Unlike the United States, where the president appears to be undermining the lead member of his coronavirus task force, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has fully backed his chief strategist, the unflappable Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the federal sub-secretary of health who is an experienced epidemiologist to boot.
Lopez-Gatell is the public face of Covid-19 in Mexico: his daily evening briefings may not be riveting viewing but they are the main way the government keeps the nation updated on the evolution, patterns and statistics of the disease. However, this tight controlling of the coronavirus narrative has made the deputy minister a target of media outlets that are skeptical about the credibility of the official data, and whose reporters are hungry for more substantive stories. Many of these outlets have been branded by Lopez Obrador as the “conservative press” – ones he believes are politically motivated, biased against his administration and whose only interest is to see him fail.
Criticism of Lopez-Gatell has intensified in recent weeks as reports of excess deaths surface, fueling accusations that the federal government is hiding the full scale of the crisis. His strategy has also come under scrutiny for Mexico’s low testing rate compared to other countries, allowing the reopening of the economy while Covid-19 transmission rates are still rising, a perceived antipathy regarding the use of face masks, and the constant revising of estimates of fatalities and “peak” times for the disease in different parts of the country.
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