Mario Maldonado, a fairly well-informed columnist for El Universal, has been surprised, alarmed and worried because the Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation file against him for having been the first person to spread a YouTube video on social networks of a compromising conversation between the prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero, and his second in command, Juan Ramos, about the case of his political family that was going to vote the Supreme Court. And he is right. The prosecutor wants to crush him so that through him he sends the message to everyone that he is a storm captain who knows how power is used—from what we have seen, by hook or by crook.
Gertz Manero is not alone. He has the strongest support he can have, that of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who avoided referring directly to the Maldonado case, underlining his intention not to intervene in the affairs of the Prosecutor’s Office, except when it was a serious matter. . How the president defines the parameters of “seriousness” is something personal that is not based on what the law says. In this case, the violations of due process incurred by the prosecutor are not serious, nor are they inventing crimes, as the Supreme Court said on the issue of his in-laws, either. In private, however, it is very different.
López Obrador fully agrees that Gertz Manero go after Maldonado, persecute him and prosecute him. The issue was raised shortly after the specialized prosecutor for Regional Control, Germán Castillo Banuet, announced last week in an interview with Ciro Gómez Leyva on Radio Formula, that an investigation had been launched against the journalist for the alleged crime of article 211 bis of the Federal Penal Code. Although it is not clear that this article violated the law, because it did not copy or disseminate the video from a government security system or equipment, but from the public platform YouTube, the president internally established what he believed.
In a meeting with his collaborators, what Gertz Manero had done against Maldonado seemed correct to him, as a demonstration effect to the media that they are “collided” with his enemies, whom he identifies as conservatives or neoliberals, who are determined to attack those who , like him, seek to change the country. Once again, the president was out of focus, within the narcissism that everything that happens negatively for his officials is not due to the fact that they may do badly, but to the enemies of his administration. By leaving no room for discussion, it automatically turns his rudimentary radicalism into support for whom he is being criticized.
A legal expert stressed that the dissemination of an audio as such is not contemplated as an action to be pursued, let alone sanctioned in the Penal Code. He explained that there is an absence of crime, in the terms as Castillo Banuet proposed, but there is a “civicly reprehensible” behavior as the recording is an illegitimate interference. Therefore, he added in a general context, any knowledge without consent would be a civil wrong. From the public and spoken, there are very few people who consider that what Maldonado did, posting a public audio on YouTube on his social networks, is a crime, implicitly considering an ethical principle in journalism, where there is space for Disseminate materials of this type if the content means a greater good for society, as happened in this case, by showing how the person most responsible for protecting justice violates it.
With the endorsement of a president who waves pom-poms in support of his prosecutor, Gertz Manero is going to proceed against Maldonado, no matter what. To the president, totally refractory to the fulfillment of the law, less.
The international organization Article 19, which defends freedom of expression in the world, condemned the opening of the investigation file against Maldonado and pointed out that Castillo Banuet, by sharing public information about the journalist, criminalized and stigmatized him. The Inter-American Press Association described the investigation against him as “contrary to press freedom.” The convictions against the Prosecutor’s Office will continue, and will deepen when the scope of what it wants to do against Maldonado permeates.
In the interview with Gómez Leyva, Castillo Banuet pointed it out as part of a “concerted operation” to intervene and publish the call between Gertz Manero and Ramos, which would have a place in article 211 bis of the Penal Code, but not as a dissemination of information. an illegitimately obtained conversation, but for allegedly responsible for espionage, which carries a sentence of 12 years in prison. Then Maldonado, who as a journalist received a tip or came across the YouTube video while he was fishing on the nets -as many of us do as a method-, would be persecuted and eventually prosecuted for a crime of espionage, which escalates the dimension from the research folder.
This second part of the accusations made known by Castillo Banuet are nuclear. Gertz Manero would not have to open investigation folders to all the people, journalists or not, nor to the media or institutions that broadcast the telephone conversation, as from a legal point of view, chemically pure, it would have to be, and come to a clash in court where the counter allegation finds its roots in articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution.
For the Prosecutor’s Office it is not about the discussion about the right to be informed based on the common good that used an illegal recording for it, but it goes to depth: Maldonado participated in the intervention scheme of the prosecutors’ communications, which he becomes a spy, and he is in charge of spreading it, which makes him a conspirator. The journalist of these worried about what is coming on him is right. But everyone, we must be alert because with the presidential endorsement there are no controls or limits.
#Gertz #Maldonado