Hammered by Mexican media and corrupt “ancien regime” politicians for refusing to recognize Joe Biden as president-elect, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador restated at his press conference this morning that he will not recognize a winner in the U.S. elections until the vote counting in the states is concluded, legal challenges resolved, and the result decided by the appropriate U.S. election officials.
I am not saying that there was fraud or not in the U.S. election; that is not for us to decide, López Obrador specified. But in our case, he continued, in 2006, there was fraud; and it was all set up for the congratulations to flood in for our opponent. The President likewise suggested that people refresh their memories of the 2016 U.S. election. “Four years ago there was a great pile-on on behalf of Mrs. Clinton,” not only by the Mexican media, but from the Mexican government itself, he said, citing hysterical cries by “the idol of the technocrats and neo-liberals” who then headed Mexico’s central bank, Augustin Carstens, that a Trump victory would be “a Category 5 hurricane.”
AMLO pointed to the lesson of Bolivia, whose people just overturned the brutal “color revolution” run against Evo Morales’s government: “Why not wait? … This business of our issuing judgment, is as if we were electoral judges, when our Constitution establishes that we should be respectful and not intervene until the Americans resolve their affairs. And there is no reason for worry. The people are intelligent. Look what happened a year ago in Bolivia. The situation was extremely grave in Bolivia. It was thought that democratic life would not be re-established, even that violence would be unleashed, and I celebrate that yesterday President Arce was sworn in after a democratic election, and they resolved their difference peacefully. So, why such anxiety? Such desperation?”
The Mexican President made clear his government expects to get along with whoever wins the U.S. Presidency, because his government is not “servile” and will defend his nation’s sovereignty. “We have a very good relationship with the government of President Trump, because there has been a relationship of respect, of non-intervention,” he said, and added he had no problem with Mr. Biden or the Democrats.
But when asked by a reporter if he was worried about a Democratic win, given that deportations of Mexican immigrants were much greater under Barack Obama, López Obrador delivered a sharp warning: “There won’t be any problem, because we have already defined a policy of respect. We would not permit, for sure, the introduction of weapons which President Calderon [2006-2012] allowed under [the Obama regime’s] Fast and Furious secret operation. But I am sure that they are not even going to dare, if Mr. Biden should be given the victory, to propose that to me…. So there is not going to be any problem.”
