After remaining in the shadows for almost a decade, former Jalisco Governor Emilio Gonzalez has reappeared, offering a damning appraisal of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who he accuses of heading “a government at the service of the cartels.”
Gonzalez, the third (and last) governor from the conservative National Action Party (PAN), served from 2007 to 2013. In a rare intervention this week, he defended his then president Felipe Calderon, who AMLO frequently blames for having lit the fires of today’s wave of violence through his U.S.-backed “war on the cartels.”
Whereas Calderon was “a brave president who faced up to the drug traffickers,” Gonzalez said today it is unclear whether “Morena [AMLO’s party] is the political arm of the drug traffickers or the drug traffickers are Morena’s armed wing.”
Gonzalez called on opposition parties to unite to halt the Morena juggernaut, specifically calling on the centrist Citizens Movement (MC) to see the wider picture and join forces with the PAN and other parties to present a unity candidate for the 2024 presidential election.
Gonzalez was speaking this week at an event in Guadalajara at which federal legislator Santiago Creel, interior minister in the PAN administration of President Vicente Fox (2000-2006), announced that he is ready to run as a coalition candidate for president in two years’ time.