Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Can you imagine what would happen to López Obrador and his government if he did not do the mañanera every morning? What would be the effect on his political presence and the electoral strength of Morena, Claudia as a candidate, and the Morenista legislators?
López Obrador does know. He even said it in a mañanera, from a distant morning, before the Covid pandemic. He said, more or less verbatim, “If I don’t do it every day (referring to the mañanera), they will knock me down”.
So, to assess the true political strength of the President, it is necessary to distance oneself from his recognized capacity to affirm a hundred times things that are not true, present facts that are not verifiable, or exalt achievements that do not exist and will never exist. This distance from worldly noise to assess AMLO’s real political strength will allow us to evaluate how he wields his political power. And to understand that he governs sitting on top of a grand lie he built.
Actual data are interwoven with mythological phenomena to understand this artificial construction that is AMLO and his power. And to understand why, as he says, I get knocked down if I don’t do the mañanera daily.
The real fact he uses effectively to build his image of unparalleled power is his control over the legislative branch. The legislators of Morena and allies are brainless sheep. That is the truth. Congress is his docile political instrument to destroy any institution on his way to his longed-for total power, approving measures they know beforehand are absolutely illegal and unconstitutional. Fortunately for Mexico, AMLO came to the Presidency without a clear idea of what he wanted when he enjoyed a qualified majority in both Houses. The only relevant thing he promoted was the Revocation of the Mandate, with an electoral and personal view but lacking a vision of a nation. He did it imitating Chávez, Ortega, Evo and Correa.
As his most profound and philosophical thinking does not go beyond electoral issues and, therefore, personal power, López Obrador was convinced that the only thing he needed to change the Constitution and thus be reelected as President was going to be the election of 2021 and then the Revocation of Mandate. The day of that election arrived, and reality gave him a tremendous slap in the face. Instead of increasing his legislative strength, he lost the qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies. And therefore, he lost his ability to change the Constitution, and with that, he lost his possibility to be reelected as President. It was undoubtedly the most bitter moment of his presidency.
After that fatal blow to his political project and narcissistic ego, he launched a scorched earth campaign, copying the US war in Vietnam. The idea of that campaign is to use all the force to destroy everything in the way that he considers an obstacle to his objective, which is to win the final battle. Then, the real Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was born.
He launched a frontal, total, and thermonuclear war against the autonomous agencies. Those he could not colonize, he eliminated. If he could not destroy them, he took away their functionality, taking away their budgets, their members, or both. He waged war against the National Electoral Institute (INE) until he managed to place his own in the leadership of the Institute. He waged war against the institutions of higher education and scientific research institutions that he could not colonize. He promoted hatred against medical institutions and their professionals, doctors, and nurses, trying to justify hiring supposed Cuban doctors, many of whom are security agents, spies, and infiltrators in the Mexican Armed Forces.
From the mañanera, he professes hatred towards journalists and the media that question him and do not obey him. Without confessing it, he endorses the murder of journalists with his continued promotion of intolerance, contempt, and lack of empathy. Incredibly, because he is President, he promotes violence and criminal groups in society, saying they deserve all his respect and sympathy as ” persons”.
He promotes the frank and open militarization of federal political power. He populated the federal public administration with the military. He does as Pinochet did in Chile, with excellent results for the military and its institutions. Today, the Chilean military are among the wealthiest families in that country. This will happen in Mexico in a very short time. AMLO has erased the constitutional boundaries between the military institution and the federal and local public administration. He is creating a power that can easily replace him, although he, blind, does not see it.
Now, he is on a war and hatred plan against the Judicial Power, one of the three branches of the Mexican State. He cares little for the autonomy of the jurisdictional body. He considers that it does not obey him and, therefore, it must be destroyed. The most relevant thing is that in his eagerness to destroy the Judicial Power, the President adds another sector of society that will definitely not vote for his candidate or his party. Sheinbaum has practically turned her campaign for the Presidency into the spearhead of the movement to destroy the Judiciary. By doing this, she implicitly confesses to be the puppet of the puppet master. Thus, she will never win the Presidency of the Republic, although her workshop blindness does not allow her to see her surroundings or perceive her reality objectively. The apparatus surrounding her is made of ignorance and deceit, betrayals and long-standing lies.
What does all this have to do with AMLO’s mañaneras and his great lie to govern? Well, it is precisely in the mañaneras where he instructs his flock on what is the next object of hatred to be attacked. Faced with the frustration of the abortion of his original reelection project, he now reloads on charging society for not giving him the support he demanded. His fury is uncontainable. So is his hatred. He preaches love, but his actions are of hatred.
This whole situation stems from the original lie: the one claiming that AMLO possesses a political strength that he does not have in reality. He invented the mañaneras to cover his weakness and objective reality: he never knew what he wanted to build in Mexico. So, stealing ideas from Porfirio Díaz, he decided to build anything, like a fantasy train in the Southeast, even though it is neither profitable nor a good idea. It just looks nice, says the President.
Once the grand lie narrated by the most robust President in history has been created because he speaks every day, now he dedicates himself to giving orders so that it can be seen that the myth of his uncontainable power is true. But behind that screen shade is the President who knows something unconfessable: if I don’t do the mañanera every day, I will be knocked down.
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