Elena Poniatowska remembers from the sofa of her house surrounded by books the days in Lecumberri prison, the black hole into which the PRI threw writers, unionists, and dissidents of the regime. There were the bones of the student leaders of ’68, those who survived the Tlatelolco massacre. The great living Mexican writer, chronicler of the cracks of the time, knew by heart its corridors, its cells, its inhabitants: its interviewees. Sometimes, she crossed paths with Annie Pardo, a scientist who also came to visit her fellow prisoners. Pardo, who hosted meetings of the young movement in her house, used to take her daughter with him, a six-year-old girl who decades later would say that trips to Lecumberri forged his political future. In those gloomy galleries, the girl and the writer met. It was a meeting that had something prophetic about it. It was the first time that Poniatowska saw Claudia Sheinbaum.
Ask. You are 92 years old. He has been in Mexico for 82 years. Have you seen it change a lot?
Answer. I arrived after the Mexican Revolution. My mother was born in France, in Paris. They were Mexican landowners who left at the time Porfirio Díaz left and when they returned they no longer had anything.
Q. And then?
R. I arrived in a country where there was only one party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and I began to go to prison a lot as a journalist, just as you do, to prison. I wanted to meet Mexicans who didn’t look like my family or my social environment; knowing other lives that were totally foreign to mine. For example, I met a woman, Jesusa Palancares, who was in the Mexican Revolution, she was a soldier.
Q. Who else did you meet in prison?
R. To railroad workers from the 1959 strike. I interviewed David Alfaro Siqueiros several times, who had been in prison before and I saw him in Lecumberri. I remember that he had very messy hair and I said to him: ‘And when do you comb your hair?’, and he told me: ‘The Communist Party regularly does my hair.’ And many farmers who lived there. I went to prison a lot and that has helped me meet absolutely admirable fathers and mothers, and students who are willing to give their lives.
Q. I read an article that he published in EL PAÍS in 2018 in which he talked about Tlatelolco. He was interviewing former student leader Gilberto Guevara. He said that the Army acts as the police in Mexico. It sounds current. Control at airports, public works, natural disasters…
R. I don’t know the role of the Army. I would prefer the Army to be in the barracks.
Q. The president calls them ‘the people in uniform’.
R. Well, there he is.
Q. You have always defended López Obrador.
R. Much much.
Q. Did you like this six-year term?
R. Yes. I am a fundamentally loyal woman. I don’t think she can do political editorials. I read them, I’m very interested. I have a political attitude, but in general I express myself through interviews or chronicles.
Q. In the 2018 article, he talked about Ayotzinapa case and the missing persons crisis. He asked himself: ‘What name can we give to this new night in Tlatelolco?’ Do you have an answer?
R. The death of a young person is always a crime. Killing a young man is killing hope, killing not only his future, but the future of an entire community. I see in the newspapers that there are many murders, which I felt had disappeared. It’s good that a woman is going to come to power because I think she [Claudia Sheinbaum] In Tlalpan he managed to reduce the number of crimes and I hope that now he will also achieve it because it is a very painful situation, where the victims are always the poorest, the most forgotten, the abandoned.
Q. What is Mexico’s main problem?
R. Insecurity and the standard of living of the people, although it has risen. Another important problem, another enormous desire, another hope, is education. If there are schools for everyone, if there is work for everyone, if there are good salaries, the standard of living rises.
Q. I would like to know your critical view on this six-year term, the good and the bad.
R. I voted for López Obrador with great enthusiasm. I have never seen him again. Once he called me, last year, when I turned 90, and told me that I couldn’t go to an event they gave me, when they gave me the medal that has moved me the most of all the awards I have received, the Belisario Domínguez, who, as you know, was an extraordinary man from Chiapas who was killed treacherously. I have not had any contact with him, nor has he sought me out for anything except to excuse himself that day.
Q. I thought they were friends.
R. No no. I know him, he came here [a casa de la escritora] several times when he needed me. I think he didn’t need me deep down, but José María Pérez Gay [fallecido escritor y asesor de López Obrador] told him to surround himself with people like Carlos Monsiváis, who had been very close to the students, or me, who had written The night of Tlatelolco, and that’s why he came to see me. Later I was at several rallies. I suffered because I had to prepare a speech, a speech that in the end no one cared about, because the one they wanted to hear was the candidate, but there was always a prelude while the square filled up. López Obrador wanted to have a full square when he got on the stage and saw all the people below, women with children and small children sunbathing.
Q. Did you feel used politically?
R. No, I have never felt that nor would I ever use those words. I am of legal age than Andrés Manuel López Obrador and I agreed because I love my country.
Q. What is the most critical part of this six-year term?
R. The relationship with the press. He answers the questions he wants to answer, he has all the reins in his hands, the journalists who come in the morning are people who believe in him, who follow him, who admire him. I didn’t like that the opponent [Xóchitl Gálvez] Denying him entry seemed rude to me. I have enormous hope in Claudia Sheinbaum, because I have known her for a thousand years. I saw her many times in the Lecumberri prison. I admire her mother, Annie Pardo, a left-wing woman who was a close friend of my editor, Neus Espresate, who was from Barcelona like all editors. Claudia has always cared about the people she least has. She gives me great pleasure, first, that she is a woman who rises to power, and that she is a woman [va a decir ‘de izquierdas’, pero se calla]… I don’t like that word ‘left’ at all. It’s ridiculous because, am I on the left? Well, yes, but my background is aristocratic. Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski was the last king of Poland in 1740.
Q. But you have always been left-wing.
R. Yes, out of interest too. I can be amazed by a novel by Carlos Fuentes, by a poem by [Octavio] Paz or Gabriel Zaid, but I am very interested in what people who live in a neighborhood tell me, in that I have a lot to do with this North American anthropologist, Óscar Lewis. I don’t know what the life of a bracero can be like, of someone who dies crossing a river to get to the United States, of a woman who arrives at her house at night and doesn’t know what she’s going to feed her children. her. I was lucky that a prisoner from Lecumberri wrote to me years ago, when I was young, and asked me to go see him. I got a whole popular Mexican culture through the people I talked to before 1968.
Q. He lived in a Mexico that welcomed Spanish, Chilean, Argentine exiles…
R. A Mexico that is extraordinarily generous and kind, luminous, one could say maternal, that tells you come here and I will solve it for you, a nutritional Mexico, capable of giving.
Q. Now instead of exiles come migrants.
R. It’s horrible, they all go to the United States and finally their trip is hellish. I have not accompanied them, but I have read in the newspaper that the mistreatment of migrants is shameful and terrifying. It is in Mexico and it is when trying to enter the United States.
Q. What has happened for the reception to have changed so much?
R. There is a very cruel police force, which is why I can’t like the idea of an Army in the streets.
Q. Your husband, Guillermo Haro, and you, were great defenders of UNAM. What do you think when the president says that he has gone right?
R. Compared to other universities, UNAM may seem conceited, but it is a source of knowledge, it welcomes everyone. I am a true devotee of the UNAM, I am against any criticism made of it, especially of a president who came out of the UNAM. What he said seems wrong to me. I think we should point out to the president that we all have that right. In the United States there is a lot of talk about yes men, the men who say yes to everything. Mexicans have the ability to say no. That rejection is good.
Q. What would you say no to the president?
R. The presence of the Army would not agree. He also has attitudes towards people who have done good for the country. I think that would not happen if Carlos Monsiváis, whom he asked for advice, were alive.
Q. I didn’t know that López Obrador went to Monsiváis.
R. Very little time, because Monsiváis died, but he [el presidente] I loved him very much. Some followers of Monsiváis are in his Government [se refiere a Jesús Ramírez].
Q. López Obrador or Claudia Sheinbaum?
R. Claudia Sheinbaum, because she is the illusion, she is a university student, physical, deeply intellectual and with her I lived moments that I never experienced with López Obrador.
Q. And the opposition?
R. I always see Xóchitl Gálvez smiling. As we say in Mexico, she can stand a piano, because the press, The Day, where I work, attacks her, insults her frequently, and I think she continues to smile. Politically, I have not really studied his proposals, but it would never occur to me to speak ill of Xóchitl Gálvez.
Q. And the PRI, PAN and PRD coalition? From the outside it seems out of place that right and left go hand in hand.
R. I don’t understand it either, it’s a big question mark. In Mexico since the Revolution there has always been a very strange mix of people. The fabric of Mexico’s history is very unexpected.
Q. How do you see the future?
R. With hope, I want all the best, but it is a Mexico that I will no longer see. When I arrived the social differences were enormous. There were many children without school, few opportunities, for women who came from the countryside their way out was to work in a house, but there are more and more in higher education, women who have stood out greatly at high levels, with enormous gallantry. And the young women now who speak so freely. I don’t think we’re going to get worse. Many valuable people have disappeared, but we are moving forward.
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