López Obrador’s fourth year is the scene of disputes that threaten not only the stability of the administration but governance itself. In the last few hours these disputes for power have escalated, and their turmoil is unpredictable for two of the three powers of the Union.
The most recent chapter of the lack of control that AMLO brings, and more revealing of what he is willing to resort to in this fight, is the audio leak where Alejandro Gertz Manero reneges along with a close collaborator of the decisions that ministers of the Supreme Court are about to take on a case involving the attorney general personally.
It is not necessary to speak a lawyer to discern the seriousness of what these two top officials of the Attorney General’s Office are trying to elucidate with respect to a draft sentence from the highest body of Mexican justice.
The relevance of the leaked audios on Friday night is first of all in form. Prosecutor Gertz is exhibited in maneuvers that despise the autonomy of the ministers, and of the Court itself, but also the rights of his counterpart in a legal conspiracy that has already been given abundant and noisy account in the press (case known by the defense undertaken by the children of Alejandra Cuevas, arrested for this plot).
In the audios, Gertz and Juan Ramos López, head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of Federal Crimes, deny the sense in which the Court’s sentence is outlined, which must resolve if Cuevas faces his trial in freedom. If it were two private persons, two lawyers studying the scenarios of a plaintiff, even what is heard in the leak could be almost conventional, including, of course, the boast that there is already the complicity of some ministers .
But we are before the conversation of the two most powerful officials of the FGR, doomed as they are to resolve in favor of an individual —the Attorney General—, and not justice, a case that keeps a woman in jail, the daughter of the ex-partner of the deceased brother of Gertz Manero.
That the attorney general has devoted time to a personal case that should be devoted to the interests of the Republic is not something new. That this case has regained momentum since he assumed such a high position, unfortunately, is not new either. But listening to him in his eagerness, and in the disparaging phrases with which he shows his contempt for the other party and for the Judiciary itself, forces the Court’s ministers to demonstrate their independence —even from the head of the Court, whose free action even Before these audios, there was already enough doubt—and forces President López Obrador to resolve disputes that have now escalated to the point of espionage, very serious, of the nation’s lawyer.
Because the audios, irremediably extracted illegally, since it is practically impossible for Juan Ramos to have leaked them or for Gertz himself to derive something beneficial from this revelation, show that powerful interests around López Obrador have decided to settle their lawsuits not in court or in the corridors of the Palace, but in the media and on social networks, a space where Andrés Manuel has recently lost several battles that are already reflected in his disapproval in the polls.
The conjectures about what is intended with the revelation of these audios do not have to be twisted much to find the reasons for it. Gertz Manero had recently wanted to build an insurmountable tower from which he challenged all authority, all people. Including, and to begin with, the President of the Republic.
And it is that the timing of the revelation cannot be understood without taking into account the legal actions undertaken by Gertz in persecuting a group of lawyers close to Andrés Manuel’s former legal adviser, who is also a personal friend of his; These complaints have been answered with this bazooka that exposes the prosecutor’s little or no institutional character.
But at the center of everything is López Obrador and the fate of his six-year term. If a reading must be made of the audios uploaded to YouTube since Thursday, but circulated on the last business day of the week, it is that they represent an alarm, we do not know if the last one, so that Andrés Manuel regains control of people who had promised him loyalty, but which is now involved in struggles whose drift threatens political stability.
Gertz Manero is a loose bullet on the Government board. His brazen (because they are not at all discreet) clashes with Santiago Nieto, when he was head of the Financial Intelligence Unit even though he had already left that position, showed that the prosecutor does not care about the consequences of brawls that seem fundamentally motivated by for revengeful passions rather than for legal or institutional reasons.
Calming that battle, which still had a new chapter in these months at intervals, forced the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, to use time and skill, with meager and uncertain results until now. Hours and diligence used to placate those who are supposed to privilege the interest of the President’s government. However, such a precedent today is a pale memory in the face of Gertz Manero’s new crusade.
Since the end of the year it became known that Adán Augusto had received the presidential task of trying to stop a new attack by Gertz Manero, this one against one of the men who has been closest to López Obrador since the frustrated 2006 campaign: Julio Scherer Ibarra was the new objective of the prosecutor, in a turn worthy of novelistic minds, since the former legal adviser was turned to neither more nor less than the one who was promoted to the Prosecutor’s Office by him.
Scherer Ibarra is the man who explains one of the ways in which López Obrador established himself as of 2018 as the power of powers. He was a political operator of the Government of Tabasco. And now the prosecutor intends to hunt him down, a move that incidentally has exposed AMLO’s way of negotiating and even squeezing.
Because well seen, the maneuvers of the former legal adviser were oriented above all to an end: to establish that Andrés Manuel would not be anyone’s adornment, that there would be no factual power that would impose themes or times, limits or costs. Mexico had a new president and Julio became the operator of different legal and political initiatives with which López Obrador established in the imaginary the premiere of a way of making decisions in the Palace, and that everyone had to adjust to it.
Those adjustments included the collection of fortunes that, in the president’s opinion, had been unduly or illegally withheld from the treasury. Hence the not a few reformulations of economic terms, in contracts and public concessions, some multimillion-dollar tax payments from companies to the Treasury and, without a doubt, negotiations with those who have been arrested to stipulate the repair of the damage, in pursuit of those agreements Julio’s hand came to snap fingers in multiple instances.
That now details of these operations are known implies the risk of severe turbulence. But this will not be a scandal like that of the gray house, which regardless of the journalistic merits of the revelation managed to unsettle the president for weeks; we are facing a struggle of dry blows, there is no doubt, but of complex appreciation by the audiences; a fight of lawyers with encrypted messages from and for the elites where the resonances, and the costs, will affect, first, the image of the Government. A debate full of latin words and legal truths that will saturate the space of know-it-alls of public opinion; but, yes, the people from below know perfectly well that when those above are fighting, the trampling of the elephants always resents them more than those who are at ground level.
But there isn’t one smoking gun about who is the bad guy in this fight, even if there is no white or gray house with which to predispose society about who is to blame for these complaints where the defendants of the six-year term go for revenge from the prosecutor himself, the President should not trust that this battle does not imply great costs for his project. Because in the end what will be in question is the way in which power has been exercised in this Government: the maneuvers that are denounced – the existence of alleged payments by famous defendants to Scherer’s entourage in order to get rid of the accusations or jail—could not have occurred without López Obrador’s knowledge. The former counselor, by the way, has denied any corruption.
If there was corruption in carrying out these maneuvers, the president is in a dead end, or they abused him or abused him along with him. If there was not, then he has Gertz Manero challenging him: because Julio is AMLO, AMLO is Julio and in these years they have become more twinned.
Due to this trust, the President of the Republic commissioned Scherer Ibarra with a way of exercising power and pressure against adversaries and/or in favor of official interests; that per se It’s not bad, but it’s rarely presentable. It is already known: few like to see how the sausages are made.
López Obrador had an efficient operator in July, who was even the axis of a group for the prosecution of important cases, a space for royal politics where representatives of the FGR, the Judiciary and the Presidency of the Republic agreed on the prioritization of the objectives. A scheme whose political-strategic relevance can be recognized if it is overlooked that borders on illegality and compromises the autonomy of the powers. This group had been known for months, but the most timely account of its operation was published this week by Raymundo Riva Palacio.
At that table they were at one time together and oriented towards the same objective, characters who are now facing each other in what seems like the train wreck of the six-year term. The very departure of Scherer Ibarra from the Government last August, justified these days by the president as a search to balance and reduce costs in his cabinet, achieved just the opposite: it empowered the Attorney General of the Republic in such a way that he even to see the current Secretary of the Interior incapable. And from the new stripe to that tiger that accumulates scandals called Arturo Zaldívar, it is not necessary to add more.
Gertz Manero’s position is compromised by the content of the audios, but the revelation of the espionage to the prosecutor, and the attempt to harm him, shows that what is at risk is the president’s own project. Either it contains and leads its official and unofficial collaborators, or while some fight for their innocence and the prosecutor to impose their power on their former relatives and their former cabinet colleagues, the State itself could derail: exposed as it is by this new scandal, the president of the Court, the Attorney General of the Republic and the still silent actor in this plot: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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