AMLO’s war against the intelligentsia

ON SEPTEMBER 21st President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) began his televised early-morning press conference by asking a functionary to read out an interminable list of petrol prices at service stations around the country. Then there were video updates on AMLO’s pet infrastructure projects: an $8bn oil refinery, a new airport in Mexico City and three new railway lines. After an hour or so, he got to the meat of his agenda: attacking two small monthly magazines, Nexos and Letras Libres, and singling out by name their editors, Héctor Aguilar Camín and Enrique Krauze.

They “were the chiefs of the intelligentsia throughout the neoliberal period”, AMLO complained. He insinuated that they acted as hired propagandists for the governments of his predecessors. “They belong to the conservative grouping which would like to maintain the same regime of corruption, injustices and privilege,” he said earlier this month. These attacks, which apply, too, to Reforma, an independent newspaper, have intensified in the past few weeks. They look like an attempt to silence critical voices in the Mexican media by a populist president who has already hobbled previously independent institutions such as the Supreme Court and regulatory agencies. Many media businesses practise self-censorship.