María Amparo Casar has dedicated her life to strengthening the checks and balances against the Executive, which she reinforced almost a decade ago with her activism to stop abuses of power through Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, including those that were being committed in the government of Vicente Fox against the current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Years before founding the NGO, as coordinator of advisors to the Secretary of the Interior Santiago Creel, she operated in favor of someone who today has exacted irreversible revenge against her public fame.
Casar, along with the then presidential spokesperson, Rubén Aguilar, confronted Fox and the then attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, to prevent him from putting López Obrador in jail to deactivate him from the presidential race. Fox, pushed by Macedo de la Concha, wanted to arrest the then head of Government of Mexico City, for having disobeyed a court order not to do work on a property in Santa Fe that was in dispute. López Obrador was ousted by Congress, a preliminary step to proceed criminally against him, but they persuaded Fox about the excesses of this measure, which would also be politically counterproductive.
Paradoxically, the abuse of power that Aguilar’s arm prevented him from attacking López Obrador, today he suffers, as the President uses all his strength to finish Casar personally, socially and politically, by dusting off a case closed by Pemex 20 years ago. about the death of her husband, Carlos Fernando Márquez, publicly opening all the details of that tragedy and disseminating the 384 pages of the file, which include personal data of her and her children.
The meanness with which López Obrador has taken the bill for leading the fight for the accountability of the powerful – his investigative work on the government of Enrique Peña Nieto helped pave the way for López Obrador to the Presidency – justifies it with an accusation of corruption, for having received, he claims, a widow’s pension from Pemex – which was used for the education of his children – which he did not deserve because it was a suicide, and for having received insurance for his death.
López Obrador violated the law and political ethics by ensuring that in matters of corruption there is no private data that is valuable, but his actions do not correspond to the fight against irregularities, but to revenge. If he thought there was corruption, he should have litigated it privately where Casar could appeal and defend himself in court. He did not do it, because the nuclear charge against her is political, it is not against corruption, but rather an asymmetrical settling of scores to inhibit Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity from continuing to document the corruption of the presidential family in this six-year term.
The invention of blame and responsibilities is the trademark of the house, and it applies to all those who become uncomfortable for López Obrador.
Casar received his pension from Pemex until February 15, when they suspended it without giving him any notice. The pension, according to former Pemex officials, proceeds beyond the cause of death, unless there is an explicit clause in the contract regarding exceptions. However, Chapter XVII of the Work Regulations for Trusted Personnel, regarding benefits post mortem, does not specify any qualifications. And regarding the insurance that he collected, he did not cost Pemex, but rather the private insurer with whom he had the contract.
There is nothing in the documents released by the Presidency and the director of Pemex, Octavio Romero Oropeza, that proves any act of corruption. Even the word “suicide” does not exist anywhere in the file, except in an informative note in the opinion of the Attorney General’s Office of the Federal District, so neglected that it denies itself.
In that note dated October 25, 2004, Guillermo Omaña, legal representative of Pemex, informed the coordinator of Preliminary Investigations of the Attorney General’s Office, Carlos Becerril de la Cruz, that Márquez “suffered (the) accident while sitting and leaning on the window From his office”. The Deconcentrated Prosecutor’s Office of Miguel Hidalgo concluded, however, that Márquez had carried out “suicidal-type maneuvers to deprive himself of his life,” but did not contribute anything to support his characterization.
The causes of death that he indicates are those established in the death certificate, as a “set of traumas,” and the baseless conclusion of suicide was probably drawn from the first statements of Márquez’s brothers-in-law, José Casar and Juan Rebolledo, who “stated that it was possibly suicide” due to the recent separation from his wife. However, in expanding on his statement, they noted that they did not believe he had taken his own life.
Victoria Martínez, who was Márquez’s assistant secretary, explained that she used to sit on the edge of the window and lean against the structure of the building to smoke, as she did that day. Martínez said that a day before the events, she did not notice any different attitude from her then boss. Octavio Aguilar, who was his boss in the Corporate Administration Department, said that he found out about his death when he returned from a trip, “thinking that it had been an accident… (because) he had the habit of smoking in his office and to “He approached the window… sitting on the frame with his back turned, and the edge of the window was very thin, which is why he believed he had lost his balance.”
That contradictory opinion from the attorney general’s office headed by Bernardo Bátiz in the López Obrador government was not relevant, but it is what the President and the director of Pemex have now seized on to say that Casar is corrupt. The accusation is a lie, according to the information released so far and, even more serious, due to the accusations, as it does not conform to any alleged content in the file, even if Márquez’s death had been by suicide.
