President Pena Nieto Blames Journalists for Mexico's 'Bad Social Mood' Jorge Ramos - Fusion
go to original May 4, 2016

“In Mexico, suspicion and distrust are a collective illness.” — Octavio Paz

On a recent night of terror, multiple clashes broke out between federal police and heavily armed men linked to the drug cartels — a situation that has become dangerously common in recent years in Acapulco — and led to the temporary closure of some 3,800 of the city’s businesses and 100 schools.

But a few hours after the firefight, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was at a tourism fair in Guadalajara, lamenting the fact that so many Mexicans are in a “bad mood.”

Let me explain why things are so grim.

“They say that the [the country’s] in a bad mood … that the atmosphere is down,” Peña Nieto complained during a news conference in Guadalajara. On stage with him was a group of indigenous children. Cameras caught a young girl yawning and rubbing her eyes while the president spoke. “That girl is Mexico,” journalist Javier Risco tweeted.

He’s right.

Here was Peña Nieto promoting a campaign focused on boosting domestic tourism in Mexico … amid a wave of unspeakable violence. Sometimes it seems as though the president is asleep at the wheel, unaware of what’s happening in his own country and uninterested in discovering the truth.

...You’d be in a bad mood too if a relative or friend was among the 43 missing students — or among the other grim statistics. But Peña Nieto doesn’t see it this way. He thinks the media is to blame for Mexico’s bad mood. He naïvely believes that journalists who criticize him and his administration are aligned with the opposition, or that somebody is paying us off. No, we criticize him because he is incompetent.

Read the rest at Fusion

Related: Mexico Government: Four Laws Show Peña Nieto's Iron Fisted Efforts to Impose Social Control (Mexico Voices)

Related: 185,000 Killed in Mexico in 9 Years, 70,000 Under Peña Nieto (teleSUR)

Related: Alejandro Hope: So Much Violence, So Few Covering It (El Daily Post)

Photo: Getty Images

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