Corruption in the 4T

Not one who doubts that favors in politics are paid well and sometimes requetebién -would say the classic. In 1976, the then young man from Tabasco, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, joined the team of the candidate for senator, the poet Carlos Pellicer. Months after the elections in which Pellicer was elected, the elections to elect the governor of Tabasco took place, the vote favored the engineer Leandro Rovirosa Wade. The fact of not participating in the campaign of the winning candidate closed the doors of the state government to AMLO. He spent 18 months touring various instances with a project for La Chontalpa that he had thought of during the poet’s campaign.

In consideration of the help that Andrés Manuel gave him during his campaign, Pellicer insisted until Rovirosa Wade supported the appointment of the one from Tepetitán, as a delegate in Tabasco of the National Indigenous Institute in 1977. There he began his political career, his first formal boss was Ignacio Ovalle Fernández, national director of said institute and who years later in 1984, recommended him to Clara Jusidman, director of the National Consumer Institute, an institution of which López Obrador was director of Promotion from 1984 to 1988, when he broke with the PRI and He joined the democratic current headed by Porfirio Muños Ledo and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, among others. During his management at the National Consumer Institute, the Tabasco promoted the Consumer Magazine and created the little song with the Institute’s telephone numbers.

What I want to highlight in this great —by lengthy— introduction is the favor granted to the current president by Ignacio Ovalle, a favor to which the president reciprocated, as soon as he arrived at the Palace by naming Ovalle, who was in charge of Conasupo in the six-year term of Salinas de Gortari, director of Mexican Food Security (Segalmex), a basic institution of the 4T in its purpose to improve the nutritional conditions of the poorest.

There was no reciprocity for the gratitude and loyalty that AMLO, at the time, offered to the person who was his first boss in his political career and who also recommended him for a position of relative importance during the six-year term of Miguel de la Madrid. On the contrary, Ovalle Fernández, caused a scandal when in 2021 they began to talk about bad and corrupt management in the area of ​​their responsibility, to the point of considering that the irregularities in the Segalmex accounts could exceed those of the Master Scam. of the previous six-year term.

According to the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic, in the scrutiny of public accounts for the years 2019 and 2020, in the purchase of grains, sacks and other products that never entered the department’s warehouses; lump sum payments to producers; excessive travel expenses and a non-existent list of payroll fees for personnel; as well as cash outflows without justification, a budget embezzlement of 2,000 million pesos was discovered in just two years. This scandalous embezzlement contradicts what President López Obrador has expressed morning after morning about the annulment of corruption during his six-year term and the austerity that he demands of his collaborators.

However, Ignacio Ovalle, responsible for so many irregularities in the body that the president put in charge, has not been called to account; On the contrary, as soon as the smell of putrefaction in Segalmex began to become unbearable, the president appointed Ovalle coordinator of the National Institute for Federalism and Municipal Development under the Ministry of the Interior.

With the disastrous example of Ovalle that contradicts the anti-corruption proposals of the 4T, the phrase that literally says that in “politics there is no small enemy”, can be paraphrased to say: “in politics there is no small friend”.

Final point

A mother tells her son: A little bird told me that you take drugs. The one who takes drugs is you who talks to the little birds.