A Trump-like Mexican oligarch, Gilberto Lozano, is leading a coalition of corporate leaders and far-right fanatics called FRENA to try to overthrow President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
by José Guadalupe Argüello III and Ben Norton
Part 7 - FRENA member Rafael Loret de Mola, an elite neoliberal journalist
Joining Lozano and Ferriz de Con on the FRENA governing council is Rafael Loret de Mola, who retired very publicly in August 2019, after 38 years as a journalist, in an act of protest against AMLO, whom he accused of persecuting right-wing reporters.
Loret de Mola also made a video strongly endorsing FRENA, demonizing AMLO’s Fourth Transformation as the “Fifth Trap”, calling the López Obrador government a “farce”.
Although he has formally left the media, Loret de Mola’s son Carlos is continuing his father’s legacy as a viciously anti-AMLO journalist.
Carlos Loret de Mola previously hosted a popular news program on the Mexican media conglomerate Televisa. The younger Loret de Mola has worked with the top corporate media networks in both Mexico and the US, and currently writes for the Washington Post.
Both Lorets de Mola have also been instrumental in providing the intellectual justification for neoliberal economic policies rammed through in previous Mexican governments. Before AMLO’s presidency, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and neoliberal Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) both worked to make constitutional changes that privatized Mexico’s natural resources and state industries, resulting in private and international corporate involvement in the energy sector, particularly in oil and electricity.
These neoliberal reforms were extremely controversial, given public ownership of Mexico’s substantial fossil fuel reserves was enshrined in the country’s 1917 constitution, which was drafted during the Mexican Revolution.
So to justify and maintain these changes, and to criticize any group or individual opposed to them, the Mexican right-wing dispatched a team of self-declared “intellectuals” to influence the public. In Mexico, the public intellectual is still revered as a mainstream figure that has the ear of large parts of the population.
Rafael and Carlos Loret de Mola have diligently played the part of these anti-AMLO public intellectuals, spilling much ink criticizing the president.
The AMLO government has a series of “Essential Projects and Programs” that aim to wrest back the energy independence Mexico achieved in the late 1930s. Carlos Loret de Mola has harshly criticized AMLO’s National Electric Energy Plan, arguing that the state-owned power utility the Federal Electricity Commission (Comisión Federal de Electricidad, or CFE) is “inefficient”. His proposed alternative, of course, is “private initiative“, which he claims is cheaper and better for the environment — an argument challenged by actual scientific experts.
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