No one can slander AMLO; is in the heart of Mexico: Sheinbaum

Luis A. Boffil and Patricia Vázquez

Correspondents

La Jornada newspaper
Monday, September 22, 2025, p. 4

At the close of her tour of the southeast, President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo highlighted the work of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who in six years “transformed” the country and “stayed in the heart of the people of Mexico”, so no one can slander it.

Yesterday, when paying two reports in Mérida, Yucatán, and Cancun, Quintana Roo, the president criticized that the opponents continue to attack the former president, who in his sexennium managed to reduce poverty and inequality, which grew during the 36 years of neoliberal regimes.

“Notice, the government left practically a year ago and they continue to slander it, saying things about their government, because many do not support that they have removed their privileges,” he said before thousands of Quintanarroenses.

Hours before, from the Yucatecan capital, he stressed that there is only one truth: “They can never slander it because he stayed, not in monuments, not in street names, he stayed in the heart of the town of Mexico, and thus will continue to be.”

He stressed that in the six -year period of Miguel de la Madrid, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto ruled “for a few, for whom they felt owners of Mexico”, so the gaps increased and grew poverty.

Accompanied by the Secretary of the Interior, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, and the governor of Yucatán, Joaquín Díaz Mena, the president stressed: “The good thing is that, peacefully at the polls, the people of Mexico woke up and began in December 2018 the fourth transformation of the public life of Mexico. The transformation is deep, it is not just a change of government. It has changed a lot in the country.”

The most important thing, he said, is that 13.5 million Mexicans left poverty, “never before seen in the life of Mexico.”

In addition, inequalities decreased, because while in 2012 the country was the one with the greatest gaps between rich and poor registered on the planet, these differences have been closed and is now the second least unequal in the continent, only after Canada. “Wealth was distributed,” he said in the XMathuil meridian community.

Hours later, from the Tajamar Malecon, in Cancun, when he also referred to the closing of these gaps and the reduction of misery, the president explained that this was given by several actions undertaken since the past six -year term, three in particular:

Increase in the minimum wage, which in 2018 was 3 thousand pesos and in seven years it has increased 135 percent; The welfare programs, to which this year will be allocated 850 billion pesos and are unique in the world, “no country has a social program as ambitious as in ours”; and, thirdly, the construction of strategic public works by the Government.

“That is why poverty and inequalities were reduced. That model is called the fourth transformation of public life; that model is called Mexican humanism, and it is from here, from Mexico, based on our history, our cultural wealth,” he said before the state president, Mara Lezama, the federal secretary of the Interior and other officials who accompanied her.

All this, he said, made the people of Mexico in 2024 decided, at the polls, to continue the transformation and that, for the first time, a woman would occupy the presidency of Mexico.

Yesterday, Sheinbaum visited states 22 and 23 as part of the tour he undertook three weekends throughout the country, in uninédit exercise of presenting, entity by entity, his first government report.

In both acts he also referred to the judicial election. “This will go down in history; our grandchildren, great -grandchildren, will remember the year when, for the first time, Mexicans decided who were going to be the judges, the magistrates and the ministers.”