The president’s exasperation over the “grey house” will have new chapters in the coming days and, the truth is, it will be difficult to change the course of the river that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself and his group of hard-liners chose. . To face the journalistic revelations about a house where his son lived in Houston, collapsing his discourse of austerity and privileges, the path chosen was polarization and confrontation, which has been a failure. The group was opened to people with greater skill and intelligence, summoned to find a way out of the worst crisis of the six-year term, the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, the powerful private secretary of the president, Alejandro Esquer, and the former head of the Office of the Presidency, Alfonso Romo.
After a week of a new strategy in search of damage controls, the result was also negative. The mismanagement of the crisis, with fabricated documents in the National Palace, contributed to the disaster. Worse yet, it provided new elements to expand journalistic investigations. Consequently, López Obrador’s anger and his attacks on the media and journalists. Two moments showed his frustration, when his voice cracked and tears ran down his face when he talked about his children -some think it was theater, but his children are, in fact, what affects him the most- and the exclamation of “with families don’t”, as a bellicose claim so that nothing about their children is spread.
But the president is wrong. The right to be informed is one of the reasons why he designed the morning as the axis of his government, where one of the segments most promoted by him is that it is the vehicle to alternately inform the media. That right to know that he proclaims so much does not apply when those who seek to keep Mexican society informed, as is the case of the “grey house”, of the inconsistencies in his austerity discourse and the possibility, because it is not yet clear, whether or not it was a conflict of interest, or whether or not there is an act of influence peddling and corruption.
What the president alleges is the right to privacy of his children, which would be valid if it were not for the fact that his eldest children have had public activities, having worked within the structures of Morena during electoral campaigns, and in the case of his second, Andrés, direct intervention in government affairs. The last sample button was its inclusion in the extended group in the National Palace.
Politicians, like celebrities, know or should know that the role they play within society brings them into greater public scrutiny and there is a loss of privacy. In the case of celebrities, without that media exposure they would have less public presence, which results in less fame and success. In the case of politicians, particularly a president, given the impact their decisions have on the governed, the magnifying glass is much larger than with other public figures, and the reporting on their actions is more intense. This is not only with López Obrador. He was with his predecessors and is with leaders in other nations.
The lack of understanding of the president and his group of hard-liners that only caused him to sink further into the swamp, canceled the possibility of having minimized the revelation of the “gray house” and the option, in case the issue continued to kick, as It happened initially, ordering an investigation from the Ministry of Public Administration. She would have removed that hot potato from her body and would have had a fuse to burn in her, not in his office. But what they triggered was more reporting on the “gray house” and, gradually, on other issues that affect, at least for now, the president’s mood.
Wanting to return to the private sphere what was public and has an impact on his government, is no longer possible. José Ramón López Beltrán, central subject in the “grey house” scandal, coordinated his father’s last presidential campaign in the state of Mexico and coincided with Delfina Gómez’s campaign for governor. Still last July, López Beltrán participated in public acts of Morena in that entity where social programs were restructured.
His brother Andrés, about whom last week there was abundant information in the press about alleged influence peddling -which should be the subject of investigation in the Public Service-, worked with Octavio Romero Oropeza, a man of all the trusts of the family and current director of Pemex, of the organization of the electoral structure and the defense of the vote in the 2012 elections. In the current government he continued to work informally on the electoral structures with the then coordinator of delegates, Gabriel García Hernández, and is recognized in various sectors as an efficient political operator of his father.
The president can favor the privacy of his children, the minor, and Gonzalo, who despite having had political and electoral activities in 2012, keeps a low profile and is not known to have participated in any political activities. But the two of them are not in the context of what the president proposed, but José Ramón and Andrés. It is in the public interest to know in detail what they have done under the presidency of his father, as well as to know if it is a matter of perceptions only that does not have ramifications in conflicts of interest or corruption.
Confrontation with the press is not the way, but transparency. The strategy they follow will not help to turn the “gray house” upside down, but on the contrary, it will unfold in other leaks and investigations, as is beginning to happen, and in more scandals, more crises and more confrontations.
#informed