in the election came in multiple forms, as credited by testimony from representatives of Facebook, Google and Twitter before the Senate Crime and Terrorism subcommittee that millions of Russian messages were transmitted through those media to manipulate the electorate in Trump’s favor.
There is also the successful Russian breakthrough in conventional media, such as RT (formerly Russia Today), a copy of CNN, which has deployed intense propaganda supporting populist and anti-systemic causes that have been presented in recent elections and as an inexhaustible factory of fake news.
Russia openly and unabashedly supported Brexit in the United Kingdom, Le Pen in France, Puidgemont in Catalonia, and proto-fascist candidates in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, the Baltic and Central European countries, including Ukraine, where the disinformation campaign has been colossal.
All this should be of great concern to us since RT in Spanish is deeply involved in trying to skew the 2018 presidential election in favor of López Obrador, Russia’s ideal candidate to create problems for the US on its southern border, in these times of heightened revival of anti-gringo nationalism, thanks to Trump’s repeated insults to the country.
“RT’s man in Mexico”, as the editor of that news platform calls him, is none other than the tireless demagogue and guerrilla apprentice John Ackerman, a charlatan who claims to be an academic and who claims to have “lectured” at American University, when what he did was to give a couple of heated political harangues with his Marxist version of what is happening in Mexico.
It turns out that Ackerman, one of AMLO’s key advisors on foreign affairs, has been inventing “news” and weaving intrigues in his repeated attacks on the Mexican government, which are mimicked and amplified by the regime’s enemies to the hilt, Aristegui, Dresser, Lorenzo Meyer, and others, who do whatever it takes to make him fail.
As Ambassador Arturo Sarukhán has repeatedly pointed out in his accurate articles, it is of the utmost importance that our government take seriously the imminent danger of Russia’s involvement in influencing and potentially deciding the next presidential election.
† May He Rest in Peace