The British and their Washington allies are intent on silencing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s daily, early-morning press conferences – the famous “Mañaneras” – through which he has maintained an open dialogue with the Mexican people, free of the controlled media’s spin and containment by much of his own palace guard. In fact, the “Mañaneras” are to López Obrador what tweeting was to President Donald Trump. And the same “Holy Inquisition” that Facebook and Twitter carried out against Trump and others, as López Obrador aptly characterized it, is now being directed against the Mexican President.
Investigative journalist Daniel Marmolejo, who spoke at the March 20-21 Schiller Institute conference, has been particularly targeted as well for exclusion from the Mañaneras, on the specious grounds (invented 10 days ago by some in the palace guard) that he doesn’t have enough YouTube followers to meet the newly-raised threshold of 100,000. Marmolejo has angrily denounced the campaign, including reporting on his participation at the SI conference, which over the course of a week has raised his subscriber base from 70,000 to over 85,000.
On March 23, a Mexican NGO called “Artículo 19” launched a broadside against the Mañaneras, saying they are “an instrument of disinformation” which López Obrador uses to “manipulate” people. The charges received high-profile coverage in nearly every major Mexican news outlet, and the campaign to shut down the press conferences is off to the races. A little counterintelligence digging by EIR turned up the fact that “Artículo 19” is not very Mexican, and not particularly “non-governmental” either. Rather, it is the local branch of an international NGO called “Article 19” which, to quote its own website, “was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1987, and takes its name from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
They themselves further report: “In 2019, 59.5% of the organization’s income came from grants from international private foundations, while 40% was granted by diplomatic representations in Mexico and development agencies.” These include:
Boll Foundation (German Green Party)
British Embassy in Mexico
Dutch Embassy in Mexico
European Union
Ford Foundation
German Embassy in Mexico
MacArthur Foundation
National Endowment for Democracy
Open Society Foundation (Soros)
U.S. State Department