On October 19, 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that one must work 16 hours a day and rest eight, in order to fulfill what was promised in a six-year term. This Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, he added that “it’s not true that I don’t work” and that he is “more applied than ever.” The truth is that the president is lying. He has never worked 16 hours a day, say people who have known him for a long time, nor is he more dedicated than ever. López Obrador does not like that they put a mirror in front of him, but the reflection of lazy and unrestrained is beginning to shine.
The two statements in a space of three years would not be understood without the hacked emails to the Secretary of National Defense, which he wants to openly deny but cannot, although he is outraged that the Army keeps a record of all his activities. He does not understand that it is not against him, since there are logs of both López Obrador and his predecessors. The novelty is that the hacking is beginning to draw him before public opinion—which he no longer liked.
The president brought up the subject of his daily activities last week five days after Gibrán Ramírez, a former applause of López Obrador, a former federal official and who aspired to lead Morena, published an article in Milenio asking who ruled in the National Palace. “For many years the impression has been nurtured that the president is a hard worker. This was, without a doubt, reality,” he pointed out.
“That image was the one that got the ruler his approval of more than 90 percent and, added to his feat of going through all the municipalities of Mexico, (which) formed an important part of the myth of the tireless and exceptional leader. The myth now lives only in the unconditional supporters of the president, less and less, increasingly older”.
The acid criticism of an old believer of López Obrador was based on Sandra Romandía’s column on October 27 on the Opinion 51 portal, where, based on hacked emails, he revealed that after the morning conference and his daily “monologue” with the media, his activities are usually finished “unless he goes on tour and participates in a ‘supervision’ or a visit to some state, (and) his schedule remains empty, blank, with nothing else scheduled to do more than receiving the physical therapies that the military medical corps provide him and his wife, sometimes also their youngest son, generally in the afternoons”.
In the Army log, mentioned by Romandía, his day begins at 6 in the morning, when he arrives at the security cabinet meeting. López Obrador, according to people who know his activities, gets up around five in the morning, and usually sleeps more than eight hours. He regularly takes a nap, around 12 noon, as he has been accustomed to all his life -something common in the tropics-, after which he has fun, like going to throw some balls in a baseball field, because he no longer runs or can move as before, due to his spinal problems.
Romandía pointed out that according to the hacked emails, the president’s activity agendas “are very short, two daily activities in most cases, and the rest of the day nothing to do.” For example, he added, “in the reports from April 29 to May 29, 2019, where there are 31 days of activities for López Obrador, on 18 of the 31 days, that is, 58% of the time, the only thing he did the President went to meet from 6 to 7 in the morning with the security cabinet and then his morning. The other 13 days, including Saturdays and Sundays, he dedicates to supervising some work or attending to inaugurate something inside the Republic, nothing more.
“According to the agendas obtained by the hack, the President rarely has any work activity after morning. This scarce agenda of activities by the President of the Republic since this administration took office, was observed even before he suffered the collapse of health on his ranch in January 2022, since in the leaked files can be seen summaries of his events from 2019 to the present and in all of them it can be seen that the only constant and daily activities of President López Obrador are his morning meetings, and then nothing.
López Obrador acts in the National Palace in the same way as he did when he was head of government in Mexico City. He had a security meeting, one in the morning and then had breakfast to give instructions. The rest of the day he used it more to play baseball and rest than to work. Romandía found that neither in his international tours, the president’s agenda is increased, as in the tour to Central America from May 5 to 8 of this year, where his acts were reduced to meetings with the leaders of Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala , Belize and Cuba, without any other activity.
The president usually has private activities, sometimes at noon, sometimes in the afternoon, but they are usually unannounced. Around seven at night he meets with the head of propaganda, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, to prepare the morning, his government space, during which they decide who he is going to attack the next day, to prepare support materials, and distractors from underlying issues.
That is what he calls “governing”. He no longer thinks like in the spring of 2019 he said it was “easy” to do so, but his behavior remains the same: he works little, lazy a lot, does not govern, manages conflicts, and gets angry when faced with reality. The macaw leaks, they are exhibiting it.
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