Mexico’s political establishment is shocked by claims that three former Mexican presidents and an all-star cast of lawmakers and staff may have been involved in alleged acts of corruption.
The accusations were leveled at Emilio Lozoya, the former head of the Mexican state oil company Pemex, and will fuel the efforts of the country’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to portray himself as an anti-corruption writer.
López Obrador, a 66-year-old nationalist, swept to power in 2018 and vowed to free Mexico from corruption and decipher the ‘mafia of power’ that he claimed to have taken control of the No 2 economy of Latin America.
In a leaked 63-page depot, Lozoya, who was extradited from Spain in July to make allegations of corruption his own, plunged some of Mexico’s most famous politicians into a scandalous scandal.
According to the newspaper El Universal, the former Pemex boss Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico from 2012 to 2018, implicated in multi-million dollar bribery and illegal financing of campaigns.
Reuters said Lozoya also claimed that Felipe Calderón – president from 2006 to 2012 – and Carlos Salinas – from 1988 to 1994 – had committed “acts that may constitute crimes”.
Lozoya served as Peña Nieto’s international relations coordinator during the 2012 election campaign, and was later appointed to run Pemex.
“He was one of the masters of the universe,” said Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez, a sociologist in Mexico City. “He was appointed to that position because he was part of Peña’s most intimate circle.”
Lozoya was arrested and extradited to Spain in February for charges that he received more than $ 4 million in bribes from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.
On Thursday morning, López Obrador, better known as Amlo, told reporters that he believed the leaked document was real, but he had not read it all because he “did not want nightmares”.
Amlo has previously said he hopes Lozoya’s extradition would contribute to the ‘purification’ of Mexican public life.
Calderón hit back on Twitter assert The Mexican president sought to arm the former oil boss and his “ridiculous accusations” as “an instrument of revenge and political persecution”. “He is not interested in justice, but in a line,” Calderón said.
Neither Peña Nieto nor Salinas responded immediately to the allegations.
Wein doubts how much corruption the elite Mexican politics has allowed. During Peña Nieto’s six-year term, a series of widespread political scandals caused public outrage, paved the way for Amlo’s country elections, and Mexico looked dramatically at Transparency International’s corruption index.
But Calderón is not alone in suspecting that Amlo is using the investigation to eliminate powerful political opponents and support his anti-corruption evidence.
Some have compared the Mexican president’s campaign to an urgent anti-corruption drive carried out by China Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. Through this collapse, Xi was able to imprison several prominent rivals, including the former security chief of China Zhou Yongkang and the Communist Party heavyweights Bo Xilai and Sun Zhengcai.
“This is not a trial, it’s a telenovela,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst in Mexico City.
‘Some things Lozoya says may be true [and] given the position he is in and the wrong way this has been handled, this will have a huge political impact. But no justice will be done. ”
Others doubt the timing of the revelations, and think they may be a deliberate distraction from the coronavirus crisis currently raging in Mexico.
Mexico now has the third highest death toll in the world, after the US and Brazil, and is set to exceed 60,000 dead in the coming days.
“[The leak] derives from everything, ”said Esteban Illades, editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos. ‘The economy is in turmoil, almost 60,000 people have died and not a single thing is good at the moment. But by creating a political circus there is distraction. ”
