Lenia Batres represents the purest expression of the destructive cheerleading led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is not ashamed of her ignorance, but rather boasts of it as a strength. Her only support is the political power that elevated her, and that is enough for her to pontificate before her peers, shamelessly demonstrating that she is in the Supreme Court to serve her boss. She does not show the slightest desire to seek to remedy her lack of knowledge or experience. She is facing giants of the Law and does not even intend an intellectual battle in that arena; Their thing is to descend and seek confrontation through the cheapest demagoguery. If the majority of the Mexican people have a level of education barely above primary school, in them they have found a worthy representative. Batres Guadarrama is, according to her self-proclamation, the “people’s minister.”
His appointment showed that AMLO had finally learned his lesson: he could not trust anyone who was not as ignorant as himself. He appointed some competent ministers and, horror, they made his own decisions. To destroy institutions requires an abundance of loyalty and an absence of scruples. He who knows nothing fears nothing; Ignorance allows you to obey without knowing the consequences. Batres pontificates with singular self-confidence to his colleagues that the Supreme Court cannot stop the actions of Congress. Not because the Constitution establishes it that way, but because the President would like it that way. He fulfills his mission without caring about ridicule.
The six-year term reaches its final months with that singular mixture of messianism and cheerleading, with the President now obsessed with trying to cover up his failures with appointments like Batres’s or laws that allow him to appropriate the savings in the Afores as well as amnesty those who it seems best to you. AMLO closes his administration in a destructive zeal unparalleled in modern Mexico, obsessed with destroying everything that hindered his path and prevented him from achieving that historical transformation that he glimpsed in his delusions.
He came to power convinced of his own destiny and greatness, with the certainty that his ideas, matured throughout a life in politics, would place him in the annals of the country on a par with Hidalgo, Juárez, Madero and Cárdenas. He now knows that time has run out and that in the five remaining months he cannot accomplish what he did not achieve in five and a half years. The clock is about to empty of sand. He can no longer deceive nor, no matter how hard he tries, deceive himself.
He believed that reality would bend before his will and power, and what his eyes behold when he dares to open them is a series of failures, from Pemex to the Mayan Train through Dos Bocas. He continues to offer the health system like Denmark, while the hospital infrastructure is falling apart and the medications still do not appear on the shelves of his mega pharmacy.
What is left for you is to hold others responsible for the disaster you will deliver. It is not difficult for him, it is the path he has always taken, driven by hatred and resentment, and now also by frustration. For months now, his anger has been projected against the Supreme Court, the institution that he presents to his faithful as guilty of his setbacks, that obstacle against which the transformation crashed. Now it is the desire to bequeath to whoever succeeds in the National Palace a country without a balance of powers and subject to authoritarianism without counterweights. There is the final bet of destructive cheerleading.
