Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not want, two weeks before the presidential election, for the Zócalo of Mexico City to be painted pink in a unanimous expression of repudiation of his Presidency and support for Xóchitl Gálvez. He used the shock and extortion group that is the Teacher Coordinator and the capital government wanted to inhibit attendance with an environmental contingency and closing the Zócalo plaza until half past eight in the morning, as if that square were not public. He didn’t make it.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly citizens of the flesh, filled the Plaza de la Constitución to tell him that, unlike him, they are not afraid of him. The mercenaries of the teaching dissidence put up obstacles and tried to spoil the rally, which was accompanied by similar demonstrations in more than 60 cities, and even tried to block access to the Zócalo, which after skirmishes and pushes, they decided to back down.
The actions undertaken with the endorsement of the Presidency and the complicity of the Mexico City government, show the real stature of López Obrador as head of State, undeserving of being called that because he never wanted to represent all Mexicans, nor govern for all. .
Yesterday, Sunday, will remain as one of the dark moments of his Presidency, when history reviews his management based on his results and his actions, and finds that he did everything possible, to the limit to avoid giving an authoritarian slap, for prevent the congregation in the Zócalo and prevent him from being rebuked in that place, which for years he considered his own. The questions that remain from yesterday are why the fear of Gálvez and why the fear of the opposition. Why all these punitive and sabotaging actions if, as your candidate Claudia Sheinbaum says, the election is a mere procedure?
The political language suggests that they will not be formal. However, Gálvez, the coalition parties and all civil society groups or autonomous citizens must remember that a full Zócalo does not win elections. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas filled Zócalos in 2000, 2006 and 2012, and never came close to the Presidency. In 1988 he did not do so but he swept Carlos Salinas in the metropolitan area of Mexico City and Michoacán, in a controversial election and under political and ethical litigation to this day, largely because one of López Obrador’s closest men Currently, Manuel Bartlett, then Secretary of the Interior, carries on his back “the fall of the system” as a euphemism for electoral fraud.
This is just one of the paradoxes and the return of the past to the present.
Nobody like López Obrador knows the value of the Zócalo as an instrument to show muscle, and make money by extorting the government.
Yesterday’s so-called pink tide showed that the energy that motivated her to defend the National Electoral Institute in the streets in February of last year has been maintained, so it is ironic that the president advisor of the INE, Guadalupe Taddei , which receives instructions from the president’s spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, said the day before that the organizers of the event and the citizens could not use the color pink. The pathetic call generated antibodies in the INE, where several counselors said that it was not an institutional position but a personal one.
Civil organizations, citizens and parties, unlike what López Obrador used to do, did not hold the rally to blackmail him. López Obrador played this game during the Salinas government, when he held sit-ins in the Zócalo to coincide with official festivities where the Plaza de la Constitución was used for parades, which he held after the then head of the Department of the Federal District, Manuel Camacho – His right arm was Marcelo Ebrard, he attacked his pants pockets with millions of pesos.
That dialectic of Mexican politics that he knows so well and from which he profited so much to build a movement that took him to the Presidency, could not operate yesterday. That is why he resorted to strategies of the old PRI to sabotage, using the teaching dissidence, which moves to the sound of money, to tarnish the event. It was obvious, how ridiculous the environmental contingency seemed -even if it had been true-, because it was part of a series of actions where far from inhibiting those who were in the Zócalo, he injected them with courage and indignation. There were people – I spoke with several people who were walking to the appointment yesterday morning – who were afraid of what could happen to the shock group, but at no time did they show any signs of backing down. The fear was less than his desire for Morena to leave power.
The strategic line of the Presidency throughout the week was that the rally would not be for citizens but for parties. In the digital battlefield, the accounts paid by the Presidency and Morena – experts estimate that they invest at least 100 million pesos per month – had the word “carreados” as a trending topic on X for hours, which surpassed the hashtag “MareaRosaConXochitl ”. But social media, filled with a rowdy crowd and legions of robots, doesn’t automatically translate into votes either. Gálvez, in any case, quoting General Miguel Negrete, an enemy of Juárez, who joined the defense of Mexico in the Battle of Puebla with a memorable phrase “I have a country before a party,” responded to the voices of López Obradorism.
The opposition’s political victory gave Gálvez additional fuel during his final presidential debate with Sheinbaum and Jorge Álvarez Máynez, Movimiento Ciudadano candidate, and the final push for the final 11 days of the presidential campaign. There seem to be few to change what seems to be the course of the election, but there are strategies that we do not see, or persuasion for a strategic vote that abandons Álvarez Máynez, which polls do not measure or record perceptions.
X: @rivapa
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#Sabotage #failed
