President Claudia Sheinbaum let 48 minutes of Friday’s conference pass before entering the thorny topic of the Attorney General’s Office and, as soon as she got to it, she chilled the reporters present in the Treasury Room with a brief explanation, apparently simple, but that confirmed her responsibility in the decision: “I offered him an embassy, and he accepted.” Six words that contrast with the liters of ink that have been written speculating about the true causes of the removal.
Faced with the multiple theories that circulated since Wednesday night, fueled by the long hours of tension that were experienced on Thursday while waiting for the resignation letter, the president responded with simplicity and calmness, without hiding her satisfaction for the new stage that opens with the early departure of Alejandro Gertz Manero, the octogenarian former prosecutor who will soon land in an embassy.
In her own way, the president celebrated Gertz’s resignation and the arrival of Ernestina Godoy, the former Mexico City prosecutor with whom she lived as head of government and who served as her legal advisor in the Presidency. “I hope that now, once the new prosecutor is appointed, there will be even more coordination,” anticipated the president, who will have one more piece on the political board.
To the qualified majority in Congress, a new federal Judicial Branch with ministers and magistrates related to the fourth transformation, 24 governorships and majorities in twenty local Congresses, is added – as a new tool – the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic, whose autonomy has been called into question after the political operation that led to the departure of Gertz Manero.
The removal is a slap on the table that expands Sheinbaum’s power, by getting rid of one of the officials he inherited from his predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in an operation coordinated with the leader of the Morena senators, Adán Augusto López. He had distanced himself from the president in recent months, precisely due to the FGR’s investigations into the alleged leader of the criminal group La Barredora, Hernán Bermúdez Requena, a man close to the Tabasco politician.
Paradoxically, it was PRI senator Claudia Anaya who most clearly described the implications of the Gertz episode within the ruling party: “there was no resignation, there was a farewell to Gertz, presuming that he is leaving as ambassador and that in Morena everyone is disposable and that in Morena everything is negotiable.”
This blow also occurs after weeks of instability in which the president had lost control of the public agenda, following the assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, on November 1, and the 15-N march orchestrated by alleged Generation Z groups and opposition operators.
In the opinion of the opposition groups in the Senate, the maneuver closes the stage of autonomy that was intended to open with the reform that transformed the former Attorney General’s Office into an independent Prosecutor’s Office. “The resignation is the opening of a new chapter of political control, with a comfortable, quota-based and obedient prosecutor,” commented Senator Raymundo Bolaños, of the PAN.
The arrival of Ernestina and the paralysis of the opposition
In a brief slip, the president revealed that, in addition to prompting her resignation, Gertz was asked to appoint Ernestina Godoy as special prosecutor for Competition Control before leaving, which enabled her to remain as interim prosecutor, in accordance with the provisions of the Organic Law of the FGR. “The prosecutor accepted, he accepted… well, rather he appointed Ernestina Godoy in one of the areas,” Sheinbaum hesitated.
And, when asked if she would like her former legal advisor to be named head of the Prosecutor’s Office, the president said that this will correspond to the Senate, but she extended her praise to her collaborator: “she is an extraordinary woman, of principles, honest, with many convictions, and she demonstrated her results when she was prosecutor of Mexico City.”
Godoy herself issued a brief statement on her social networks, in which she thanked Sheinbaum for his trust in having appointed her legal advisor to the Presidency and confirmed her arrival to the special prosecutor’s office for Competence Control, which automatically made her the office manager. “I assume this new assignment with the same conviction that has guided my entire professional life: to serve the people of Mexico with ethics, firmness and a deep sense of justice.”
In the Morena leadership, Luisa María Alcalde remained silent about Gertz’s departure, and focused on the new interim prosecutor, whom she described as “an honest and principled woman, a tireless fighter for the most just causes of the people of Mexico.”
The departure of Gertz and the arrival of Godoy left the opposition silent, which was left distraught by the maneuver carried out by Sheinbaum and Adán Augusto. PAN members and PRI members have omitted to take stock of Gertz Manero’s seven-year management at the head of the FGR and have not made serious criticism of the way in which the replacement in a constitutionally autonomous Prosecutor’s Office was carried out. Furthermore, they arrived incomplete at the Thursday session in which the resignation was voted, assuming that Morena and her allies would add enough votes to approve the resignation process and the call to designate the next prosecutor.
Of the 21 PAN senators, eight were present and 13 were absent, among them its former national leader Marko Cortés, former governors Francisco Ramírez Acuña and Miguel Márquez, and former coordinator Guadalupe Munguía. Furthermore, the party’s positioning was made by Raymundo Bolaños, substitute senator for former Yucatecan governor Mauricio Vila, and not the coordinator Ricardo Anaya, who has avoided referring to the prosecutor who, at the time, had in his hands the investigations of the Lozoya case, which involves him and other PAN members in a case of alleged bribery.
Nor did the national leader of the PAN, Jorge Romero, speak out, who has been identified as the leader of the political clan known as “the real estate cartel,” which Ernestina Godoy investigated during her tenure as CDMX attorney general.
In the case of the PRI, eight of the 13 senators that make up the bench were present at the afternoon session on Thursday; Among the five absentees are the former governor of Coahuila Miguel Riquelme; the general secretary of the party, Carolina Viggiano, and the national PRI leader, Alejandro Moreno, who was also investigated at the time by Gertz Manero’s prosecutor’s office, without any results. Paradoxically, Moreno is one of the few politicians who publicly recognized the prosecutor’s work. “Alito” used his social networks to congratulate him for having worked legally and without political overtones, and to regret “the coup movement” that Morena undertook against him.
