Mexico's Lopez Obrador: What Will Be Impact of His Heart Attack? Julio Hernandez Lopez - La Jornada
go to original December 5, 2013

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s health decline [he was hospitalized this week with a heart attack] will test the political party that he has been creating under the name Morena and, in particular, the peaceful resistance movement against Peña Nieto’s energy reform. So far, most achievements in these two creations are the result of a single, disproportionate force: that of the former presidential candidate. He has relentlessly traveled all over the country promoting the new party and attending state constituent assemblies, and his irreplaceable magnetism continues to draw out many Mexicans to public squares and protests such as those that will be staged around the issue of oil and so forth.

So far, López Obrador has lived an exhausting activism devoid of frills or amenities. Unlike the vast majority of politicians, including many who belong to PRD and Morena, López Obrador has rigorously and sacrificially lived his personal and family life subject to the economic mediocrity that Benito Juárez invoked for public service workers. Amid the tangle of extreme corruption that exists in many areas of public service, López Obrador passed by the hefty national coffers of Mexico City without lifting a single penny. He saw electoral fraud in presidential elections twice, in 2006 through manual and cybernetic operations that officially amounted to a negligible half-point difference [between him and Felipe Calderon] that gave way to a depressing six-year term, and in 2012 through a huge vote-buying scheme and coercion of citizens so that a PRI official [Peña Nieto] came to Los Pinos [Mexican "White House"] whose daily verifiable ignorance and incompetence foreshadowed a highly corrupt administration this term.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Thomas Mosley

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