OPINION

Photo: Carlos Diaz/Xinhua

By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has an abundant stock of scapegoats to blame for all his multiple failures, be it the spiraling economic crisis (which he blames on the neoliberal conservatives, who haven’t been in power for over three years now), the lack of medications for children with cancer and others in desperate need of treatment (clearly the fault of greedy pharmaceutical companies, he says), the rising incidence of gun violence (those nasty arms producers in the United States are to blame), or the soaring inflation rate that is expected to hit 8 percent by year’s end (obviously, a consequence of financial mismanagement in the United States and supply chain breakdowns, he points out).

And, of course, if all else fails, there is the media to blame, which, he insists, is blatantly corrupt and makes up lies to discredit his administration.

But now the president is hard pressed to find someone else to blame for his bumbling immigration policy (or lack thereof) in the face of the tragic death of 55 mostly Central American undocumented migrants who died tragically when a tractor trailer that they were being smuggled in overturned and crashed in Chiapas on Thursday, Dec. 8.

What AMLO cannot explain — or brush off by pointing the finger at others — is the fact that the tractor trailer — packed to the hilt with more than 150 migrants — somehow managed to get past Mexico”s southern border and three additional migratory checkpoints without being noticed before crashing into that fateful highway railing and rolling over.

Surely, there was — and no doubt still is — a network of complicit migratory agents that turned a blind eye to the illegal truck that entered Mexico “undetected.”

One border crossing and three migratory checkpoints add up to one simple explanation: Someone in the government was getting paid to let the truck pass.

True to form, AMLO tried on Friday, Dec. 10, to pass the buck for the crash trailer on to someone else.

But since his close buddy-buddy Francisco Garduño is at the head of the helm of the National Migration Institute (INM) and the National Guard is his ace in the hole for when his devout followers finally stop drinking the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) Kool-Aid and wake up to the fact that he has been duping them all along,  López Obrador had to find another patsy to take the blame.

The governor of Chiapas, Rutilio Escandón, a diehard Morena proselyte and AMLOphile, also managed to escape being the fall guy for López Obrador’s migratory blunder.

So AMLO resorted to one of his all-time favorite culprits, the U.S. government, claiming that the Joe Biden administration has not acted fast enough to implement his disastrous Sembrando Vida tree-planting scheme (which, instead of providing jobs for rural workers and helping to reforest the country, has opened up yet another door for Morena-sponsored corruption and destroyed thousands of hectares of Mexico’s natural rainforests).

Granted, Biden’s come-wait-don’t-come-wait-maybe-come immigration policy is a quintessential example of how not to run a border and has led to chaos along the southern U.S. border, mounting insecurity across the United States, an increase in illicit drug use and a serious drop in his own political polling, but AMLO’s murky promises to welcome migrants only to later abandon them is just as duplicitous.

The trafficking of undocumented migrants is big business, and one that is controlled by organized criminals.

The question that remains is whether the trailer truck crash is evidence that AMLO and his team are intimidated by those criminals, or in bed with them.