Best known to his zillions of political detractors as The Tropical Messiah, Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador went to New York last week. He was met by snow storm Stella and created one of his own in Mexico, denouncing the Mexican Army for human rights violations galore.
His initial objective was to file a complaint at the United Nations Organization against Donald Trump for mistreatment of Mexicans in the United States as well as denouncing the scheduled border wall as an act of terror against Mexico, but the Stella storm hit exactly on Tuesday, the day he was going to be at the UNO.
Still, he held several indoor rallies in which inadvertently he started washing the Mexican political dirty laundry in public, precisely at a moment when the President Enrique Peña Nieto is seeking to tone down the Trump post-truths against Mexico used during his campaign.
In one of those rallies last Monday in New York, AMLO was unable to finish a speech because a small group of the parents of the missing 43 Ayotzinapa teachers’ college students interrupted him to demand that he produce the missing bodies of their sons.
AMLO invited them to the stage because “protesting is part of freedom of speech” but the parents did not go on stage. They stayed on the floor.
Once the rally was over the small group of Ayotzinapa parents followed AMLO to his vehicle and one of them, Antonio Tizapa, questioned AMLO’s relationship while he was one of the leaders of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) with Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca and a short list of suspects in the crimes against the students, including former Guerrero state governor Ángel Aguirre.
AMLO listened for a moment as Tizapa showed him a picture of himself with Abarca – now in jail for murder and allegedly being part of a drug production gang known as Guerreros Unidos – and finally felt there was ill intent by Tizapa and called upon him not to be “a provocateur.”
Slanderous reports against AMLO were that he told Tizapa “shut up” in a despotic way.
This irritated Tizapa who said “there is no room for Señor López Obrador to call me and treat me like a provocateur because I made him feel my irritation because of the disappearance of my son.”
On Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington DC, AMLO held a press conference in which once again reporters wanted to know about Tizapa’s accusations about his relationship with mayor Abarca and governor Aguirre and the questioning Tizapa made in New York.
“I’ve got nothing to do with Abarca or Aguirre,” AMLO answered and repeated that Tizapa had approached to provoke him.
“I understand the desperation that the father of this missing young man may have, but I am in disagreement with his proceeding because it’s unfair. The reclamation should be against the State, not with us, the reclamation is against the Administration, it has to be with Peña Nieto, with the Armed Forces, who intervened in that crime, not to us.”
That did it! At least in public, President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has had to bear the burden of criminal activity in the nation and pay the consequences, said nothing but he immediately unleashed the powers that be against the Tropical Messiah.
The first in a series of onslaughts to discredit AMLO was the current president of the Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Enrique Ochoa Reza.
Ochoa demanded AMLO apologize to Tizapa given the pain this tragedy has unleashed. “He went to López Obrador and López Obrador treated him in a despotic way telling him to shut up,” he said.
A double check carried out be Proceso says that AMLO, definitely unhappy with Tizapa, did not say “shut up” but “have a good one” or “que te vaya bien” in Spanish. It’s not the same.
Then Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong on Thursday launched a furious tirade against AMLO demanding that “if he has proof that the Army participated in the disappearance of the teaching students he should show them.”
He called upon AMLO to show up with the Attorney General to show proof of any participation by the Army, who the night of Sept. 26, 2011, was aware that there was a gun battle downtown Iguala and that municipal policemen were shooting at buses.
But that’s not all. Over this past weekend an assortment of print columnists have attacked AMLO for going north and open up the files on an issue the Peña Nieto Administration much rather not hear about anymore.
Finally, the 2018 presidential election has taken up speed and it is time to start washing the dirty political laundry, and to potential candidates, it does not matter if it’s abroad or at home.
Just hurl the dung!
