López Obrador denies setback and rules out sending another electricity initiative

Roberto Garduno and Fabiola Martinez

Newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday, April 19, 2022, p. 5

On Sunday in the Chamber of Deputies, an act of betrayal of Mexico was committed by a group of sell-out legislators, outspoken defenders of foreign companies that are dedicated to thriving, stealing, and backing looters, evidenced President Andrés Manuel López Workshop.

In a robust response to the event in San Lázaro, he said: We prepare for betrayal and two years ago he brought his cabinet together in the Treasury Room to describe the energy rescue route, in the face of opponents who show Ignorance of the substance of the matter, of the history of the country. Quiet, the president appeared at his press conference. He gave free rein to his political experience and ruled out sending a new electrical initiative during his administration. He left her that task to the candidate that emerges from our movement.

He explained that behind the ambition are the investment funds that dominate the world and the political parties are at their service, but he ruled out buying opposition legislators as happened in 2013 with Peña Nieto’s energy reform: If we had done the same, then we would have had a qualified majority.

He also denied that the vote against the electricity reform is a disaster, and argued that what happened on Sunday was not a setback, but a success, it is splendid, where those who call themselves popular representatives vote for Iberdrola; They have no love for the people and, as the Rubén Blades song says, he who does not love his homeland does not love his mother.

However, he pointed out that the episode in which the sellouts could not argue how the reform affects, nor in the trade agreement with the United States and Canada, as alleged by the Secretary of Economy of the past six-year term (Ildefonso Guajardo), was unfortunate. This man thinks this way because together with the previous boss, (Luis) Videgaray, they had already delivered the oil.

He hardened his tone when he touched the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI): It was even embarrassing to see the PRI as a drainer for the PAN; and the other paleros parties, that of the Citizen Movement. The conservative block has already been integrated, and it’s good because there is no longer any simulation!

López Obrador added that despite the above, his government’s energy policy just beginning And, with that perspective, he prepared himself for betrayal, but above all to strengthen oil, so that the nation manages this resource, the electricity industry and lithium. And the way to do this, he added, is the democratic one, to have more and more votes.

–Would you leave that task for the next administration?

–Yes, yes, that the candidates or the candidate that emerges from our movement raise it, raise it again. And the same in the case of oil for when the six-year term ends.

The president accepted the event as a triumph for democracy, to demonstrate that we live in a true state of law, that there is no authoritarian president, that there is no corruption, that freedoms are guaranteed. It’s splendid a moment like this, it’s a stellar moment.

When asked if he does not feel it is a setback for his government, he responded with the results of a survey published last weekend, where he appears as the second most accepted head of state in the world.

From the ownership of the more than one hundred contracts that were awarded to national and foreign companies in the oil rounds, he defined that he has fulfilled his commitments (not to cancel them), but his successor could even make use of tools of participatory democracy –such as the citizen consultation – to ask the people what to do about it.