The one on Sunday, will it be the last march of AMLO?

I interviewed Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the first time in April 1995 on my program Fuego Cruzado, which was then broadcast on MVS Televisión. He had arrived a few days before in CDMX at the head of a group of Tabasco PRD members who marched the almost 830 kilometers between it and Villahermosa to protest the alleged electoral fraud committed against him by the Tabasco authorities in favor of PRI member Roberto Madrazo in the elections to elect governor held on November 20, 1994.

Those elections culminated in yet another fraud, similar to those perpetrated by the PRI members during the years when their party had near-monopoly control of public office in the country. According to Santiago Creel and José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti, who were IFE advisers at the time, there were irregularities in 78% of the polling stations.

The so-called Caravan for Democracy allowed him to link up with the then Secretary of the Interior and today Ambassador to Washington, Esteban Moctezuma, who failed in his attempt to negotiate Madrazo’s resignation, and with the then Secretary General of the Government of the DF, today Secretary of Foreign Relations Marcelo Ebrard, who by orders of his boss, Manuel Camacho, provided Andrés Manuel and his companions with various supports, including financial ones.

The Caravan was not the first march led by AMLO. Three years earlier, as state president of the PRD, he led what he called Exodus for Democracy, which also left Villahermosa on November 25, 1991, for CDMX to protest various frauds committed by the PRI against candidates. PRD supporters in the municipal elections held that same month. The march reached the Zócalo of the CDMX on January 11, 1992 and 40,000 people listened to his speech. The political pressure that AMLO exerted with his march was enough for several of the municipal elections to be annulled and the then PRI governor Salvador Neme Castillo to resign.

In 1995 he led marches against Fobaproa and in 1996 led marches and blockades at Pemex facilities in Tabasco to demand that the peasants and fishermen affected by the polluting activities of the oil company be compensated.

In April 2005, faced with the threat of impeachment as head of the DF government, he led a march that some describe as the largest in the history of Mexico.

He marched in 2006 against the victory of Felipe Calderón in the presidential election and, more recently, against Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy and education reforms.

Next Sunday he will again lead another march, this time in defense of his electoral reform proposal.

In this regard, in his press conference he said that the next one could be his last march by saying “it may be the last, I cannot say that it is the last, because we do not know what fate holds.”

674 days will pass from Sunday the 27th to the last day of his government and AMLO says that the next march may be the last “because we don’t know what fate brings.” It is a fatalistic response for someone who has proven to be an incorrigible optimist. Could it be that he knows something that he does not want to tell us about his state of health, something that did not appear in the Guacamaya Leaks?

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