forbidden amlitos

“These are prohibited objects in the Mexican electoral system: we can no longer have amlitos.”
Mario Delgado

I am willing to defend democracy at a time when it is facing significant risks. Many of the electoral reform measures that the president is trying to pass into secondary legislation, Plan B, have no purpose other than to return to one-party rule. I cannot defend, however, the prohibition of amlites. Not only is it ridiculous, but because of its irrationality it weakens democracy.

Article 134 of the Constitution states that government propaganda “should be of an institutional nature and for informative, educational or socially oriented purposes. In no case will this propaganda include names, images, voices or symbols that imply personalized promotion of any public servant”. The provision was introduced in the Magna Carta in 2007, as part of a demand from the left-wing parties expressed by Pablo Gómez. The idea was to prevent officials (not yet corcholatas) from using official publicity campaigns to promote their political aspirations.

From that to prohibiting the caricatures of officials in electoral propaganda, however, there is a long way, but that is precisely what the Electoral Tribunal has done. Judge Felipe de la Maza explained it: “Based on this criterion, it would be completely clear that the use of the image of public servants in electoral propaganda is prohibited, and the same can be applied to caricatures, dolls, botargas. That is, any electoral propaganda formula with an image. That is prohibited”.

When the 2007 electoral reform was discussed, I questioned the restrictions it imposed on freedom of expression. I wrote against the reform and went to the Senate, where I had a discussion with Gómez, who along with the PRI member Manlio Fabio Beltrones was one of the main architects of the initiative. There was no way to convince them. They approved a reform that, in order to seek an impossible equity, established a series of restrictions on freedom of expression that today have led us to a ruling as absurd as the ban on amlitos.

Worse, the censorship has arisen not from a government propaganda campaign, but from a message on social networks from Morena. Prior to the elections in six states in 2022, the party spread a banner with its thumb raised as a sign of triumph and the slogan: “Smile, this June 5 we won 6 out of 6 for Morena.” A perfectly acceptable message, but with a friendly caricature of the president.

Many of the bans that we are suffering come from the statements that Vicente Fox made against AMLO during the 2006 campaign and that the Electoral Tribunal said then that they had jeopardized the fairness of the election. The curious thing is that these statements pale in comparison to the daily insults that López Obrador launches against the opposition today. It is very unfair that the morenistas are now complaining about the prohibitions that they themselves demanded in 2007, but even so it is unacceptable that we have an electoral system that tries to prohibit politicians from doing politics.

Amlites are not a threat to democracy. On the contrary, banning them is a much more dangerous attack, because democracy requires freedom of expression to thrive. For this reason, from here I ask Mario Delgado to send me a small bag. I am willing to take care of it with affection and display it publicly in defense of freedom of expression, without for that reason ceasing to be critical of government policies with which I disagree.

Vera Carrizal

I am against unofficial preventive detention, but in the case of María Elena Ríos, the saxophonist attacked with acid allegedly on the orders of former congressman Juan Antonio Vera Carrizal, there is a clear danger for the victim. In these cases, it is correct to resort to preventive detention.