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 9 - FRENA’s religious extremist member Juan Bosco Abascal warns of the “Synagogue of Satan”
The last currently known member of the FRENA governing council is Juan Bosco Abascal, an elite businessman with very strange fundamentalist religious beliefs.
On his Facebook page, where he posts non-stop anti-AMLO propaganda and has nearly 13,000 followers, Abascal says he worked as a “leader for human development projects” for restaurant and hotel chains, the Jalisco state’s finance ministry, and Pemex, the Mexican state-owned oil company.
Abascal also helped lead an ultra-conservative NGO that calls itself Family, Force of the Future. There, he served as a consultant and speaker, addressing themes such as “death, culture, abortion, the pill, and other scourges”.
Keeping in line with his religious extremism, Abascal says he is currently a teacher for Regnum Christi, an international federation of the Catholic Church. The priests and seminarians in Regnum Christi make up the fanatical Legionnaires, which the Wall Street Journal described as a “fast-growing conservative Roman catholic order” backed by “a handful of Latin American billionaires and some of the world’s top financiers”.
Regnum Christi “concentrates on ministering to the wealthy and powerful in the belief that by evangelizing society’s leaders, the beneficial impact on society is multiplied”, the Wall Street Journal explained. In other words, it pushes a trickle-down spirituality.
The Catholic order’s most infamous Mexican member is a priest by the name of Marcial Maciel, who was accused of sexually molesting eight teenage seminarians over two decades.
Juan Bosco Abascal has made his fundamentalist religious views very clear in lengthy video rants on Facebook and YouTube, in which the prominent anti-AMLO opposition figure frequently cites the Bible to explain how the “universal Free Masons” are trying to establish a “New World Order” and create a “world government” by using the international drug trade and mass media.
Abascal portrays leftist grassroots movements in Latin America, such as Venezuela’s Chavismo, as examples of this Satanic influence, citing Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro as symbols of his nefarious conspiracy.
One of Abascal’s YouTube rants is titled “The feminazis are worse than the coronavirus,” and it has more than 20,000 views. In another video, with nearly 50,000 views, the FRENA member describes how Free Masons are purportedly trying to “create apostates to de-Christianize” Mexico.
In an even more shocking YouTube rant, Abascal advises parents how to “cure” their LGBT children. He argues that “being gay, in whatever of its 120 forms, does not have a genetic or biological basis. They are all emotional and psycho-sexual deformities caused by inadequate parents and the toxic environment in which children were raised.”
In addition to warning in his videos of the threat of “losing our souls in the Synagogue of Satan or Church of the Anti-Christ,” Abascal has written two books pushing these deranged conspiracies.
One book-length screed blames virtually all of the world’s problems on “postmodernism“, warning of “the modern enslavement of humanity by the postmodern phenomena against Virtue, such as Trivialization, Desacralization, Dechristianization, Disintegration of the Family, and many more.”
The other book by Abascal, a novel titled From the Nest of the Serpent, reflects the anti-AMLO activist’s extreme-right worldview. It tells the story of a brave multimillionaire protagonist who, inspired by his Christian faith, refuses to work with the global drug mafia; so the bad guys bribe the corrupt politicians who “abandoned their Catholic faith” to murder his family members. The capitalist oligarch responds by forming a private army he calls the “Spartan League,” and takes his battle to the “Universal Masonry,” declaring a war to rid the planet of drugs and Satanic influence.
In case it wasn’t already clear that Abascal sees himself and his elite friends as the multimillionaire protagonist of the novel, he situates the story in Mexico.
The cover of the book employs textbook anti-Semitic imagery, displaying a Star of David caging the planet.
Abascal’s fascistic views did not discourage Gilberto Lozano from openly promoting him as an “esteemed member” of FRENA. On his personal YouTube channel, Lozano published footage of Abascal endorsing the National Anti-AMLO Front.
In the video rant, Abascal refers to AMLO as “MALO” (bad in Spanish), and repeatedly calls the global coronavirus pandemic the “China plague.” Abascal attacks the Mexican health system and medical professionals, and spins an elaborate conspiracy: The prominent FRENA member claims that the López Obrador government has used Covid-19 as a weapon, that it “intentionally let Mexico get infected with the virus” in order to implement its revolutionary Fourth Transformation, and that the country is now “heading to a monstrous, unimaginable crisis.”
In the past, one other member of FRENA had been publicly disclosed: Pedro Luis Martín Bringas, a prominent shareholder in the Soriana Organization, a grocery store chain based in Gilberto Lozano’s hometown of Monterrey and one of the businesses granted a tax waiver under previous governments.
Martín Bringas appears to have been kicked out of FRENA on May 17, however, according to the website.
One point of ire for the big business community is the AMLO administration’s efforts to force businesses to pay their current and back taxes, in order to provide much-needed government revenue.
Source, links:
Comments
Post a Comment