A poster of MORENA and allies’ presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum next to a poster of Xóchitl Gálvez, right-wing Broad Front for Mexico coalition’s presidential candidate. Photo: France 24.
By Saheli Chowdhury – May 27, 2024
Mexicans will elect their president and almost 20,000 other public officials, including parliamentarians, state legislators, some state governors, and mayors and councilors of thousands of municipalities on June 2, in an electoral process that has been termed “historic” due to both sheer size and the high stakes involved. Although most interest is focused on the presidential election, given Mexico’s significance in the American continent, the other elections are no less important, as their results would signify to what extent the next president can implement government policies.
In addition, the fact that Mexico shares a long border with the United States brings with it the interventionism of the most belligerent superpower in the world. Over the last five plus years, Mexico has had a president upholding national sovereignty for the first time in almost four decades, if not more, and the US empire seems anxious to return to the status quo of controlling Mexico as a sort of neo-colony, by imposing a servile head of state by any means possible. This is a major—and perhaps the most significant—factor behind the dirty war that Mexico is experiencing as it nears the election day.
US-led media smear campaign: “narco-president” and “narco-candidate”
Hegemonic media of both Mexico and the United States have been against AndrĂ©s Manuel LĂłpez Obrador almost throughout his political career, since years before he became the president of Mexico. However, they turned particularly vicious after 2018, especially Mexican mainstream media, having lost their chayote, the so-called financial aid provided to private media conglomerates by the Mexican government, which in reality were bribes paid to media in exchange of positive coverage. Moreover, Mexican mainstream media is controlled by private economic interests, a de facto power in the country that is linked to the interests of transnational corporations based in the United States, Canada, and various countries of Europe.Â
Mexican mainstream media is also closely linked to the US mainstream media and US state interests, and there is ample evidence that it is fed tidbits of information by US intelligence agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which have been operating in Mexico freely for years, as if Mexico was not a sovereign country, until AMLO put limits on their power. Currently, while the electoral process is underway, this media-corporate-US intelligence nexus is carrying out a dirty war against AMLO, the ruling party Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA), and its presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, and taking it to unprecedented levels with the use of social media bots and evidently hundreds of millions of dollars.
Over the last five years, AMLO has been the target of the Mexican elite media-intellectual complex, a group of journalists, intellectuals, and artists who have accused him of everything: polarizing the country (because with the rise of alternative media outlets, the people’s opinions have become visible); giving money to “lazy people” so that they vote for him and his party (social programs such as pension for the elderly, scholarships for students, financial assistance to single mothers with minor children and to families with disabled children, etc.); handing over the country to organized crime through the Abrazos, no balazos principle (“hugs, no bullets,” as AMLO maintains that attending to root causes such as poverty and lack of opportunities is better than brute force at eradicating crime); militarizing the country (by giving the military the task of administering customs, and participation of the armed forces in public works, things that are common in various countries), and several other unforgivable “offenses.” However, the current dirty war surpasses all that.
A coordinated media attack began on January 18, 2024, a month into the presidential pre-campaign, when the think tank Baker Institute’s Center for the US and Mexico released a report titled Mexico Country Outlook 2024. It alleged that in the upcoming election, “criminal organizations may even become an important electoral ally” of the ruling party, without providing any evidence for this claim.
On January 31, three international media, namely, ProPublica, Insight Crime, and Deutsche Welle, published the same news, citing DEA sources, claiming that narco-trafficking gangs contributed money to López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign, an election he lost because of a documented fraud. ProPublica’s Tim Golden, a Pulitzer winning US journalist, titled his report as a question, “Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?,” and claimed that the Beltrán Leyva brothers, associated with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel, had funneled $2 million to López Obrador’s campaign. The meager sum—according to narco-traffickers’ standards, as well as the total lack of hard evidence, raised eyebrows in Mexico. Meanwhile, the Deutsche Welle piece was penned by Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández, known for her investigations and books on Mexican drug cartels, and alleged by some to be a DEA asset. Both these reports were primarily based on allegations made by a DEA informant and former lawyer of the drug lord Édgar Valdez Villarreal alias “La Barbie,” Roberto López Nájera alias “Jennifer.” López Nájera had been used as a “witness collaborator” by the former “president” of Mexico, Felipe Calderón (president in quotes because he did not win the 2006 election but was imposed by fraud), to fabricate allegations against police and military officials who would refuse to do Calderón’s bidding or who had discovered his corrupt activities. Interestingly, this had been revealed by Anabel Hernández herself, more than a decade ago, in a report for Proceso magazine. She had also said, in an interview several years ago, that she had thoroughly investigated AMLO for organized crime links during several years and found nothing. Yet, during AMLO’s presidency, she has exhibited an 180° turn, and has thus single-handedly destroyed the credibility that she once enjoyed.
Two weeks later, on February 15, the portal LatinUs, belonging to the media conglomerate Televisa, openly opposed to López Obrador, published an interview presumably with Celso Ortega Jiménez, leader of another criminal gang, Los Ardillos, that operates in the mountains of Guerrero state and is involved in a violent territorial war with two other gangs (Familia Michoacana and Los Tlacos). In that interview, Ortega claimed that in 2006 the narco gang Los Zetas financed the electoral campaign of López Obrador’s former party, Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), on the national level. To reinforce his allegations, Ortega added that Los Ardillos, which is a breakaway group of Los Zetas, still maintains contact with AMLO’s current party, MORENA, and especially its operatives in Guerrero: Congressman Félix Salgado Macedonio, his daughter and current Governor Evelyn Salgado, and Norma Otilia Hernández, mayor of Chilpancingo, epicenter of the inter-gang war.
Several Mexican political analysts quickly pointed out numerous inconsistencies in the interview, the chief among which was the allegation that two different narco-trafficking gangs financed the same presidential campaign, something unprecedented and considered impossible in Mexico. Moreover, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, long-time researcher on drug cartels and author of the book Los Zetas, the group did not exist as a standalone gang in 2006; it was the armed branch of another older gang, Cartel del Golfo. Others questioned how Carlos Loret de Mola, Latinus’ editor and “star reporter” who conducted the interview, “happened to be contacted” by the leader of Los Ardillos while he “happened to be traveling” in a violent zone (claims made by Loret de Mola). Some others wondered how it could be possible that a presidential campaign financed by multiple gangs did not win the election, or rather lost due to a fraud, and yet none of the gangs set cities on fire, something they regularly do for far less important reasons.
AMLO alleged that the Loret de Mola interview was a “montage,” which may not be wrong, as the journalist is branded as “Lord Montajes” for having launched several montages throughout his career, some of which destroyed innocent people’s lives, such as Israel Vallarta, who is spending 18 years and counting in “preventive detention” without a sentence, for a crime he did not commit. Loret de Mola openly colluded with Gennaro GarcĂa Luna, CalderĂłn’s secretary of Citizen Security and an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel, currently in a US prison for drug and weapons trafficking charges. However, there might be some truth to Celso Ortega’s claims, though his gang did not provide support to either AMLO or PRD on the national level, but possibly to his own brother, Bernardo Ortega JimĂ©nez, a PRD politician who is currently a member of Guerrero state congress, and was formerly mayor of Quechultenango, precisely in a zone controlled by Los Ardillos. Although Bernardo has claimed many times that he “chose a different path” from his brothers, the allegations and rumors remain.
Barely a week after the LatinUs montage, the New York Times continued with the narco-narrative, with a report by Alan Feuer and Natalie Kitroeff titled “U.S. Examined Allegations of Cartel Ties to Allies of Mexico’s President,” which made claims about López Obrador’s 2018 presidential campaign being allegedly financed by the Sinaloa Cartel. This report provided even less evidence than the former ones which had at least named their sources, while this one was based on the claims of three unnamed sources and archived DEA reports that Feuer and Kitroeff failed to cite. They even admitted that “much of the information collected by US officials came from informants whose accounts can be difficult to corroborate and sometimes end up being incorrect. The investigators obtained the information while looking into the activities of drug cartels, and it was not clear how much of what the informants told them was independently confirmed.” On reading the piece, it becomes evident that the two reporters repeated hearsays and blatant fake news disseminated by Mexican hegemonic media on a daily basis.
Simultaneously with these reports, there exploded a social media campaign designating AMLO as “narco-president” and presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum as “narco-candidate.” The hashtags #narcopresidente, #narcopresidenteAMLO, #narcocandidataClaudia and similar ones were republished millions of times on X and other social media platforms. However, a large fraction of the accounts that spread these hashtags all over social media were revealed to be bots, created by troll firms based in Mexico as well as outside, in countries such as Argentina and Spain, as revealed by social media researcher Julián MacĂas Tovar. The Spanish journalist connected these troll firms to the opposition coalition formed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), National Action Party (PAN), and PRD, and its presidential candidate XĂłchitl Gálvez, whose campaign is supported not only by the US authorities (through National Endowment for Democracy funding of NGOs that back her) and US media but also by the Spanish neo-Nazi party Vox.
MacĂas’ allegations are reinforced by the fact that NYT published its report just after Gálvez’s visit to the United States. During her trip she even met with NYT editors, as well as with Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), who is well known for promoting coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia. She also visited Spain, where the welcome that she received was, albeit, much less warm than in the United States.
The narco-president/narco-candidate smear campaign is still ongoing, although the US National Security Council confirmed that there is no investigation into the Mexican president, and that a former investigation, based on López Nájera’s claims, had been closed in 2011 due to lack of evidence. According to AMLO, the media dirty war is a soft power tool that substitutes the brute force of the empire. “What helps the oligarchs the most, the ones who think they are the owners of the world, in controlling, dominating, are media wars—discrediting popular leaders and those who oppose hegemony,” he commented in this regard. “In the end, it is a return to the maxim of Goebbels, Hitler’s head of propaganda, that a lie, when repeated many times, can become the truth.”
President of Mexico Demands Respect Following US Human Rights Report
Simultaneous media montages that ended in farce
Late April-early May brought two more montages involving one of the most serious issues that Mexican authorities are yet to resolve—forced disappearance. This is a very delicate issue in Mexico, where from December 31, 1952 to May 1, 2024, there are 104,496 missing persons registered nationwide, according to data from the National Commission for the Search of Disappeared Persons. The montages were launched at the same time, and mainstream media blew them out of all proportions, intending to inject some oxygen into the struggling Xóchitl Gálvez campaign by taking advantage of an issue that has caused immense tragedy to Mexicans, but it all ended in farce.
The first one involved a supposed clandestine mass grave in Mexico City that turned out to be a place where people dumped and burned trash. On April 30, Ceci Flores, founder of the collective Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, and a well-known activist who has been searching for her disappeared children, reported on her X account that she had discovered an alleged crematorium/mass grave in the municipality of Iztapalapa, in the east of Mexico City, where she found women’s voter cards and children’s notebooks and a school ID. She also posted photos of the site, which held a large mound of ash, and photos of herself holding what appeared to be a charred piece of bone.
Soon after the publication of the photos and videos, Mexico City authorities deployed forensic teams to the site, and did report the discovery of identity documents of a woman and a boy, but both persons were found to be alive and well, at their respective homes. The woman, a resident of Estado de México, reported that she had lost her voter credential last year when her mobile phone was snatched from her, and the document was inside the phone cover; meanwhile the child’s parents claimed that they had mistakenly thrown away their son’s school ID with some of his old school notebooks. Forensic examinations revealed that the bones at the supposed mass grave did not belong to humans but to animals, mainly dogs, while the ash came from burnt trash. Yet, most mainstream media outlets continued to distort the matter and sow doubts about the veracity of the official forensic investigations.
Marti Batres, interim chief of government of Mexico City, called the clandestine crematorium story a “montage” aimed at staining the image of the authorities and at impacting the elections at both national and local levels. The governorship of Mexico City will also be decided on June 2, and Clara Brugada, mayor of Iztapalapa, is MORENA’s candidate for the election. Since the fake mass grave was found in Iztapalapa, Batres conjectured possible political motives. Similarly, collectives of mothers searching for their disappeared children, based in Mexico City, criticized Ceci Flores for not informing them at all about her investigations in the city, as they came to know about the issue only after media had made it viral. The founder of one such group also called out Flores for trying to “profit from people’s pain” by lending herself to Xóchitl Gálvez’s electoral campaign and thus “harming a just cause.” While mainstream media did not contact these mothers, they gave space to Ceci Flores even after the mass grave allegation was discarded, where she went on to accuse the Mexico City government of “cover up.”
The other fake disappearance story was launched at the same time but in Morelos state, and it involved the Catholic Church of Mexico. On April 29, the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM) filed a complaint about the disappearance of the emeritus bishop of the Diocese of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, Salvador Rangel Mendoza, aged 78. Although the diocese is in Guerrero state, and specifically in a zone of decades-long inter-gang territorial war, the bishop has been living in Jojutla in the neighboring state of Morelos (also impacted by narco-gang wars) since his retirement three years ago. This case assumed a serious dimension as Rangel Mendoza had been working as a mediator among the warring gangs in order to pacify the region, and had brought about a “ceasefire” between two aforementioned gangs, Los Ardillos and Los Tlacos, both vying for control in Chilpancingo. He is even rumored to be friends with Celso Ortega, leader of Los Ardillos. He is also a vocal critic of the government of President López Obrador, whom he accused of allowing “organized crime to win,” and has openly backed the right-wing opposition in the past, although AMLO said on different occasions that he supported the bishop’s work for peace. After the bishop’s disappearance, the CEM insisted that he had been a victim of organized crime, and held AMLO, Guerrero state Governor Evelyn Salgado, and the authorities of Morelos responsible for it. Hegemonic media repeated and inflated the CEM’s claims, without scrutinizing the curious facts surrounding the matter.
Rangel Mendoza left his home on the morning of April 27, and throughout the afternoon and evening of that day there were recorded small withdrawals from his bank accounts and payments at convenience stores and food shops. Thereafter there was no trace of him until April 30, when the CEM reported that he had been found in the General Hospital of Cuernavaca, a public hospital in a different part of Morelos state. Within a short while, the attorney general of Morelos state, Uriel Carmona, commented to the press that the bishop had been victim of an “express abduction,” but that version was later discarded by the state commissioner of Public Security of Morelos, José Antonio Ortiz Guarneros.
In statements to the press, Ortiz Guarneros revealed that his office was in possession of videos that showed the bishop entering a motel in Ocotepec (a municipality in Morelos state, close to Cuernavaca) out of his own volition, “without anyone forcing him. We have some evidence, and we already gave those to the Attorney’s Office; as far as we know, the bishop voluntarily entered the motel with a person of the same sex and later that person left.” The interim governor of Morelos, Samuel Sotelo, corroborated Ortiz’s statements, and added that the last time the bishop had been seen (before ending up in hospital) was on April 27 at a pizza shop, where he met with one of the employees of the establishment.
On May 2, Rangel Mendoza’s toxicology reports were leaked, showing that he had consumed cocaine and “other drugs.” The bishop has not given any statement to the police, and the CEM no longer wants an investigation. Thus, what started as an alleged case of grave insecurity in Mexico ended up in a scandal for the Church as well as unmasking mainstream media’s yellow journalism.
In the opinion of sociologist Bernardo Barranco, this incident also indicates a “serious and unprecedented interference” by the Church authorities in Mexican politics and state affairs “in favor of the right wing,” even though constitutionally Mexico is a secular state. There are allegations all over the country that church officials are promoting extreme-right candidate XĂłchitl Gálvez, and asking parishioners to vote for the right. According to official census data, more than 70% of Mexicans are followers of the Catholic Church, therefore, given the gravity of the situation, the left’s candidate Claudia Sheinbaum has already met with the CEM top officials. However, “the Mexican Episcopate defends the interests of the most recalcitrant right,” commented JosĂ© Manuel Guerrero, a priest and liberation theologist, in an interview with journalist Julio Hernández LĂłpez “Astillero.” He stated that since the time of the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Catholic Church of Mexico totally abandoned Liberation Theology, which before that was a minority progressive and socialist current within the church system. Currently, the Church is on a “crusade” against AMLO and Sheinbaum, although their political project, the Fourth Transformation, which “puts the interests of the poorest and the most vulnerable above all, is most aligned with Christ’s doctrine.”
The interference of the de facto powers—national oligarchy, mainstream media, transnational corporations, US empire—against the left in elections in Latin America has been the order of the day since the First Pink Tide was ushered in the region with the triumph of Hugo Chávez as the president of Venezuela in 1998. In addition, the judiciary, the branch of the state that is most difficult to reform even if a left-progressive government can properly establish itself in any Latin American country, is known to intervene not only in elections but also in administrative functions in favor of the right or the “status quo.” In Mexico, the judiciary severely curtailed the work of the government of López Obrador throughout his term, and is now intervening in the electoral process. This issue will be discussed more in detail in the next part of this series.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Saheli Chowdhury
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Saheli Chowdhury
Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She is a co-editor and contributor for Orinoco Tribune.
