2023-10-04 21:20:26
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, (AMLO), president of Mexico | Photo: RODRIGO OROPEZA/AFP via Getty Images
The six-year term of López Obrador (AMLO) taught us that campaign rhetoric in search of power is very different from that practiced when it was already conquered. When he wanted to be president he shouted at his rallies that, if he came to power, he would send the Army to the barracks. He said that, since Mexico is not a warlike country nor does it have enemies, the armed forces had to disappear.
As president, López Obrador refused to have his security in charge of the Presidential General Staff. He ordered its dissolution and referred its 8,000 members to the Secretary of National Defense. Today he explains that he did it because he had a lot of power. “They had practically kidnapped the president, the president was going somewhere and surrounded; he would talk to a person and they were always there and felt superior.” (Excelsior, October 2, 2023)
Apparently López Obrador’s determination to reduce the presence of the Army was real and the first step was the disappearance of the Presidential General Staff.
It is possible to assume that a reaction to the president’s intention was the breakfast led by the general secretary Louis Crescent Sandoval on October 22, 2019, information leaked a week later, in which General Carlos Gaytán Ochoa gave a speech in which he stated:
“We cannot ignore that the current head of the Executive has been legally and legitimately empowered. However, it is also an undeniable truth that the existing fragile counterbalancing mechanisms have allowed a strengthening of the Executive that has been promoting strategic decisions that have not convinced everyone, to put it mildly. This worries us, eventually offends us, but above all it worries us.” Because it clashes with the way the country is run today.
Given the disqualification of the work of the GIEI by the president @lopezobrador_the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts called for reviewing the investigation and findings with rigor and not with opinions or disqualifications.https://t.co/lsXXqFd30f
— Political Animal (@Pajaropolitico) October 3, 2023
General Gaytán Ochoa posed some questions, highlighting the following: “Who here ignores that the high command faces, from the institutional level, a group of falcons that might lead Mexico to chaos and a truly failed state?” (La Jornada, October 30, 2019)
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That event was interpreted and denounced by López Obrador as an attempted coup d’état in progress. The event was decisive in the change of attitude of the president. It would explain the process of co-optation of the Army and Navy that was undertaken, through the assignment of responsibilities in the field of public administration, which the Constitution reserves for civilians. Their budget was increased and transfers were authorized to carry out the works.
All administrative and financial information, by decision of López Obrador, was classified as National Security, so it remained confidential, which implies a mechanism of opacity over the public resources they manage.
López Obrador’s attitude is considered a process of militarization of the country. The president justifies himself by saying: “the soldier is a people in uniform and that is why he will never betray his people.”
This week López Obrador attempted to wash away the historical stains that the people assign to the Army. A week separates the mourning of the two dates. First on September 26, 2014. On the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students from the normal de Ayotzinapa, their parents demanded the clarification of the case and the presentation of their children alive. They hold local and federal authorities responsible. They denounce that the Army participated in the disappearance and demand that the Secretariat of National Defense deliver all the information on the case. They reject the version offered by the López Obrador government regarding these events and affirm that it is similar to the Historical Truth of the Enrique Peña Nieto government.
In defense of the Army, López Obrador argued “that the disappearance of the normalistas had more to do with collusion, with the criminal association between local authorities, municipal police and the crime that dominated that region.” He expressed that, if this crime had links with some soldiers and they had committed the crime of omission, it is another matter that the government, from above, “Peña Nieto or the general secretary at that time, had ordered the disappearance of the young people, not ”.
For López Obrador, it is reckless to hold the Army responsible for the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students. He assures that it is his obligation to take care of the prestige of the Army and the Armed Forces.
The second death date is October 2. 55 years have passed since the massacre that the Army carried out in Tlatelolco. Hundreds of students dead. The cry is the same. The testimonial and graphic evidence is repeated every year. López Obrador offered his version of the actor who shot at the protesters that followingnoon.
On the morning of October 2, López Obrador’s response to what appears to have been a planted question regarding his evaluation of the participation of the Presidential General Staff in the 1968 student massacre said: “There are elements to maintain that, in the repression of October 2, 1968, those who participated directly were members of the presidential general staff.”
The apology that López Obrador carries out in defense of the Army is striking. It is evident that it is part of his responsibility, but It is unheard of that he carries out the task of exonerating him following having profited for years from the speech that criminalizes them. We find the key phrases in his harangues for 20 years. October 2 is not forgotten. It was the State. It was the Army. It seems like a betrayal of the historical positions of the left, the real one.
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