It was September 1996. Almost 25 years ago the now president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sided with THE UNIVERSAL before the arrest for a few hours of the Executive President and the Board of Directors Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz for an alleged tax crime, an accusation that could not finally be upheld.
The president of the country was Ernesto Zedillo and AMLO had been the national leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for just over a month. López Obrador took office on August 2, 1996, and the arrest of Ealy Ortiz occurred on the night of September 12.
López Obrador himself recalled this Tuesday, in his morning conference, that he defended Ealy Ortiz almost 25 years ago, in the face of what seemed to him then an authoritarian rudeness of the Zedillo government:
“I remember that when President Zedillo, I defended Juan Francisco, because I wanted to put him in jail, and it was persecution. I think Chuayffet was the Secretary of the Interior, and I came out to defend him. “
Then, López Obrador said that the intervention of the police in the newspaper EL UNIVERSAL “is an authoritarian rudeness of the Zedillo government, which should not be allowed under any circumstances in Mexico.”
On page 14 of the September 14, 1996 edition of EL UNIVERSAL the informative note reads like this:
“(López Obrador) added that the laws must be applied without arbitrariness and without arrogance, and freedom of expression must be guaranteed in any circumstance and the rights of communication and the press must be safeguarded.”
The anecdote was brought by the President when criticizing a column by the columnist Salvador Garcia Soto. López Obrador accused that the text obeys a strategy of the newspaper, orchestrated by Ealy Ortiz himself against him.
In response, this Wednesday on EL UNIVERSAL both Ealy Ortiz and the newspaper’s columnists, columnists and cartoonists published texts addressed to the President, where they defend the first freedom of expression and the seconds the editorial freedom of their firms.
In 1996 there was also a display, on the part of the workers and collaborators of the newspaper in defense of freedom of expression:
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