By María Julia Castañeda |
Mexico City (EFE).- Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández accused the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in an interview with EFE of exercising “terrible censorship that suffocates” her new book ‘The Secret History: AMLO and the Sinaloa Cartel ‘, on social networks and the media, which he compared with the threats he has previously suffered for his publications.
“It is a virtual murder when they don’t let you say things, when they don’t let you communicate, when, on the one hand, they take away any possibility of explaining the investigation,” said Hernández.
“On the other hand, the President of the Republic has a monopoly on communication, through his ‘morning’ conference, where there have already been several occasions when he disqualifies me and my work. There are insults, there is machismo, there is misogyny,” he continued.
Mexico is the country without war with the most journalists murdered in the last decade, according to figures from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an organization that has also denounced the increase in hostilities of the current Government towards this profession, which increases the danger of practicing it.
Anabel Hernández, who has suffered these attacks, remembered her colleague Javier Valdez, executed after publishing about Los Chapitos in Sinaloa, a “very painful” experience that the author mentions in the book.
“Although Javier and I didn’t talk very often, when we did talk and look at each other, it was very deep because we both lived in terrible isolation,” he described.
“Because after you receive death threats, you’re not just thinking about yourself, but about ‘if someone comes and shoots me, the lady next door shoots him, or the child who’s at the movies’, or what do I know?” Hernandez added.
From praise to censure
The author of ‘Los Señores del Narco’ (2010) pointed out that at the beginning of the current Government, López Obrador “congratulated” her for her investigations into Genaro García Luna, former Secretary of Security under the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), now imprisoned in the United States for the revelations she published 14 years ago.
“Only now that he is the one being investigated, now he does denigrate journalism. No, the power does not understand that journalists are not here to applaud it, we are there to investigate it,” he explained.
The journalist explained that “there are two key witnesses who testified against García Luna in New York,” who also pointed out López Obrador’s ties to the cartel.
One, according to Anabel Hernández, is King Zambada, “who already declared in court, in a trial that he did give money to López Obrador’s campaign.”
And the other is “Sergio Villarreal Barragán, alias El Grande, who also testified in the PGR (extinct Attorney General’s Office) and in the trial of Genaro García Luna”, about the links of both politicians with organized crime.
Furthermore, Hernández defended that his sources are “direct witnesses” of the events, which is not easy to process as a journalist, since it is necessary to question and contrast it over and over again, which becomes “very exhausting.”
Election times
The book is published in the midst of the campaigns for the June 2 elections and even the opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez cited it during the last debate last Sunday.
But the journalist indicated that the work “was in process for four years” and it was not until the end of 2023 and 2024 that she found “very important” testimonies that “put the last pieces of the puzzle” with “forcefulness and clarity.”
“I realized that the investigation was over, seeing that there really was such solid evidence that López Obrador came to power sponsored by the Sinaloa cartel,” he stated.
The book, based on dozens of testimonies and court records from the United States, narrates how the Sinaloa Cartel would have financed López Obrador’s campaigns from 2006, until the 2021 midterm elections, when his party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), It swept almost all the States.
In the last chapter, ‘La Heredera’, Anabel Hernández suggests that this structure will probably pass into the hands of the official candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum.
“What I do have are many testimonies that there are members of the Sinaloa Cartel who are calling for a vote in favor of Claudia Sheinbaum. There are those who are saying that with her they will be better than with Obrador,” she said.
