López Obrador gives the first interview in years: more than two hours without touching on thorny issues

Since he has been president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador hardly gives interviews.

The president of Mexico speaks every day for about two or three hours in his morning conference and from there he answers questions from reporters.

But he has hardly accepted a face-to-face meeting with the press since the beginning of the six-year term.

Times are counted on the fingers of one hand.

The last one was published this Tuesday.

López Obrador gave an interview to the Russian journalist Inna Afigenova for the Spanish television channel Red, directed by Pablo Iglesias, former vice president of the Government and founder of the left-wing party Podemos.

In two hours and 15 minutes of conversation, they avoided thorny issues from afar.

What the president does talk about is the presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, whom he showers with praise, his package of constitutional reforms and the role of the opposition and the Judiciary, whom he harshly criticizes as usual.

López Obrador seemed relaxed and smiling most of the time.

He made the announcement of the interview last week by promoting it on his social networks.

He barely had any other private meeting with the press in these years.

This time they hardly touched on uncomfortable topics, and when they approached them, they did not do so in depth.

The accusation that was made to him days ago in the media about the financing of his campaign by the Sinaloa Cartel was not so much a question but a moment to unload and attack the press.

Among his remaining pending issues, he did recognize that the

had become one of them.

“That would be a pending issue that would hurt me not to resolve,” he said.

He did not mention a word about the accusations made to the federal government of trying to divide the parents of the 43 students, nor the criticism that the Army still receives for not providing all the information in the investigation.

The Mexican president did review multiple topics, such as the cleaning he subjected the presidential chair to, which was said to be haunted, or the conversations he had with Donald Trump, with whom he agreed not to talk about the wall on the border between Mexico and the United States to avoid any problems.

On issues of international politics, the president criticized the United Nations for its ineffectiveness in stopping wars and resolving conflicts through dialogue, but he did not delve into his position regarding these war conflicts.

López Obrador has remained silent on these issues to avoid conflicts with other countries.

What he did demand again was the economic blockade of Cuba.

The talk, which at length covered passages of Mexican history, touched on the presentation of constitutional reforms in electoral times as a way to pressure the opposition — “politics is time” — and the need for countries to have a generational change .

Along those lines, he defended Claudia Sheinbaum as her heir — “she is more prepared than me” — and pointed out that the mistake that some revolutions in Latin America had had was the lack of change in leadership.

She did not want, however, to name names.

At the end, the host asked him what achievement of these five and a half years he is most proud of.

“Having reduced poverty,” she responded.

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