In November 2021, a man named Luis Carlos Ugalde, who was President of the IFE and co-responsible for the 2006 fraud, made a curious assertion. At a table of alleged analysis on the country’s governability, organized by the PRI, the former electoral bureaucrat, without any fear of ridicule, assured that for López Obrador his six-year term would not be enough to achieve a transformation and that he did not rule out the possibility of a re-election scenario or that he would push his wife Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller to the Presidency to govern through her.
Ugalde issued his prediction with a very timely washing of his hands, because instead of ensuring these scenarios on his own, he cured himself with vagueness, clarifying that these possibilities were not ruled out because perhaps in the Obrero movement voices would arise that effectively demanded either the re-election of the Tabasco native or the imposition of his companion. In other words, Ugalde was not even able to display his feverish predictions bravely, and had to sublimate them in the alleged actions of third parties.
Let’s state the obvious: neither at that time in 2021, nor at any time in Mexican history, was there ever any indication that López Obrador wanted to be re-elected, nor that his wife had the intention, let alone to be a candidate for the Presidency, but rather to participate in any political position, not even in the cultural or literary field, which is hers.
It must be said that those who, like Ugalde, at some point predicted that AMLO would be re-elected, did so based on the very rigorous and reliable methods of occultism and esotericism, either because they read the President’s mind, perhaps using Madame Zazú’s methods; or perhaps reading your birth chart.
That’s because if we stick to the historical evidence, there was no indication that told us that AMLO had re-election intentions or to impose on his wife. For example, in all the public positions that the Tabasco native held (leader of the Tabasco PRI; Chief Officer in Tabasco; leader of the PRD in Tabasco, national leader of the PRD; Head of Government; national leader of Morena), he never did anything to increase, extend or repeat his legal period of command, nor did he pull strings to impose a successor, processes in which he was not only respectful (and led to normal successions, such as the internal PRD election in 2005 for elect a candidate for Head of Government), or even, by following ideological principles of non-intervention or non-surrender, López Obrador shortened his period of power, as he did with his resignation from the Tabasqueña Mayor’s Office for disagreeing with the local PRI; or stepping aside from the internal PRD election in 1999, which ended in prolonged conflict and an interim presidency.
That is the historical evidence, which never showed signs that AMLO had any intention of prolonging his presidential term too long or of imposing a family member on it. But perhaps people like Ugalde or Krauze were very busy reading the Tabasco native’s mind with Walter Mercado; or reading with Bárbara Tijerina their body language and other reliable scientific sources; that they could not realize that, for example, Vicente Fox did want to impose Martha Sahagún as a candidate – as documented by Alfonso Durazo in July 2004 -; Just like Felipe Calderón, supporting the candidacy of his fraudulent wife Margarita Zavala with false signatures, both in 2016 and 2020.
With this background, no one intelligent or emotionally healthy was surprised that López Obrador finished his presidential term normally in 2024, without at any time suggesting any possibility of re-election. When in that year it was already more than obvious that the supposed “re-election” of the populist from Macuspana was one more of the many nonsense, gossip, delusional myths, black religious legends and demonizations that the most obtuse and feverish right has foisted on the Tabasco native, that same right saw the need to modify its myth, and that is that, according to this, it continues to rule from its farm and impose an agenda on the President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The arguments in that sense are the same as the esoteric mind reading of years ago, since it is assumed that Sheinbaum looks nervous, that her body language gives her away, that her anger with God knows what shows her as being subject to the Tabasco native. Those who believe themselves to be more serious use another painful argument, such as that “Claudia is subject to AMLO because she has not broken up with him,” which, in addition to being esoteric, is absurd because both are builders and militants of the same political movement; in the same way that it would be absurd to ask the goalkeeper of a soccer squad to distance himself from his fellow midfielders, when they are part of the same team.
In this framework of rabid amlophobia, which however needs López Obrador to make sense of it, the former president of Mexico reappears. And he does so by keeping his word: after a year of monastic silence, he sat down to write about the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico and went out to announce his book, before returning to seclusion and isolation.
In his almost hour-long announcement, however, López Obrador left an interesting announcement, as he noted that he would only go out into public life to defend democracy, sovereignty or President Claudia Sheinbaum, whom he showered with genuine praise, from an attempted coup d’état.
The message is not for the Armed Forces, which in Latin America have traditionally been the coup actor par excellence; something that, however, in Mexico, exceptionally in the second half of the 20th century, was not replicated. The message is for the Mexican coup plotters of the 21st century, a scenario where coups d’état and illegitimate defenestrations are no longer carried out with the weapons of the army, but with legislative, media and legal traps, as has happened in Brazil, in Ecuador, in Peru, in Bolivia, in Argentina, in Honduras, in Paraguay and in a long etcetera.
And here we agree with the thesis of maestro Luis Hernández Navarro, the soft coup is a very serious concept that has had a presence in Latin America, although not everything that the Mexican opposition does, no matter how repugnant it may be, counts as a soft coup.
But there are proven coup plotters in our country: the first case of a legal coup in the north of Latin America in the 21st century was neither more nor less than the ousting of López Obrador in the 2004-2005 biennium, where a small group of debased authoritarians tried to remove from office and imprison an innocent figure, to prevent him from being a presidential candidate.
Many of those coup plotters are still active there, as mediocre politicians, commentators or public voices, such as Santiago Creel, Vicente Fox, Rafael Macedo de la Concha and their entourage such as Mrs. Zulema Mosry; Felipe Calderón and Margarita Zavala; Marisela Morales or Mrs. María Amparo Casar. But it must be said clearly: it is worrying that these beings with authoritarian impulses persist in the political life of the country, but they are weakened, with little room for maneuver, slowed down by their own corruption and incompetence, condemned to irrelevance.
But beyond that, it does not hurt that former President López Obrador indirectly evokes them with his phrase of defending President Sheinbaum from a coup d’état, because although there are no conditions or possibilities of such an atrocity, it does not hurt to remember that those who did act authoritarianly twenty years ago are still there, and are held together by the same absurd myths that guide their behavior. Like that trick that López Obrador was going to be re-elected.