Several columnists concluded this weekend his last collaboration on Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president with a “thank God”. It’s good that he has finished his term and it’s good that he is leaving.was his inference. Today will be the last day of his short six-year term, which seemed fleeting in months and years but very long in the day to day. The synthesis of the experience was summarized by Alejo Sánchez Cano in El Financiero on Friday: “In this six-year term, lies, farce and manipulation were instituted as central axes of the public policies. See you never, Andrés Manuel López Obrador”.
There are those who dispute this position that abounds in the opinion press, which experienced the most vile and abusive attack that has ever occurred against the media, as entities and journalists, since the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. It was an unequal, asymmetrical fight, where all repressive force was used by those in power – the SAT, the UIF, the Attorney General’s Office, the Army and the CNI – to harass, intimidate and punish anyone who raised their voice. But it was intellectually inevitable. Cynicism and negligence at critical moments forced him.
His “empire of other data,” as Luis Estrada, director of SPIN Taller de Comunicación Política, titled his book, was an affront to common sense that called for critical approaches, for the minimization of violence, his victory song in public policies that They were a colossal failure, his irresponsibility in stating that with a scapular he stopped a pandemic, or his predatory ecological policy and the fantasy world with which he deceived during the six-year term.
To confront facts with falsehoods, for one thousand 436 days -including today’s-, He used his tongue of fire for two hours to attack the media and journalists, defame them, encourage their lynching, damage their reputations and reduce their credibility.. Lopez Obrador thus managed to divert his errors and deficienciesand finish with 74% popularity in the general average of the surveys. The president won the cultural war and colonized the minds of even his harshest critics, who assumed his pejorative language, such as the popularization of the term “PRIAN,” or who internalized his grandiloquence, assuming “the fourth transformation” as a historical moment.
Lopez Obrador managed to graft into the Mexican mind that he was the most criticized president since Francisco I. Madero, which became one of the 100 lies that he told daily on average, because there is no data that demonstrates the veracity of his saying, according to the record of SPIN. However, he nested it in the Mexican imagination.
Throughout his six-year term he carried out your morninga combination of the information and dissemination exercise, but whose main part was a supposed press conference –violates the Constitution because it is outside its legal powers-, designed so that the YouTubers invented by his propaganda machinery could literally, although it may be heard poorly, lick his feet and help him avoid sensitive topics, and to push for a good part of the two thousand 870 hours -344 thousand 400 minutes, until Friday – a monologue of diatribes against the critical and moderate press. But he also invested hundreds of thousands of pesos to have a roster of recognized journalists who were placed in various media so that by normalizing things, their errors and failures were always qualified with references to the past.
In his relationship with the media, López Obrador always compared himself to Maderonot only because he also believes himself to be an apostle of democracy, as the unfortunate president was called, but because of the way the press criticized him. It was another simplism from the presidentwhich encompassed the entire Mexican press and journalists, including some who showed intellectual honesty and criticized it where they considered it pertinent, to equate them with the Porfirista newspapers. The reductionist analogy replicated pronouncements from more than a century ago in its expressions.
A wonderful study on the newspaper El Mañana, published by historian Jesús Méndez Reyes in 2001, is highly relevant to our present because it contains some of the keys to López Obrador’s narrative. Méndez Reyes recalled that El Mañana, directed by Jesús M. Rábago, who had been part of the aristocracy during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, led a struggle for more than two years with systematic attacks on the Madero government in search of the restoration of the privileges gone through who had been his private secretary, Victoriano Huerta.
The theme of lost privileges and criticism as a tool to recover them has been constant in López Obrador’s speech. Méndez Reyes recorded how Madero left many intellectuals and journalists related to Díaz out of the budget and perks of the Porfiriato, which fueled criticism – another element of the president’s narrative -, and that the growth of the press during Maderismo was a sign indisputable financial support from the opposition to the country’s first democratic government – does that sound familiar to you? At the same time, he forced the regime to create its own media, as López Obrador tried to do.
In six years, López Obrador achieved what Dilma Rouseff, the former Brazilian president, recognized in the documentary “On the Edge of Democracy” when she said that she and Luis Inazio Lula da Silva were unable to maintain control over the Judiciary, but The Macuspano could not, with the other clamp of the strategy, control the media.
He tried everything, even the unthinkable, such as lobbying in the United States so that several critical journalists would be linked to drug trafficking during the trial of Genaro García Luna, but as Ciro Gómez Leyva, survivor of a political attack and one of the journalists most repressed by this regime, “we already won.” His phrase was in the context of the group of media and journalists that he could not liquidate.
The goodbye that several columnists wished him Lopez Obrador It will only be for what concerns its constitutional mandate. Today his Presidency ends and tomorrow begins his seventh year of government.
X: @rivapa
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