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Falsification of some amparos in favor of two children of Andrés Manuel López Obrador without the current court order, without being mentioned in any investigation and, in addition, without signatures of those represented or of his alleged lawyer, served as a source of a false news disseminated by The Universal, Latinus And, once denied, even in the first flat of the Reform The next day. The idea is to somehow link the former president and his family with the investigations of gasoline smuggling from Texas. And, for this, they raised amparos: to have a source from which they could lie.
This idea is not new in Mexico: if the lie has no source, you have to invent it. On May 9, 2022, one month after the elections in Tamaulipas, someone created a portal called Dallas Chroniclewhich simulated being an information site. Had only one “news”: the involvement of Morena with the Huachicolthe disappearance of some sailors, and some supposed accounts in the Netherlands of the then candidate Américo Villarreal, today Governor of Tamaulipas. He Dallas Chronicle He disappeared to the day of his birth but, based on that “news”, the leaders of National Action, Marko Cortés, and of the PRD, Jesús Zambrano, requested the cancellation of the elections in Tamaulipas. The “news” was presented as evidence in an electoral trial and, with it, those who have been behind this falsification – presumably the campaign team of the Truko Verástegui, uncle who now plans to register a Mexican political party in the name of Donald Trump – inaugurated procedural fiction. But legal fantasies were only born. Already when the prian had lost Tamaulipas, on September 19, 2022, they were published in The Universal Supporting cables of the then United States ambassador, Ken Salazar, to the DEA in which it was notified in a more helpless English than that of Peña Nieto, of a detective plot: the Northeast and Morena cartel had commissioners to marine to wash money for the choice of the State of Mexico that was going to be carried out until the following year. If they had not served Tamaulipas, they could be used in another entity. According to those “cables”, the washing account in Virgin Islands was from the son – they are always the children – by Américo Villarreal. It was Ken Salazar himself who denied those invented cables: “They are not from the United States and Punto,” he said. The funny thing is that both news, that of the portal that existed for a day and the lie of The Universalthey continued to appear as valid, however they had been declared as lies. The effect they wanted to achieve is that there is a backdrop, atmospheric, where Morena is associated with the Huachicol And with suspicious acts, if not verifiable, yes repeated in private media. The focus is Andrés Manuel and his family because it is the fight against Huachicol The one that indicates the highest point of its approval (80 percent) and its incorruptibility, its most endearing feature for most Mexicans.
This time there is a crime: someone impersonated Caro Quintero’s lawyer, Francisco Rodríguez Smith Macdonald to ask for the amparos because, in a detective plot, what better than the litigant was someone linked to the best known character of organized crime of Mexico. Supplanting someone’s identity in a legal act is a crime. The media that disseminated it, just minutes after the protection issued in several states of the country, must be part of a fraudulent network of clothing of false sources. The discussion then wanted to lead us to debate whether the media can be punished for their falsehoods. That is a debate that we already had in the mid -nineteenth century, between Lares Law and Zarco Law, as Florence Toussaint has studied.
One, was written, obeying Lucas Alamán, for Teodosio Lares, the Minister of Justice, Ecclesiastical Business and Public Instruction of Antonio López de Santa Anna in his last period. It is 1853 and there is established prior censorship, the possibility of imprisoning the editors and confiscating their printing presses, in addition to controlling those who sell the printed ones. Santa Anna did not have time to use it in all its reach, but Porfirio Díaz took flight with her. Lares was part of the failed Empire of Maximiliano de Habsburg and had to exile when Juarez expelled the invading army. His law established three types of prohibitions: against subversive forms, that is, they were against the Catholic Church, the government and personal life of the rulers; Sedicious, which was to publish falsehoods to cause disobedience; immoral, against decency; injurious, against good reputation; slanderous, which will aggravate people or institutions. It is based on the principle that not everything expressable can be beneficial for the nation and that there are those who know how to distinguish the false from the true over others, and that is President Santa Anna. The defense is peace and stability, not freedom. On the other side is the Zarco Law, which guarantees the free impression on the basis of a principle other than the conservative: the self -regulation of truth and lie in a market of ideas. “For the printing press there is no better corrective than that of the same printing press,” Zarco will say. Alaman will say otherwise: “The printing press is nothing more than an instrument to commit crimes like any other.”
Although with many fluctuations when implementing the freedom of printing – citizens who qualified the publications, judges of sentence, interference of the municipalities – the truth is that that freedom, that of expression, is the result of a liberal and then left -wing fighting. It has only depended on the self -consent that, since 2018, does not exist in many of the media. There is an audience that continues to think: “How can it be a lie if it is what I think?” But in the case at hand, that of the amparos manufactured, there was the crime of supplanting the identity of the lawyer in question. And that perhaps would be an exception: when freedom itself incurs a crime to impersonate the truth. What should be punished is the dispossession, never falsehood.
