A dear reporter friend tells me that she met Carlos Loret de Mola on a trip from Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca, to Mexico City on a Mexican Army plane. The reporters had toured the areas affected by the earthquake of September 9, 2017. The only way to reach the Isthmus of Tehuantepec by air was through a small military airport located in Ixtepec where once a week they land or land. Aeromar planes, otherwise, the journey by land from the capital of the country could take up to 24 hours or more, for this reason, the newsrooms begged the army to charter the reporters in the cargo planes in which they were also transported humanitarian aid.
After extensive tours through destroyed municipalities, some reporters, photographers and cameramen would return to the country’s capital and for them it was a joy to be able to do it by plane.
The group of communicators had to wait sitting on a landing strip for about two hours with the plane parked there. When in doubt, the soldiers replied that they were waiting for “a very important character”, everyone believed that he was a high-ranking general, but no, when he arrived it was Carlos Loret in the company of two other people.
He tells me with some indignation that the military went out of their way to attend to him, he and his company occupied three of the only four seats for passengers, they offered him peanuts and the pilot -a member of the Mexican Air Force- took photos with him, who in at that time he was the headline of Televisa’s morning newscast.
The dedication with which the dependencies, including the Mexican Army, treated the employees of that company was so evident that it seemed regular; they always had the best place to shoot an image, exclusive interviews, “leaks” by way of… well. The relationship of the Mexican government with the representatives of the most important television station in the country was, in general, one of privilege.
Another example that may come to the case and that they did not tell me because we all saw it also happened during the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto, when the Mexican Navy offered the same company a “preferential place” with everything and official jackets to cover the rescue of children, yes, of children in the Rebsamen School, after the earthquake of September 19, 2017. The coverage became a shameful (to say the least) farce.
Knowing this context is essential to understand that with the arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency of the Republic, things changed radically and those privileges, with all that they imply, came to an end, and this could be one of the many reasons for the current conflict between the president and Carlos Loret.
This war is much deeper than it seems and has to do with the interests of both parties, with freedom of expression, fiscal secrecy, authoritarianism, corruption, revenge, violence against communicators, inheritance and capital. politician of both….
In a new battle of said war, López Obrador disclosed Loret’s personal and obviously private information, neither more nor less than in the morning, the most important pulpit in the country.
The president’s action generated (with good reason) innumerable criticisms and a wave of solidarity for the driver. Nearly 60,000 people, including hundreds of journalists, gathered at a space of Twitter in which Loret participated. During the virtual meeting, the communicator mentioned the importance of the investigation that he carried out together with the team of Latinuswhich revealed that the president’s son, José Ramón López Beltrán, occupied a mansion in the United States valued at one million dollars, owned by a senior executive of an oil company that has current contracts with Petróleos Mexicanos and thereby not only violated the maxim of his father: austerity, but it represents a conflict of interest.
Indeed, no other journalistic revelation (neither the money bag for Pío, nor the contracts with Felipa) had shaken the President so much. That is the thread that the press would have to pull to continue discovering contradictions and probably crimes committed by those close to López Obrador, because that is precisely the role of the press in a democracy.
Last Friday the President showed himself to be an autocrat whose figure is not subject to legal restrictions and, on the contrary, for Loret the feeling is one of empathy because despite his position in the previous regimes, no one wants him to expose his income , above all, such income (although Loret has already denied it) in a country in which 55 journalists have been murdered in this administration alone, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
For the President, popularity is everything, that is what feeds him and goes beyond his political ambition; his personality is that of a man who needs to have everyone “on his side” and those who are not are his enemies, like a small child when he plays.
Journalists, by nature, cannot remain on the side of the President and for that reason they have become his greatest enemies and proof of this is Carmen Aristegui who went from being a model communicator to a “champion of power” just for doing critical journalism .
For AMLO, journalism is the opposition or the arm that it uses to attack him, however, even if he believes it is a fact about his son’s house, there is no more. The era of the swan that does not splash its plumage is over and the guilty party for making it known is receiving the full weight of “presidential justice.”
AMLO has only two paths: to persecute a journalist (or many) from power or thoroughly investigate his own son and other relatives to clean up his image again, both paths halfway through his six-year term and uphill.