Using the president's health

By Ivabelle Arroyo

🎧 Audiocolumn

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There are three options.

1. The President has a Covid with mild symptoms and his team produced suspicions with inaccurate and lying handling of information.
2. The President is in serious condition and his team is trying to minimize the impact of a situation that they do not know how it will evolve.
3. The President is well and his team artificially produced suspicions about the health of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In all three cases, the government (or the team closest to the President) is using the health of the head of the Executive for purposes unrelated to the information owed to Mexicans and which is vital for the proper functioning of a government .

Generating suspicions about a possible critical health condition is as old as lying. It is very useful to take the agenda (here I am writing about it and not about the harassment of the Supreme Court or the migrant caravan) or to lower the volume of direct criticism because it is in bad taste to vibrate about a sick person. The proper thing to do is to wish him a speedy recovery, on pain of being slammed by those who genuinely admire and love him. A slight malfunction in the President's organic mechanism may be useful if he is zealously guarded, if secrecy is abused and if lies are told about his activities.

I am not saying that this is the case. I develop the first and third options that I listed at the beginning. The second option, that of gravity, has other implications. Hiding a hole in the Palace, one that forces the head of the Executive to fail to perform his duties, is a violation of the rules of the functioning of the republic and an attack against the democratic institutional clockwork. It is not so much that Mexicans have the right to know if their president needs prayers and holy cards, but that citizens have the right to be governed by those they elected or to use the mechanisms provided by the Constitution in case of absence. The absence may be temporary and brief, but in any case it is necessary to know if the decisions are being made by the spokesman Jesús Ramírez, the compadre Adán Augusto or the spoiled general. Not only that. It is necessary to know if this temporary person in charge is watching over the interests and projects of the president who was elected or the interests and projects of a group that is taking advantage of his absence.

I am not saying that this is the case. I only develop the second option, and I do so because the cabinet does not report, misreports or uses the president's health.

The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.

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