During a press conference, Andrés Manuel López Obrador presents a projection in which Carlos Alazraki will appear on June 30, 2022, Presidency
Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been involved in a controversy for two days. The president this week leveled sharp charges at Carlos Alazraki, a Jewish publicist who is extremely critical of the government, assuring that “he is of Hitler’s thinking” and “extremely conservative,” he said on Wednesday and repeated on Thursday. Among other things, the President criticized that he had told many lies against him just to harm him. At the root of the anger were alleged hoaxes involving Felipe Ángeles Airport, one of the flagship projects of this six-year tenure. The comment led to rejection from the Jewish community, which, according to a statement they issued, “rejected the use of Hitler’s term to refer to any person.” Alazraki responded with a letter saying he was “proudly Jewish”.
As every week, López Obrador’s morning conference this Wednesday included the controversial part, in which the Mexican government reports on what it believes to be false news over the past few days. This time it started with a broadcast from Atypical Te Ve, a YouTube channel created by Alazraki. Journalist and former opposition politician Beatriz Pagés was seen on the program that “very strange things” are happening at Felipe Ángeles Airport. “There are Venezuelan planes loaded with Venezuelans, they arrive in Mexico without going through immigration. We’re full of illegal immigrants, undocumented people and we don’t know what they’re coming to Mexico for.” Beside him, Alazraki and political scientist Javier Lozano nodded.
Publicist Carlos Alazraki during the premiere of a television series in Mexico City in 2015. Victor Chavez (WireImage)
The unveiling of the video this morning was intended to denounce comments of this nature without having any evidence to back the facts. But the claim didn’t stop there. López Obrador escalated the conflict by speaking, often in a violent tone, about the differences he has with the publicist, who also writes columns against the current Mexican government in the newspaper El Universal almost every week. “He’s extremely conservative, he’s like a Hitlerian,” the president said, “it’s assumed that because Hitler doesn’t exist anymore or Stalin or Franco or Mussolini doesn’t exist anymore, Nazi, fascist, Stalinist, right-wing thinking is already gone.” Spanish rancid. No, there is.”
The phrase sparked the ire of members of the Jewish community, who issued a statement to indicate that “any comparison to the most bloodthirsty regime in history is regrettable and unacceptable.” The document is signed by representatives of the Central Committee and the Tribuna Israelita, two of the main community organizations in Mexico. They were joined by journalists and members of the opposition, who accused him of using such expressions carelessly. For his part, Alazraki responded with a column in which he accepted being neoliberal, conservative and fifi. “And do you know who I owe all this to? To my beloved Mexico, which gave me every opportunity to develop, just like the majority of many Mexicans,” he wrote this Thursday. He also released a video in which he added: “I beg you not to insult me again with the bullshit you said.”
The fight escalated to the point that the President was again questioned on the issue this Thursday. “Mr. Alazraki, because he is a supporter of Hitler’s ideas,” affirmed López Obrador. The comparison goes back to an old quote by the publicist, which, according to the president, puts him in line with National Socialism because he advocates the practice of repeating a lie becoming the truth. “The more lies you spread against Morena, the better off you are,” the communicator can be heard saying about the ruling party in a video the president showed at the National Palace this Thursday. Alazraki founded a company that has been responsible for the advertising of large corporations such as Grupo Sanborns and Telmex for the past decade. He also worked on the political campaigns of former President Ernesto Zedillo and PRI member Roberto Madrazo.
Asked about the reaction of the Jewish community, López Obrador assured that he had “very good friends in the Jewish community”. And he added: “They are extraordinary builders, hardworking people, good people, but that doesn’t mean that the entire community has some sort of trademark to be able to do harm just because of their ideals, to influence a transformational movement, their thoughts, its conservatism and, I repeat, its Hitlerism.”
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