The Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), Víctor Manuel Toledo Manzur, attacked the Fourth Transformation led by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
This through an audio that was released on social networks – and of which Semarnat did not reject the content and a federal source confirmed that it was real -, in which the official evidenced the differences and “power struggles” in the cabinet and pointed out that the Fourth Transformation “does not have as such a clear objective and is full of contradictions”, but also accused that it has been the subject of a blockade by the head of the Presidential Office, Alfonso Romo.
After the recording was released, Semarnat refused to set a position. Last night, in the first presidential circle it was taken as a fact that the official presented his resignation yesterday to López Obrador, who was on tour in Sinaloa and Sonora, but it was not necessary for the President to accept it.
In the audio, Toledo Manzur points out that the interests of the members of the cabinet and even those of President López Obrador himself are not in line with the axes outlined by Semarnat.
It is an audio of a video meeting of Toledo with his team, where he refers to 10 months in office, after replacing Josefa González Blanco, who resigned as head of the agency due to a scandal for delaying a commercial flight .
The dispute
“I would like to share with you what I have experienced, observed in these 10 months, because indeed the 4T, as such, as a clear and finished set of objectives, does not exist; On the contrary, this 4T government is full of contradictions and these are expressed specifically in power struggles within the cabinet, which I have noticed on several lines, I give you several examples, “he said.
He said that one of the main conflicts is with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (Sader), headed by Víctor Villalobos, because in the Environment they intend to reach agroecology, while Sader seeks agribusiness: “They try to impose, let’s say, all the vision that prevails in the world for large corporations ”.
He said that the head of the Presidential Office, Alfonso Romo, blocks the entire environmental line.
In the audio, Toledo indicates that Romo has called him to three meetings with Villalobos to put pressure on him, “because there was the glyphosate problem; Semarnat managed to stop it, it is the main poison, the main pesticide, and we already had to hold meetings to negotiate, because the response of Sader, of the North American government, of 20 embassies in Mexico, against what we did in Semarnat has been overwhelming ”. The issue of transgenic cotton also generated differences with the Sader.
He noted that the controversy over the construction of the Constellation Brands brewery in Baja California also generated differences between Semarnat and the Ministry of the Interior.
Discrepancies in the federal government have already cost the departure of the director of the IMSS, Germán Martínez, in May 2019, when denouncing the “pernicious interference” of some officials; in July Carlos Urzúa resigned from the SHCP due to disagreements with economic policy.
Javier Jiménez Espriú resigned from the SCT for not agreeing with the Navy control over ports and merchant marine.
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