Maria Amparo Casar
I begin by expressing my gratitude for the support I have received from so many friends, colleagues, organizations and citizens who have made me feel supported and accompanied in the situation that I must tell today, to my regret. I lack words to describe the pain of what the government has done against me, but also the joy of knowing that I am not alone.
I would have preferred not to be writing this column. I do so with a certain fear, because López Obrador has shown time and again his willingness to use without limit the apparatus of the State to harm those he calls “his adversaries”. There are many examples of this. The list of people attacked by the President is, sadly, very long.
My case is not the most serious of those that have occurred during this six-year term in which more than 186,000 people have been murdered, among them 44 journalists and hundreds of activists. The presidential indolence in the face of this has been incredible. Their incongruence is once again patent. In the face of every painful episode we have lived through during this six-year term, he repeats that there is no need to profit politically from the tragedy, but he does it without any hesitation. He took advantage of the most painful experience of my life and that of my children to make public opinion believe that my husband’s death did not happen accidentally. Paradoxically, it was the capital authorities, then headed by the President himself and his attorney general Bernardo Bátiz, who supposedly gave in to my influence and proceeded to alter documents so that I could collect the pension to which I was entitled. If that happened, as the President says in his book, it was he and his attorney general who were at fault. By the way, Bátiz himself declared yesterday that he had never seen me personally.
The President is forcing me to talk about something I would not like to, not because there is anything to hide, but because I have had to live with that painful memory for two decades. To revive that tragedy with the sole motive of discrediting me seems to me probably the lowest thing a human being can do in public life. The President has incurred in this vileness for reasons that seem very clear to me.
It punishes the years of work of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity that has documented hundreds of acts of corruption of past six-year terms and his own, regardless of which party the perpetrators belonged to.
To this must be added the recent publication of my book Los puntos sobre las íes. A few hours after the presentation of the book, the campaign against me began with the vileness I have described. Unlike their unfounded accusations, in the work of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity and in my own writings, the rule has always been to bring evidence to the forefront: a document, a contract, a database, a reference, a testimony.
Using public resources to create a page on the official website of the Mexican government and disseminate documents about my family, which in no way prove the presidential accusation, is not transparency, as he claims. It is a violation of the right to privacy.
How easy it is to find personal information about the “adversaries of the President”, and how difficult it is to obtain information about public works and government purchases that, under the assumption of “national security”, are hidden from the eyes of citizens. Perhaps that is what is so pervasive, that the evidence shows, as the subtitle of my book says, that the legacy of this six-year term is that it lied, stole and betrayed.
Plato said that a man’s stature is measured by what he does with the power he has been given. That is the only yardstick with which I want to measure. López Obrador’s government had everything to be a good government. It was not. The results of his administration are there for all to see, even though from the mañaneras of the National Palace the reality is painted differently. What hundreds, thousands, millions of Mexicans have experienced is a President indolent in the face of the suffering of others.
I have never wanted to personalize my criticism of López Obrador because a ruler is not evaluated by whether we like him, but by his behavior. But now I must do so.
Mr. President, you have managed to embitter me deeply with your lies, but you will not succeed in silencing me with your slanders as unfounded as they are unworthy of your investiture. My work and that of Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity will not stop.
This column was published in Spanish today by Excélsior
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