What happened on Friday with the hospitalization and subsequent surgical intervention of President López Obrador demonstrates the way in which government information is handled: without transparency, with chiaroscuro, and without really providing information, actually trying to hide it or adapt it to their interests.
The president had the traditional morning conference on Friday, ending it he never said he would visit the military hospital, which he did just an hour later, and when, according to the subsequent report given by the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, he was At the point of starting the surgical procedure, the hospitalization was barely reported.
Nor has it been reported, to this day, in detail about the president’s ailment or strictly about what was done. The president must have been sedated in general, and it was never reported who was in control of the country during those hours.
It may be thought that it is something minor, that it was not important or even that the president’s health is part of his privacy. In reality, it is quite the opposite: whether we like it or not, the health of a president is a matter of state, with López Obrador or with any other.
Society has the right to know the health of the man or woman who has control of a country in their hands. The vast majority of ailments, of course, do not incapacitate a president to continue with that responsibility, but what happens must be known because health, such as physical or intellectual capacity, is a conditioning factor as important as the conflicts of interest that it may have. a mandatory.
Several examples: if there is a chapter that obscured Francoise Mitterrand’s management, it was that for years he hid, while he was president, that he suffered from cancer that finally led him to his grave. Ronald Reagan accurately reported his surgical interventions, but it was never reported that the president, during at least his last two years in office, already suffered from Alzheimer’s and many decisions no longer passed through his hands. And let’s not talk about dictators like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez, whose health was as protected as a state secret, who even adjusted, according to reliable reports, the date of their death to the needs of the situation.
When he was about to start the process of impeaching Richard Nixon, the president was depressed, he was drinking, he was drunk a lot of the time, and the chief of the defense staff, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense decided that they would not comply with any high-risk military order, if it was not previously approved by them. The same thing happened in the last weeks of Donald Trump, fearing that a president notoriously unbalanced by his electoral defeat could unleash a nuclear attack to cancel the transition of powers.
We know that President López Obrador suffers from heart problems, although his health has not been clearly reported, neither before nor now, in addition to other back ailments. Fortunately, on this occasion there were no major consequences, but the sloppiness of the information comes from the decision to keep it secret, because at the beginning the president himself at the end of the morning could have informed that a clinical study would be carried out and this would have avoided the speculations that They occurred for several hours on Friday. It was reported until the rumors had overwhelmed any attempt at containment.
Neither the president nor his administration won with it, nor did society and good government practices. Fortunately, we insist, there was nothing to regret regarding the presidential health nor was there any sudden problem that would have required the presidential attention while he was impeded. But let’s imagine for a moment that there had been an earthquake, a security episode similar to the Culiacanazo or any of the daily tragedies that plague the country. There are procedures, information mechanisms that any democracy must respect and once again in our case that has not happened.
By the way, the fact that President López Obrador has already written a political testament, as he himself has declared, should not be a cause for concern, as some have expressed. It is a practice that many politicians have always done. What it does reflect is that the president is aware of his own vulnerability. Beyond even some of his collaborators who believe that secrecy is a way of managing power.
By the way, speaking of bad communication practices, the decision to declare the 2017 media law unconstitutional, accepting as good the legislation approved a year earlier and unanimously rejected by the media, communicators and the radio and television industry in In general, it is a decision that, if not stopped in time, will have incomprehensible costs for freedom of expression in the country.
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