Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has reassured the thousands of supporters who listened to him this Saturday in the capital’s Zócalo that his policies will remain in effect regardless of who his party’s candidate replaces him in government if they win the elections. by 2024. Thus, the idea of a Mexico without the presence of López Obrador, the greatest asset that the Morenistas have today, terrified its supporters. “Each applicant selected in the survey [interna del partido] To continue our movement, he will apply the same policy in favor of the people and the nation. Continuity is assured, with changes,” he said on a stage where the main candidates for Morena were: Prime Minister Claudia Sheinbaum; Chancellor Marcelo Ebrard and Interior Minister Adán Augusto López.
On the day that marks the 85th anniversary of Lázaro Cárdenas’ oil nationalization, López Obrador has warned that unity is needed, a message that has been repeated at ruling party rallies on other occasions for fear of a follow-up trial breaking the support the president received for his election in 2018 and which he still keeps in good shape. “We have to stick together, always looking for the future and the happiness of our fellow human beings.”
Earlier, the President outlined the social policies he has implemented such as pensions for the elderly, raising the minimum wage, economic strength and national currency, scholarships for students, welfare banks, public utilities, support for the disabled and single mothers, financial aid for the country, nationalization of lithium and his government’s austerity measures against corruption. “Out of 35 million households, at least 71% receive some portion of welfare programs,” he said. Thousands of people from all corners of the country followed his speech with applause.
On the platform from which the President addressed those invited to the Festival of Oil, a date of patriotic uprising in Mexico, he was accompanied by the President of the State Oil Company (Pemex), Octavio Romero Oropesa, by the majority of his cabinet, who said a few words addressed to those summoned and to Energy Minister Rocío Nahle García. The recent nationalization of lithium, although exploitation is open to private companies, was the benchmark for comparison to the oil expropriation carried out by General Cárdenas in 1938. López Obrador has mentioned the amendment to the articles of the free trade agreement that he made at the beginning of his mandate, which has allowed Mexico to maintain “inalienable ownership of all hydrocarbons in the national subsoil”.
The President did not want to ignore current relations with the United States with praise for current President Joe Biden, but he has halted at recent threats from the ultra-conservative sectors of the Republican Party, which these days were appreciating a possible explanation of organized crime as a terrorist movement that would allow the US Army to enter Mexican territory. These statements shook the government of López Obrador so much this week that all the consuls of the neighboring country were mobilized to oppose the idea. “Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or protectorate of the United States. We will never allow them to violate our sovereignty or trample on the dignity of our homeland,” he said outside the National Palace. “It’s not the time for this [Felipe] Calderon, yet [su secretario de Seguridad] García Luna,” who was recently found guilty in the United States of having links to drug trafficking during that six-year tenure.
On this occasion the supporters of the President were not called to a march as on the previous one, in which the President went out to walk the streets with them, but to a gathering in the great Mexican square, where he received them as they left the palace National directly to the bureau. There was not much criticism of political opponents either. López Obrador’s speech was intended to review his political achievements to continue asking for the trust of his voters. “The idea and practice of glorifying the humanism of Mexico is electrifying and reaching the consciences of millions of people. That’s where I base my optimism. I maintain that whatever they do, the oligarchs will not return to power.” And he has promised that he will continue to fight “the dirty war, the slander and the attempts at manipulation” by those he calls his political opponents.
The first part of his two-hour speech, which began around 5 p.m. in the threatening rain, was a Mexican history lesson in which the President recounted the policies that Lázaro Cárdenas undertook in the 1930s, that general’s vocation to love the people and how he overcame the political obstacles that confronted him. From all this, the President draws a lesson: “Only with the people, with their majority support, can a people’s change be carried out to assert history and confront the reactionaries who oppose the loss of privileges.” Again in a current political tone, López Obrador has pledged his own that there will be no jitters in his policies or those that follow him: “No zigzags. We remain anchored in our principles. We reaffirm the decision and the course we have charted from the start. No to half measures. We will never allow a minority to prevail in Mexico at the expense of the humiliation and impoverishment of the majority.”
The duality between rich and poor, which the president repeatedly abolishes in defense of the former, fell on fertile ground, as there were quite a few people who had traveled more than 10 hours by bus from remote parts of the states since the early morning poorer , like Chiapas. His presence, wearing the traditional aboriginal dress, through the streets on the way to the Zócalo, colored the colors of the capital this morning.
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