Photo: Presidencia

By KELIN DILLON

On Tuesday, April 9, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) took to his daily morning press conference to criticize the line of questioning used at the debate between Mexico’s presidential candidates on Sunday, April 7, accusing the hosts of conducting a “smear campaign” against his government.

López Obrador claimed that the Mexican media outlets at the debate – specifically television networks Televisa and TV Azteca and daily newspapers Reforma and El Universal – treated Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate for AMLO’s in-power National Regeneration Movement (Morena), differently than other candidates.

“There was a smear campaign across the entire narrative of the debate,” the federal executive Tuesday, claiming the media outlets’ presenters failed to consider the citizens’ consultation when choosing debate questions and instead seized the “privilege of choosing the questions.”

AMLO also condemned that the debate’s questions seemingly characterized his administration as continuing corruption rather than battling corruption as per his government’s supposed mission.

“The questions say how bad the government is in health, how bad in education, how bad in everything,” said López Obrador. “As if we were equal to prior administrations, and as if we had not dedicated ourselves completely to banishing corruption.”

“We have suffered smear campaigns, they went so far as to accuse us of leaving children with cancer without treatment, all because of their excessive ambition for money, because it is the only thing that matters to them and moves them, it has alienated them, that is their God, the money,” continued AMLO, touching on his administration’s controversial failure to acquire medications for Mexican children suffering from cancer.

In contrast to Tuesday’s remarks, López Obrador had said just one prior that the “debate was carried out without major problems” and that at the end of the debate the candidates “hugged and kissed.”