The latest book by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Thank you! (Planeta, 2024), has the tone of a farewell letter and a political testament. The Mexican president has left an autobiography of his struggle on the left in more than 500 pages; He has reflected on his role in Mexican history, the decisions he made, the mistakes made; He has defined his political creed and has left what seems like a last will for Claudia Sheinbaum, his dolphin. López Obrador has recalled his moments of weakness—including his experience of a heart attack—, has spoken candidly about former presidents who emerged from the PRI and the PAN, and has confirmed that, at the end of his term, he will retire from the party. public eye. “I offer my adversaries sincere apologies; “I never thought about harming any person and I am leaving without hating anyone,” López Obrador writes in the closing of his book. “I hope you understand that, if I expressed myself harshly and radically, I always did so with the aim of achieving the beautiful utopia, the sublime ideal of love for one's neighbor,” he adds. “At the end of September I will retire and will not participate in anything public again. Whether I did well or not, history will tell.”
The president, who has published more than a dozen books, tells of his beginnings as a politician in the 1970s and why he has always been inclined to support the causes of the poor. In his political creed, which he has baptized as Mexican Humanism, the poor and the people, sometimes synonymous, have a central place. “It is a fact that we have been able to advance because the alliance with the people works for us,” he writes. “In our case, if we were not supported by the majority, and especially by the poor,” he continues, “the conservatives would have already defeated us or we would have had to rectify and submit to their whims and interests to become simple ornaments, vases, puppets or puppets of those who had become accustomed to stealing and holding the economic and political power of Mexico.”
López Obrador defines that the poor, in general, “are more sincere, loyal, less demanding and do not require many explanations; They are humble, they do not believe themselves to be wise, they are close to their emotions and feelings, and at the same time they have an accurate instinct to distinguish between those who truly love and respect them, and those who try to deceive them, even if they despise them.” The president affirms that we must bet on an alliance with the poor—who “do not usually betray” and “have kept us afloat”—to push for transformative changes in the country. In a coded message to Sheinbaum, Morena's presidential standard-bearer, López Obrador maintains that he should not “zigzag” or take “half measures,” but rather remain faithful to the principles of the movement. “Who really defends a democratic government? The people,” he says. “The main thing is to have love for the people, love the people, cultivate a deep love for the people, nothing is achieved without loving the people.”
The president maintains that on two occasions he was the victim of electoral fraud: in the 2006 elections and in the 2012 elections. Despite this, he says, he did not abandon the civil struggle (although at some point he thought about giving up, he confesses, when He was going through “days of desolation, discouragement and depression”). López Obrador remembers the occasion when, involved in the resistance movement, he suffered a heart attack and was on the verge of death. It was 2013, and President Enrique Peña Nieto had obtained in Congress an ambitious package of reforms (“disastrous,” he points out). One of them was the controversial energy reform, which opened the door to foreign investments in the exploitation of oil, a nationally owned resource. López Obrador and his supporters always fought a tough battle in the defense of national sovereignty regarding that resource.
“This last [reforma] It was largely the cause of the heart attack I suffered 10 years ago,” he says. “I clarify that before this great scare I took little care of myself and worked much more; I thought that stress did not exist, that it was a petit-bourgeois delicacy, like depression and frequent visits to the psychologist; However, I found out that I was wrong: hypertension kills.” López Obrador recognizes that, unlike the civil struggles of 2005—against the outrage—, in 2006 —after the first electoral fraud— and in 2008 —against another attempt to privatize oil—, “people did not mobilize as would have been required.” And he reflects: “It is also possible that we did not know how to do things well and failed in our strategy.” “The fact is that my heart couldn't take it,” she writes.
The former presidents, naked
López Obrador points out that the main contribution of his movement has been the revolution of consciences, having managed to politicize the majority of Mexicans: “we contribute to changing the mentality of broad sectors of the people of Mexico”, “we believe in the need to awaken the civic conscience”, “we made it evident that the PRI and the PAN represented the same thing”, “many middle class citizens who previously insulted us now respect us.” The president defends his belief in civil, and not armed, struggle as an engine of change. “We bet that with the awareness of broad sectors of the population it would be possible to achieve similar results, but in a peaceful way, with fewer sacrifices and greater depth,” he maintains. “It is not about coming to power and having people continue thinking the same, but rather that the transformation is assimilated, produced, applied and defended by the people,” he adds.
The president affirms that a merit of his revolution of thought was having shown that the projects of the PRI and the PAN “represent the same interests,” and how former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari acted as a hinge in that “gatopardism.” “Salinas' dream was always a right-wing two-party system, to simulate that there was democracy with the alternation in the Government of two parties that represented and sustained the same economy for the elite,” he explains.
Upon finally coming to power in 2018, López Obrador offered a truce to his predecessors in the Executive, but now he has harshly criticized them in his book. The one he has attacked the most is former President Felipe Calderón, of the PAN, whom he accuses of having come to power in 2006 thanks to electoral fraud and, then, in 2012, upon his departure from the Government, of having intervened to tilt the result in favor of Peña Nieto, of the PRI. “Poor Calderón, unhappy,” he writes. “Instead of hate, he deserves compassion. No matter how much he repeats and repeats to the point of ridicule that he acted well, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that justifies it. He came to power illegitimately, he never proved that he deserved to exercise it, he detained him, to the misfortune of many, and left with the agreement that he would be protected, but I sincerely do not believe that he can live or sleep with a clear conscience,” he adds. he.
Calderón, who after the trial in the United States for drug trafficking of Genaro García Luna—his former Secretary of Security—went to live in Spain, established a “narco-state” in Mexico, “a government totally infiltrated by crime,” maintains López O
brador. The president says that Calderón, whom he calls a “wimp,” a “wimp,” and “spurious,” unleashed the war against drugs to legitimize his “usurping Government”, in what he describes as “idiocy”, “a blunder”. “The lack of principles and conservative fanaticism can lead any person with power to undertake repressive actions with sick hatred to impose order, even if they achieve it in an inhumane and cruel way,” he points out, “and Calderón has that extremist profile: he is the most reactionary and authoritarian politicians in Mexico.” In another part of the book, he adds that the former PAN president “has always been a minor character, bad-tempered, badland”.
López Obrador also refers to former President Peña Nieto, whom in his conferences The Morning had previously treated him with deference. The president assures that the PRI was also imposed in the Executive thanks to fraud, now in 2012, and describes him as “just another subordinate of the dominant elite, not perverse but limited and frivolous.” “Peña represented the most corrupt group in Mexico,” he says. “He did nothing to change neoliberal policy and stop corruption; on the contrary, he deepened it.” The president says that, compared to Salinas' six-year term, corruption in Peña Nieto's period “was less, but more ostentatious and uncontrolled,” because from the highest positions in his government, where “the men and women were of the lowest moral level”, “everyone did what they wanted, there was plenty of room”. López Obrador adds that Peña Nieto is “another great traitor to the country” for having handed over natural resources to individuals, nationals and foreigners.
Of the PAN Vicente Fox, the first president of the democratic alternation (2000-2006), López Obrador says: “Never in the history of this country have we had a president as irreverent and inept as him. There have been authoritarians, thieves, surrenderists, frivolous and irresponsible, but since the first president of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria, we have never had one as mediocre and crazy as Vicente Fox.” López Obrador maintains that Fox governed the country from a vacuum and ignorance. And, given that the PAN member continued the same neoliberal policy established in the PRI, with which he had supposedly broken, López Obrador calls him “perverse” and a “traitor to democracy.”
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