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he opposition front has spent almost three weeks squeezing the bagasse from the propaganda operation started last month by the political organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), owned by Claudio X. González and operated by former PAN official María Amparo Casar. It should not go unnoticed that MCCI is the command post of the opposition coalition that ran against Morena in last year’s elections and that goes back to the Pact for Mexico, the hegemonic agreement forged by Peña Nieto between PAN, PRI and PRD to enable the last package of structural reforms of the neoliberal period.
In this period, the oligarchic reaction, supported by its media and its spokesmen, turned into a scandal a defamatory piece that does not deserve to be described as journalistic and has been branching out the insidiousness towards Pemex and towards the private corporate Vidanta not in search of the truth, but to create the impression that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is at the center of a plot of corruption, conflict of interest, influence peddling or all three things together.
The infamous offensive seeks to thrive on the ground of various distorted ideas: that the president’s preaching of austerity is incompatible with the lifestyle of one of his sons; that the son in question leads a multimillionaire lifestyle; that AMLO says he hates the rich; that both Baker Hughes – the company for which the owner of the Houston house worked – and Vidanta are the big contractors of this six-year term and that in matters of corruption all politicians are the same
. All of this is patently false.
Republican austerity is a way of managing public agencies and López Obrador leads by example: between the last year of the peñato and the third of the Fourth Transformation, the Presidency of the Republic went from costing the country 3,682 million pesos to 519 millions. This is a crusade against luxury and waste in institutions, not an incitement against private wealth, even though the President has testified on multiple occasions of his personal feelings: material goods are not the key to happiness . Even so, he has repeated no fewer times that the enjoyment of wealth is legitimate, that is, when individual fortune does not arise from an outrage against the interests of the collective.
Misconception 2: The Houston house is not a luxurious mansion
, as presented by MCCI and Loret de Mola. About fifteen years ago I was staying in South Florida in a house that was already worth what the residence exposed by the research
of yore and that it was bigger than this one in land, construction and pool; It belongs to an in-law of mine who is neither rich nor corrupt. How did she get it? Well, he inherited a good house in a neighborhood that used to be middle class in Mexico City, he sold it, supplemented that money with a loan and paid for it with his salary as assistant manager of a Costco, an income that is in no way close to that of a member of the Forbes list.
In previous six-year terms, both Baker Hughes and Vidanta obtained contracts and concessions much larger than what they have achieved in the current government, as can be seen in information that is public. And about the fact that the owner of the second, Daniel Chávez, collaborates voluntarily and honorably with the Fourth Transformation, it is understood that this is an inexplicable attitude, as well as very offensive, for businessmen who for decades have seen in the public power a mere bazaar of opportunities for disproportionate enrichment through bribery.
As for the desire of the reactionaries to sow the idea that all politicians (and all governments) are the same
, is based on a half-truth: yes, all the rulers of the neoliberal cycle were more or less the same in their triple determination to keep the country subject to the neoliberal paradigm, preserve institutionalized corruption and guarantee transexennial impunity for themselves, their partners and their collaborators. They were so equal, in fact, that society ended up placing them in the same bag and in 2018 it revolted against that regime to give the nation a different and, in many ways, opposite course, for which it placed López Obrador in the Presidency, and since then the president has honored his commitment to his constituents and has fought corruption, has redirected the budget towards satisfying the most pressing popular needs, has recovered national sovereignty and has governed in an exemplary democratic manner.
Predictably, those displaced from political power will continue to invest large sums and commit their still formidable media resources to continue offering public opinion insubstantial consequences of a false scandal. What is truly scandalous is the stubbornness in legitimizing such a lie by calling it journalism.
Twitter: @Navigations
