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 4 - FRENA’s May 30 car protest and anti-AMLO governors’ support
Gilberto Lozano’s elite National Citizen Congress established the institutional framework for what later became the National Anti-AMLO Front, or FRENA. At this point, they are essentially the same organization – the official CNC Facebook page even changed its username to FRENA.
In 2019, Lozano and the National Citizen Congress helped organize anti-López Obrador demonstrations that were popularly derided at the time as “marchas fifí” – or “bougie marches”, in slang – because they were populated by wealthy upper-class Mexicans.
The FRENA marches from May 30 this year had a similar feel. An independent media outlet called México en Marcha described the caravan in Guadalajara: “this group [of protesters] is no larger than 50 people, but because they are riding in cars and because they have resources to make these signs, their presence is felt a bit more, but in reality, they do not add up to 100 people in the whole state of Jalisco”.
FRENA also paid for professionally made banners in various states of Mexico, reading “In [this state] we don’t want you Andrés López”. Supporters posed for strategic photo ops to try to portray the movement as large and widespread across Mexico.
These demonstrations were reminiscent of upper-class marches held in Brazil in the lead-up to the impeachment and soft-coup against left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. They also mirrored the protests held in the elite bastion of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which set the stage for a military coup against the elected socialist President Evo Morales in November 2019.
Supporters of AMLO mocked the FRENA protests for their small sizes. And while the demonstrations clearly lacked the support of the majority of working-class Mexicans, the anti-AMLO Front does have friends in high places.
The leaked Broad Opposition Bloc document claimed that governors of 14 of Mexico’s 32 states support the opposition campaign. Of these, seven anti-AMLO governors have refused to follow the central government’s policy to flatten the Covid-19 curve, which is known as the “stop light” plan, and was created by Mexico’s Under-Secretary of Health Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez, an epidemiologist and expert on infectious diseases.
Several of these right-wing governors encouraged and even supported FRENA’s anti-AMLO protests. In the state of Jalisco, for instance, transit police vehicles were spotted sporting signs that said “Fuera (out) López Obrador”. That is to say, Jalisco’s local government used Mexican taxpayer money to assist protests against their elected president.
Jalisco’s opposition governor Enrique Alfaro has earned national notoriety through a series of scandals. This May, a Mexican construction worker named Giovanni López was arrested in Jalisco, allegedly for not wearing a mask, but the police appear to have beaten him to death. He died in the hospital of what doctors said was a traumatic brain injury, and suffered a gunshot wound in his leg.
The death of Giovanni López inspired large protests which began in Jalisco and subsequently spread across Mexico. These drew many parallels to the simultaneous protests in the United States over the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police.
Despite the large demonstrations, Alfaro, the Jalisco governor, defended the arrest of Giovanni López. He even claimed that the protesters were from other parts of Mexico, blaming the protests on López Obrador and accusing his Morena party of encouraging violence. The inflammatory rhetoric fueled further unrest, exposing the extremism of much of the anti-AMLO opposition.
Alfaro also attracted national attention when it was revealed that he had paid more than 1 million Mexican pesos (nearly USD $50,000) of Jalisco state funds to outlets run by the prominent right-wing media personality Enrique Krauze to spread propaganda praising the governor.
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