Was it an unfortunate phrase? Maybe.
Last Tuesday President Enrique Peña Nieto broke up the protocol set up by prompters and went back to the town-hall-type colloquial format to talk — not preach — to a group summoned by Interacciones Bank and El Financiero-Bloomberg newspaper.
Answering a vague question from the audience about the day-by-day actions of a president, Peña Nieto went into both, immediate enthusiastic response and deep mud by saying the following:
“My only purpose has been to oversee that things go well for Mexico. I am sure that former presidents have also not had other mission that that one. Nobody wakes up, I don’t think that a president wakes up in the morning thinking, and pardon my saying so, how to screw Mexico; we’re always thinking about how to do things well.”
The word “joder” (screw or worse) got financial executives and businessmen’s attention and the silent audience bust into laughter and then a standing ovation. Very simply put presidents do not use that type of language, at least not in public, and using the concept of screwing the nation was, until now, something unheard of from in the voice of a president.
His usage of the word “joder” made headlines in many national circulation newspapers such as Excelsior and La Jornada.
Excelsior, a pro government daily, festooned and thought the president was cute. The same went for sponsoring financial daily El Financiero editor Enrique Quintana who praised Peña Nieto for talking frankly.
Quintana, clearly not familiar with town halls, lauded Peña Nieto’s style of approaching an audience in a manner he should have done from the beginning.
The result, Quintana said in his column Wednesday, is that the president “would enjoy a much better image because his communication capabilities are larger when establishing dialogue than as a traditional speaker.”
But at left wing paper La Jornada, where the president is viewed as a corrupt politician, the use of the term “joder” was tossed around in an abundant way.
A cartoonist showed Peña in a wake up robe saying that he doesn’t think about how to “joder a México” in the mornings. “But I do it all day at the office,” says the cartoon president.
Columnist Enrique Galván Ochoa says that 56 million of “jodidos” (poor people) do not agree with him and asks another the question:
“Doesn’t a 50 percent devaluation of the peso ‘jode’ the people?” The question is in reference to the peso devaluation during the nearly four years of EPN’s administration.
Galván Ochoa goes on with another question:
“If it isn’t when they wake up, at what time of the day, or night, do presidents get this idea?”
No doubt the president’s slip of the mouth made him an easy target for his many critics who, just as he complains, don’t have eyes for the positive moves his administration has made — like the energy reform constantly under attack for its lack of visible results — but only for “the dismantling of Pemex” which many a leftists still considers “treason.”
In the end, the initial uproar and standing ovation by those attending the meeting in which the president was going to be just another regular keynote speaker has turned into heavy criticism, and not due just to the unusual foul language used by the president, but because with a stagnant economic growth and very visible criminal violence all over the nation, it’s, like he says, difficult for people to see the positive side of his administration.
