Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s hammock according to Gabo

Salvador Frausto

Mexico City / 04/17/2024 01:39:00

The gray eyes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez They put on more bloomers that followingnoon, as we traveled toward the government offices of the Federal District. The teacher’s instructions were clear: I would ask the hard questions and, when tensions arose, he would ask the soft questions regarding the poet’s poetry. Carlos Pellicer or Caribbean customs.

So we knew that Andrés Manuel López Obrador I had a hammock to take a nap somewhere in the Old Town Hall Palace. Or at least that’s what he told us in the conversation prior to the interview we conducted with him for the magazine ‘Cambio México’ in November 2002.

​Gabo was obsessed with the popularity of ‘Peje’, his connection with the people, his preferential option for the poor and that sensitivity that is usually five steps ahead of others. He used to comment something like “one of these is born every 100 years”.

In those days the general idea was that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas He would compete for the fourth time in the 2006 presidential elections, but the Colombian was sure that his friend Andrés Manuel would be the candidate of the left. “The Mexican Lula”, he expressed with the enthusiasm of an editor who is coming up with a headline.

García Márquez working | Darkroom expand

I really appreciated it and I openly wanted him to be president of Mexicoso much so that a few years later the beloved Nobel driver, Genovevohe carried a titipuchal of caricatured López Obrador prints in his trunk, which he gave away at the slightest provocation.

He once told me that if the Tabasco native had not been a politician, I would be a good poet. “It’s good that you took a wrong turn,” she concluded with that enigmatic sarcasm that caused silence in his interlocutors. The border between the brilliant phrase and the joke was often indistinguishable.

During the interview with López Obrador – in which the Colombian journalist also participated Roberto Pombo– we explore the keys to its popularity, the social accent of the nascent leftist governments, the happiness of the middle classes with the second floors of the Periférico, the security advice that the former mayor of New York was providing, Rudy Giulianiits closeness with Carlos Slim and, of course, 2006.

At that time, the man from Tabasco avoided the central response with variants of his classic “let them leave me for dead.”

Cover of the magazine where the interview with López Obrador appeared | Special expand

When we left the meeting, we were clear that he would go for the big time. We saw a determined, strong, happy AMLO, climbing acceptance levels that bordered on 80 percent. Dozens and even hundreds of people used to get up early to give him a written request or simply hang around his offices to see him when he arrived to work.

Gabo’s obsession with Andrés Manuel seemed like a mania to understand himself: fame, power. And the real or convenient affections inherent to influence.

Two years later, over a couple of whiskeys, He asked me if I had believed AMLO when he said he had a hammock in the Government Palace of the Federal District. I looked into his gray eyes – that’s how I remember them – and told him it was probably a joke; he would insist it was true. And we bet a Glenfiddich 12 years.

10 years following the death of the teacher, I think Gabo owes me a whiskey. Or the other way around.

Gabo and Salvador Frausto conducted an interview with López Obrador in November 2002. | Special expand We recommend you

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