There is so much speculation about the state of health of the Attorney General, Alejandro Gertz Manero, that even the Attorney General’s Office does not know exactly what is happening with him. There is also no certainty at the high levels of the Prosecutor’s Office about the severity of his illness, and not even what the condition really is. What is confirmed is that during 2022 he frequently traveled to the United States on National Defense Secretariat planes, very discreetly, on flights recorded most of the time in the logbooks as if they were carrying diplomatic bags.
The prosecutor’s state of health has been difficult to assess, even for his collaborators in the Prosecutor’s Office, because for almost the entire six-year term, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Gertz Manero worked at his home -where he received his US counterparts on one occasion – a practice which he continued. The agreements with the special prosecutors and some official visits are carried out in an office that she has in one of his residences in Mexico City.
Throughout all this time, people who have seen it have described it in radically opposite ways. Weak and sickly, said a person who came across him several months ago at the ABC hospital, to strong and of good color, as seen at a small family celebration in a public place in Puebla. Federal officials affirm that Gertz Manero has never been hospitalized, at least since he became a prosecutor, and that his visits to hospitals have been for two to three days, with the exception of one occasion in Boston at the end of last September, where he stayed for almost a week. doing a checkup.
In addition to Boston, the prosecutor has gone to medical appointments in Houston and Baltimore, where the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical Center is located, where, according to public information, he underwent surgery in January for a spinal condition. The revelation of this intervention caused President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to confirm at the end of January that he had indeed been intervened for a “repair”, but that he was working.
Although it is not known how hard he works, communication between the president and the prosecutor has remained fluid, and increasingly close, directly or through the president’s private secretary, Alejandro Esquer, the strongest man in the National Palace after Lopez Obrador. Through Esquer, he frequently sends the president comment cards on different aspects of public affairs and some policy recommendations, although he usually deals directly with the most sensitive issues.
One of the issues that he recently dealt with through Esquer, it came out, was related to the trial in Brooklyn of the former Secretary of Federal Public Security, Genaro García Luna, where the president expected him to incriminate former President Felipe Calderón. The card noted that the evidence against Garcia Luna – until now at least – was not strong, and the fact that he had refused to plead guilty or negotiated with the Department of Justice, showed that he thought his chances of being found not guilty they were strong.
Another card had to do with the meeting held by the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Norma Piña, with the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, and the legal adviser to the Presidency, Estela Ríos, about three weeks ago, from the that the press reported at that time that there was a disagreement. What Gertz Manero told him, based on what two of his collaborators who were present informed him, is that although this disagreement occurred, it was not as harsh as highlighted in the press, although there was discomfort between the interlocutors due to the position of both parties, which did not really leave a door open.
Gertz Manero occupied many of the spaces left by the legal adviser to the Presidency, Julio Scherer, when he resigned from office in August 2021, although López Obrador’s growing presence and use of the Secretary of the Interior has limited him in the field of policy. Even so, the prosecutor has influence in the National Palace, where the president listens to him, despite the fact that he does not always respond to his requests, like last year, when he proposed as Donald Trump’s interlocutor, that López Obrador wanted him to win the presidential election on next year, or in the frequent criticisms that she makes of the head of government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, and her security strategy, whose head, Omar García Harfuch, has had problems with the prosecutor since the beginning of the six-year term.
The type of issues that Gertz Manero sees with the president reflect the access and closeness between the two, who has a public expression of full support every time López Obrador finds it necessary to put his body to avoid and deflect criticism in against arbitrariness and deficiencies of the prosecutor.
Due to the way in which the president takes the things that Gertz Manero brings him, it can be argued that the force of his word has limits, and that López Obrador discharges many political tasks on the Secretary of the Interior, with whom the prosecutor have a good relationship. However, the prosecutor is a fundamental piece in the presidential gear, and an asset in presidential strategies. For example, the reactivation of the Colosio Case, proposed by Gertz Manero at the end of last year as a distraction from the underlying problems, to which López Obrador has no answers or solutions.
The public perception of Gertz Manero, that of a powerful man who, despite not having given results and having used all the resources he has as a prosecutor for personal disputes -so far without success-, is what caused the unusual interest in his health, a concern certainly shared by López Obrador, for what it would mean to lose such a functional bishop.
Mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @rivapa
#mystery #Gertz #Manero