A year after the collapse of a beam on Metro Line 12 that caused the death of 26 people, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador jumped to protect his two main chips in the presidential succession, Claudia Sheinbaum and Marcelo Ebrard. The first, because the tragedy happened during her tenure as head of government, and the imputation of lack of maintenance as one of the causes of the collapse, and the second, who rushed her inauguration before finishing her term as head of the capital government, without Review possible consequences. With a council reeking of threat, he asked the opposition “not to take a crack” in the tragedy, because it is “in bad taste”, qualifying that possibility as “ramplona” and “political”.
He had to do it, because Sheinbaum is the designated candidate to succeed him, for the moment, and Ebrard serves as a decoy and lightning rod for his protégé. López Obrador cannot allow a tragedy to annul his two corcholatas, as he calls his candidates, nor let Ebrard bear all the responsibility because it would drag down the leader of Morena, Mario Delgado, who as chief of finance of his government still made payments suspects, and signed leonine contracts for maintenance work.
The armor walks in front of our eyes without us realizing it, despite the fact that there are two cases involving similar tragedies, where the way in which capital justice has been applied is antagonistic. This is the tragedy at the “Enrique Rébsamen” School, where one of its buildings collapsed during the September 2019 earthquake, causing the death of 19 children and seven adults. The College was located in Tlalpan, which ruled Sheinbaum, and a strategy was immediately implemented to protect it, commissioned by López Obrador to his then adviser, Julio Scherer, and to his cousin Hugo, who handled the distracting messages on social networks. .
Tragedies generate empathy, especially when there are affected children. In the case of the school, there was a political context of being fed up with the status quo, which added to the social phenomenon that people, in situations like the one they witnessed on television throughout the country, felt the pain and parental anguish. Although there was not the polarization that we live in today, it can be argued that society sought punishment, not justice. That clamor, magnified by the artificial intelligence managed by Hugo Scherer, benefited Sheinbaum.
The punishment focused on Mónica García Villegas, the director and owner of the school, accused of having illegally expanded and built a flat weighing 230 tons, and on Juan Mario Velarde, the director responsible for Works at the Tlalpan Delegation, for having Authorized the work, authorities said, without carrying out the necessary tests. In July 2021, a court sentenced him to 208 years in prison for the intentional homicide of 26 people. García Villegas was sentenced to 57 years in prison for the same crime.
The punishment promoted by the Attorney General’s Office of Mexico City, headed by Ernestina Godoy, and applied by the Superior Court of Justice of the federal capital, presided over by Rafael Guerra Álvarez, was exemplary. But both, who are close to Sheinbaum, acted in a totally different way when judging the tragedy of Line 12, which, according to the authority’s expert reports, collapsed due to construction errors, for which they denounced 10 former officials and those responsible for the play. The expert reports also showed the deficiencies in the construction, attributable to the construction company of Carlos Slim, the tycoon close to López Obrador.
In the tragedy of Line 12, 26 people also died, but unlike the school, the empathy was not national due to the characteristics of the “incident”, as Sheinbaum characterized it, nor did it touch the emotional fibers throughout the country, largely because there were no children among the victims, nor was there a dramatic rescue of minors broadcast at all hours on television. López Obrador’s propaganda apparatus also helped the head of government, firing blame against former officials.
Although the two collapses are remarkably similar, with officials and private individuals directly implicated, Godoy and Guerra Álvarez’s treatment of Line 12 was completely opposite. Without the speed with which he acted in the school case, Godoy was unable to charge charges of manslaughter, wrongful injury and property damage for a whole year, and this Monday the indictment hearing was postponed for the fourth time. But in parallel, and this is the big difference with the Rébsamen, the punishment is not at the center of the case, but rather the process of restorative justice achieved. On Monday, Sheinbaum and Godoy announced that 91% of the families affected by the subway collapse had accepted the reparation agreement.
The Prosecutor’s Office opted for this scheme, Sheinbaum explained, where there are no people in jail, no protection, which “can take years and years, and what is established is whether the victim is willing to undergo restorative justice.” García Villegas and Velarde did not have that option. The justice of Sheinbaum and Godoy, supported by the Álvarez War Court, sought the punishment of a private woman and a former official. On Line 12, they rescued two presidential candidates from public ignominy and did Slim a favor by not touching his construction company, to which the López Obrador government has continued to award public works contracts, without financially compensating relatives of the victims.
It is very clear what happened, according to the experts. While in the school the force of the State and its punitive burden was shown as a reinforcement of the institutions, in Line 12 a quick agreement was reached to avoid damaging the presidential aspirations of Sheinbaum and Ebrard, in this discretionary application of justice that It has become customary in the current regime.
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