"I go into exile to continue fighting," with this phrase the opposition leader, Ricardo Anaya, announced this Monday that he will go into exile from Mexico after receiving a summons to go to the Prosecutor's Office to testify for an alleged act of corruption to approve the energy reform that he considers a revenge of the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to separate him from the presidential race.
“Exile is the only alternative to be able to continue fighting because letting yourself be imprisoned by an autocrat often means losing the battle. And let it be clear to you Andrés Manuel, I do not hide or run away, I stand up and exile myself with great pain from my country to continue fighting, "he said on his Twitter account in a message addressed to the president this morning.
According to Anaya, not even 24 hours had passed since López Obrador announced that they wanted to imprison him when he received a summons that included, among others, a statement in the North Prison.
"Once you are in prison you lose your political rights and I could no longer be a candidate in 2024 and obviously I could not be recording videos in which I denounce the ineptitude of your Government," he said.
"The crimes that I am charged with 'only' add up to 30 years in prison," he said and ironized the president's own words when he said that "thank goodness that his strength is not revenge."
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It is not clear if that last video has already been broadcast from abroad or in national territory, since after announcing his exile, if he tried to leave in the next few hours it is likely that he would be arrested, since he has pending accounts with the justice. López Obrador hinted, however, that he is already changing his mind and will not leave the country.
Ricardo Anaya, a former presidential candidate for the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in 2018, is one of the most staunch opponents of the López Obrador government and his departure from the country would discredit both Mexican democracy and the balance of powers. For a year, the Attorney General's Office (FGR) has been investigating a possible bribery of Anaya and a dozen public officials, accused by the head of the Mexican branch of the
Odebrecht case
, the former director of Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, detained and converted in a key collaborating witness of the Administration.
According to Anaya, the summons received is a strategy to eliminate him in the face of the next presidential elections. "López Obrador wants to scrub me the hard way, I get in the way of his succession plans in 2024, he doesn't want me to be a candidate," he denounced. "I know what is in my sights, a month ago they had everything ready to start the process against me, in fact they published it. If he wants to scrub me, because of the sayings of a criminal, who is corrupt and a liar, and he does nothing to his brothers, when they did receive money, "he said in reference to the videos in which the brothers are seen of the president receiving bulky envelopes with bills.
For his part, López Obrador responded to Anaya on Monday morning that he has "absolutely nothing to do" with the accusation. “That is not a trickster. It is easy for him to say 'they chase me, they chase me'; we are not repressors, we do not hate, we are not like them (...) it is a political maneuver to want to go out like this, ”he replied. Two days before, the President of Mexico advised him that “if the Prosecutor's Office and the Judicial Power accuse him of corruption and he is innocent, that he should not take refuge or flee; that it is defended with tests and with the force of the truth ”.
Anaya is being investigated for having received a briefcase with bundles of bills. The accusation came officially by the former member of the defunct Presidential General Staff and in charge of Lozoya's security, Norberto Gallardo Vargas. In his ministerial statement he assured that in August 2014 he gave Anaya a "sports bag" with almost seven million pesos to his "link" Osiris Hernández in the parking lot of the Chamber of Deputies, according to the investigation folder published in the press in June.
The investigation against Anaya is part of an alleged broader criminal network that even reaches former President Enrique Peña Nieto and former Secretary of the Treasury Luis Videgaray, reported to receive between April 2013 and August 2014 almost 100 million pesos in bribes to legislators, among them the then deputy Ricardo Anaya, to approve one of the star laws of his Government: the energy reform. This association allegedly allowed Peña Nieto and Videgaray to deliver the bribes paid by Odebrecht to legislators. Deliveries always made in cash, in bundles of 500 and 200 peso bills, through intermediaries in 15 different deliveries, according to the Prosecutor's Office.
The evidence available to the Prosecutor's Office to call Anaya to testify are three statements by the former director of Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, and four more people who participated or knew about the money transfers to legislators, as well as the statements of former directors of Odebrecht, payment and transfer receipts and a video.
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