OPINION

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Photo: WhatsApp

By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has a handy way of dealing with facts and figures he doesn’t like: He simply rewrites them.

Yes, the president’s “otros datos” (“different data”) stratagem is a magic wand he can wave over unpleasantries like inflation, economic downturn, crime, corruption and anything else he doesn’t like to make them disappear, and, sadly, the throngs of blinkered proselytes who follow the Gospel according to AMLO will blindly accept his lies.

Any solid evidence to the contrary, often presented by the demonized media that López Obrador has condemned to the ninth level of hell for its treacherous acts of telling the truth, are immediately discarded as irrelevant and false by the AMLO faithful.

And after three years of otros datos and convoluted political spins by his leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party to justify his erratic and often-illegal distortions of Mexican law and the Constitution, it should have come as no surprise that on Monday, Jan. 10, AMLO declared that Mexico has one of the lowest death rates in the world from covid-19, despite the fact that just one week earlier, on Jan. 3, Johns Hopkins University — which is tasked internationally with keeping tabs on covid-19 infections and deaths — noted that Mexico ranks third worldwide in covid deaths.

In fact, Johns Hopkins said that when it comes to covid fatalities, Mexico is only eclipsed by Yemen and Peru globally, and as the end of December, Mexico ranked 10th in accumulated deaths globally over the past 28-day period.

How to explain the contradiction between Johns Hopkins and Saint AMLO?

One should surmise that, according to AMLO, that Johns Hopkins is just another infidel corrupt institution that is paid off by the international conservative powers that be to tell lies about him and Mexico.

But as a heretic disbeliever of the AMLO Doctrine, I personally am placing my bets on the information supplied by Johns Hopkins over that of López Obrador’s otros datos.