If he had had the presidential blessing, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel would have moved to Washington DC at least two years ago. Outside the National Palace, the Michoacán politician must now dispatch in Caracas, where the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States has its headquarters.
The pro tempore presidency of that organization in which 33 countries of the hemisphere have representation has fallen, for three months, to the first of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. In Buenos Aires, three months ago, the presidents Alberto Fernández, of Argentina, and Luiz Inacio Da Silva, of Brazil, headed the bloc of dignitaries that agreed to relaunch Celac —current version of what once was the Contadora Group and the convening body of the CALC-, after 12 years of operation.
And that purpose —different from that of the Rio Group— necessarily involves the establishment of a permanent secretariat. The former coordinator of advisers to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been left in charge of that task. And the generational change?
The General’s grandson, 59, has spent nearly two decades outside of Mexico. His third departure could be assumed to be an exile, rather than a negotiated departure. Just three months ago he had planned —for the third time— to leave the presidential team, just on the eve of the presentation of Mexicolectivo, a plural initiative that seeks to build an alternative to the 2024 elections.
The palace intrigues confused the participation of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in that group with the promotion of an opposition presidential candidacy and thus the process of separating the two most influential leaders of the Mexican left was accelerated.
Cárdenas Batel held his first popularly elected position in 1997. His father won the Headship of Government of the Federal District and the young anthropologist—who had returned from Havana, where he lived for almost a decade—arrived in San Lázaro. In 2000 he went to the Xicoténcatl mansion, although he spent a year and a half in that seat, the same one he left to win the governorship of Michoacán.
The defeat of the leftist front in 2006 slowed his rampant career in public service. In 2008, when his six-year term ended, a large sector of the PRD —including the bloc related to López Obrador— proposed that he take charge of the party leadership, but he declined to move to Washington DC after accepting the invitation to join the party as a senior scholar. Woodrow Wilson Center.
It was a decade sabbatical. He returned to CDMX and was offered a candidacy for the Senate of the Republic, which he vehemently rejected. His incorporation into the AMLO team, as an advisor, has since been conditioned.
His performance as coordinator of advisers was subject to the agenda, which opens daily at 11:00 am, after the security meeting, the morning session and the presidential breakfast. One of the criticisms that was frequently heard was precisely about the time he spent in the National Palace.
The same happened with César Yáñez Centeno-Cabrera, who in the first part of the six-year term was the coordinator of Politics and Government, but had limited access to his boss. At the end of 2020 –partly due to sanitary restrictions, but above all due to a remodeling of the official residence and the iconic headquarters of the Executive branch that provided the military command with more spaces– they received the instruction to relocate their collaborators in the building Avenida Constituyentes and coordinate their entry into the presidential office with the Assistant.
Yañez Centeno joined the team led by Adán Augusto López Hernández in September 2021. Then, the ex-governor of Michoacán was on the list of probable substitutes for Marta Bárcena, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, a position to which Esteban Moctezuma Barragán was finally sent.
Cárdenas Batel had suggested his move to Washington DC to Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, who proposed his appointment as Mexico’s representative to the OAS. The Puebla Group would undertake the defense of Evo Morales and would seek to consolidate the “progressive” governments, although the triumphs of the right in Central America.
“Lázaro is an efficient operator and endured a rod in the Palace, where he separated from the grids of Jesús and Alejandro,” acknowledge officials of the Fourth Transformation, who do not rule out the option of projecting him for the candidacy for head of government of Mexico City . Why brunette?
