Claudia Sheinbaum had an enormous challenge facing the new six-year term: to mark her own voice compared to the omnipresent voice of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Within the presidential team they had been thinking for months about how to face the challenge. They knew that everything began and ended in communication, in the famous Mañaneras. But they weren’t sure how to change his face. A look at the new conferences that the president gave this Wednesday shows that, for now, everything remains the same. Or at least very similar. De Mañanera has been renamed Mañanera del Pueblo. From cherry with white it has gone to having a white decoration with cherry. The typography of the Government logo will now be in lower case. Perhaps the biggest difference is who stands in front of the microphone. At least physically, because the rhetoric remains. What has arrived at the National Palace now is Thursday to rescue national heroines and a lot of new rules, because the new president likes order.
You cannot take the microphone and speak for more than five minutes. You can’t talk about personal issues. Nor can you bring documents, letters, requests. Only two questions can be asked. If the question has already been asked, you cannot take the microphone again for 15 days. You can’t talk, eat, drink coffee. Less picking up your cell phone to take a photo. Sheinbaum’s team arrived with a series of rules for participating in their morning conferences. On Tuesday night, hours before their first press conference began, they released a list of 18 guidelines that outlined how to act. Some even seemed inspired by the characters of the universe of the Fourth Transformation, where it was not unusual for some so-called reporter to tell anecdotes or personal tragedies in a Mañanera, bring gifts for the president or grab the microphone to praise rather than to interrogate.
“Don’t worry, there are still six years left,” Sheinbaum said this Wednesday morning in an attempt to bring order to dozens of journalists eager to get a comment from the president in her first conference. Among them sat the usual characters, even Lord Molécula, who became known in the Mañaneras of the last six-year period. The communication channels will be so similar in this six-year term that they will even use the WhatsApp groups that last Monday continued reporting on López Obrador’s daily agenda. A change of logo and forward.
Sheinbaum’s Mañaneras will be held in the same room, the old Treasury room, where for the last six years López Obrador stood in front of the cameras to speak for hours. That too is advertised as subtly different. The new president is usually more expeditious. The conference will have the same dynamics, only it will be half an hour later. It will contain sections, as well as the Mañanera. On Mondays they used to present Who’s Who in Gasoline Prices, a section in which they exposed those who sold fuel at a higher price. Now it will be about healthy living, where they will explain every week the effects that junk food has on health.
Tuesdays, which were about health, in the coming years will be about Mexican humanism and historical memory. For this, a historian will come to give a lesson weekly, the president explained. Wednesdays remain along the same lines: López Obrador had a part dedicated to persecuting the press, which he called Who’s who in lies. Now Sheinbaum has baptized it without much thought as Lie Detector. On Thursdays they will remember women who were heroines in Mexican history and on Fridays there will be something called Suave patria, which according to the president, will be a kind of moment of nationalism, to invite citizens to talk about things that make them proud as Mexicans. .
Breaking his own rules, Sheinbaum presented this Wednesday a kind of tribute in the form of a history class. Justified by the date, October 2, which comes loaded with symbolism every year. To announce that his first measure would be to ask for forgiveness from the Mexican State for the crimes against humanity carried out by the Armed Forces in the Tlatelolco massacre, he has released a 10-minute video. Then he made some officials briefly remember what happened. In less time than the documentary lasted, he has answered a question about Sinaloa, one about the King of Spain, another about his first official trip, to Acapulco. In less than an hour and a half, the new president was already leaving for the next activity and everyone was heading home. Record time that that room had not seen in a while.
#National #heroines #improvisation #Mañanera #Claudia #Sheinbaum