Although the president defended López Hernández and even accused an alleged media campaign against the senator, she marked a certain distance from whoever was former president López Obrador’s strong man.
“The president is already separating herself from that circle that is so close to President López Obrador, mainly from Adán Augusto. Surely she has already measured and her team is seeing that risk that we can begin to see a more direct impact on the Morena governments,” says Tec de Monterrey professor Azucena Rojas.
Corruption reached the Navy
López Obrador delegated a large part of his project to the Armed Forces, which is why he gave them works, budget and power.
However, while he placed his trust in the Navy, corruption networks were being forged within the institution that were detected since 2023 and that led to the arrest of some sailors involved in the fiscal huachicol.
In September, the Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch, confirmed the arrest of 14 people, including three businessmenfive active sailors, one retired and five former Customs officials.
The federal government defended the Navy and former secretary Rafael Ojeda Durán, however, specialists agree that the accusations are a strong blow for the institution, but also for the worker movement.
Mario Ramírez, from UNAM, observes that President Sheinbaum is now more cautious when giving her opinion on the involvement of sailors in fuel smuggling, so as not to defend “the indefensible.”
“The president has understood it, I think she is allowing herself to be advised, for example in the scandal of the fiscal huachicol, where at the beginning she came out to defend the former president tooth and nail, today she limits herself to trying to answer it, it is a way of not getting involved in defending the indefensible anymore and even more so when the Secretary of the Navy said: whoever falls falls,” he maintains.
In the López Obrador government there were other cases of corruption, such as the one involving Segalmex, an institution in which resources of approximately 12,000 million pesos were diverted.
The challenge for the president
The president, therefore, faces one of the biggest challenges of her administration: that there be no impunity in these types of cases because, otherwise, the image for the so-called 4T will be affected.
Aldo Muñoz Armentaprofessor at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM), believes that the impact of these cases depends on “sides”, since Morena’s supporters can argue that the government is fighting corruption.
But critics of the so-called 4T maintain that it is evidence that they are not honest and that they incurred “the same thing” as governments of the past.
“For Morena supporters, the symbolic value that the complaint was made by the government means that it is a government that is even fighting the corruption of its own members and high-ranking officials of key institutions for the project such as the Navy,” considers Muñoz.
“Although if you ask those on the other side, they will say that there is proof that there is no honesty, that it was a showcase simply to win elections, but that when it came to exercising authority, they incurred the same thing,” he explains.
Azucena Rojas considers that a “good message” from the president was to send controversial politicians like Adán Augusto López Hernández behind the fences, during the rally she led on October 5 in the capital’s Zócalo.
“We can already see it very clearly in this report from her first year in office, where the arrangement of the chairs was totally different from what we have observed. On this occasion she does not hesitate to put them at another level, away from her, if she keeps them close there will be a cost for her,” says Rojas.
