When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appointed Manuel Bartlett to direct the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE)doubts arose regarding whether the former governor of Puebla had the ‘credentials’ to take charge of the company.
And it is that in Bartlett’s curriculum (more full of studies related to Law) there was no previous experience with energy issues. The closest thing is was giving lectures on energy reforms, oil and electricity.
But President López Obrador defended his appointment from the start.
“Mr. Bartlett, for many years, has been defending the national electricity industryThat’s why I decided to propose him to be the director of the CFE,” he said in July 2018.
As stated in the king of casha book by journalist Elena Chávez, López Obrador had other reasons for putting him in that position.
What favors does AMLO owe Bartlett?
Chávez pointed to the former Secretary of the Interior as one of the characters who “they pulled the strings” to help López Obrador on his way to the Presidency.
The writer affirmed that the current director of the CFE became a kind of “benefactor” for the president, both with money and with relationships with “the worst of the power mafia.”
Chávez pointed out that Bartlett had already shown a certain predilection for the Tabasco politician, to the point of asking PRI militants for a “useful vote” in favor of López Obrador in the 2006 presidential elections.
“With more political fang than the president, Bartlett saw in AMLO the possibility of perpetuating oneself in political and economic powerand together with characters of the same disposition, they managed to seat him in the presidential chair,” Chávez wrote.
‘sins’ forgiven
The author said that César Yáñez, her sentimental partner at the time, disapproved of the CFE director’s relationship with López Obrador’s team because Bartlett, until today, is singled out as the ‘architect’ of the 1988 electoral fraud by the that the left-wing candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, lost.
“Nevertheless, as in politics there are no loyaltiesAs Joel Ortega Cuevas told me one day, in the end César forgave Bartlett’s sins in exchange for influence peddling to get Dulce María Silva, the woman he married in 2018, out of jail,” he explained.
