The Historic Truth 2.0?

A version of this article appeared in The Mexico Brief

As the horror of an extermination camp discovered in Jalisco state hit the national headlines, President Claudia Sheinbaum found a familiar victim: former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her mentor and predecessor. He routinely floated conspiracies, spoke of campaigns against him amid rising crime and violence, and presented himself as the true victim in all circumstances.

“Leave him alone,” an annoyed Sheinbaum said at a morning press conference, referring to AMLO and the “narcopresidente” accusation. “All that again against President López Obrador, no, when the state prosecutor’s office had the property guarded.”

Sheinbaum won office promising to construct “the second level” of AMLO’s populist political project, the “fourth transformation.” But she’s already abandoned his stated security policy of “hugs, not bullets,” as she fends off U.S. pressure on fentanyl and migrants.

The president has stayed true to AMLO’s familiar pattern of downplaying atrocities, however, preferring to stall, gaslight and float conspiracies. She also blamed a familiar villain for the 4T: former president Felipe Calderón, who AMLO accuses of stealing the 2006 election from him.

“We’re going to show who spoke first about this,” Sheinbaum said Friday. “Many were Calderón’s functionaries.”

Shunning victims

Sheinbaum has continued AMLO’s stunning practice shunning of victims and their families – recall AMLO meeting El Chapo’s mother in 2020, while shunning victims of violence – while portraying her government as the supposed victim and target of shadowy forces. She also perpetuated the AMLO pattern of scandalizing the opposition and societal reaction to tragedies and the lack of government action rather than the actual violent acts. She also makes political hay out of highlighting problems in states still ruled by parties other than Morena and its allies such as Guanajuato (PAN) and Jalisco (Movimiento Ciudadano, though the party in other states – including Nuevo León – are aligned with the 4T.)

Much like AMLO, Sheinbaum has downplayed the problem of disappearances. Recall AMLO dispatching servidores de la nación – teams ostensibly promoting social programs, who are accused of acting as political operators – to carry out a census on the list of Mexico’s missing, insisting the registry was inflated. He told a morning press conference in 2023:

“It’s a campaign against us, being used in a vile way. Anything that helps them attack the government. So I’m offering an apology for what we have been defending.”

Fewer homicides, more disappearances

She recently presented information showing a decrease in homicides. The Mexican bishops’ conference issued a statement on security, calling the atrocity an “irresponsible failure of government authorities,” while saying disappearances were increasing as homicides dropped. Sheinbaum retorted, “They don’t have the correct information.” But anti-crime NGO Causa en Común presented government statistics showing disappearances surpassing homicides in 2023.

The president continued finding villains, however. She insisted bots were to blame – unleashed by the opposition – calling it “a baseless campaign that only seeks to discredit.”

Others screamed conspiracy. The pro-government La Jornada newspaper’s frontpage Rayuela column – which resembles an X post in style and incendiary content – questioned the existence of the extermination camp, where searchers say they found ovens for cremating victims and hundreds of pairs of shoes. The column then jumped on Sheinbaum’s claims of an orchestrated attack, stating, “The country is so rich and strong that despite so much looting and bot campaigns, it remains standing.”

Former government spokesman Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, now Sheinbaum’s chief of advisors, raised the prospect of the US using the discovery of an extermination camp as a pretext for military intervention. He told Canal 14:

“Reporters, journalists, and the media lent themselves to this campaign against the government, in the context of an international debate where the drug trafficking card is being used to pressure the country's sovereignty. The media obeyed foreign interests that seek to weaken the country and even justify an invasion.”

‘This is a circus’

The federal prosecutor’s office (FGR) organized a tour of the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, near the town of Tequila, where pro-government YouTubers and influencers – known for repeating a unanimous party line – insisted there was nothing to see at the site, much less an extermination camp. None spoke to any of the families desperately searching for their kin – long a subject of interest for foreign journalists and human rights activists.

The searchers – known as Madres Buscadoras – described the experience as a circus, with the site having been altered by the authorities to look like nothing was out of the ordinary. A madre buscadora preferring anonymity told EFE:

“I didn’t find anything. (This) is a circus, a joke. I don't know what they’re trying to do, but there's absolutely nothing like what we were trying to find. This place is cordoned off, but it’s clean. Even the floor is clean. There aren't even any leaves lying around. You can tell they swept.”

Still, searchers found a toothbrush, underwear, socks and spoons at the site, according to journalist Sandra Romandía, who participated in the FGR tour. She wrote at the opinion website Piso 51:

“It’s not just about the initial crime, but all the forms of negligence that follow: cleaning up the ranch before families arrive, preventing the search of important items, opening a site with human remains without protocol, and, most outrageously, doing so without anyone who can name what we’re seeing.”

A group known as Warrior Searchers of Jalisco discovered the site, located in an area rife with Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CNGJ) operations. They discovered ovens, bone fragments, backpacks, clothing and more than 200 pairs of shoes and figurines of the folkloric Santa Muerte. Groups of searchers say they’ve discovered at least 30 extermination camps over the past decade.

Passing the buck

The federal prosecutor’s office became in involved in the case, but handed responsibility back to the Jalisco state prosector’s office (FGE). The office has a history of bungling cases. Its morgues became so saturated that the FGE stored unidentified bodies in refrigerated tractor trailers. A scandal erupted when one of the trailers was parked behind a suburban Guadalajara neighbourhood, emitting a horrible stench. FGR head Alejandro Gertz Manero has largely blamed the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office, saying that it wasted six months without properly analyzing the crime scene.

“He rightly criticizes the Jalisco prosecutor’s office,” said Michael Chamberlin, activist working with families of Mexico’s missing. “But at the same time, the same criticism can be applied to him for everything he didn’t do, even though he had grounds to do so.”

Amid the noise and the politicking, Sheinbaum promised to send six reforms to congress to combat disappearances. Activists said many of the proposals are already in law.

Historic truth 2.0?

The attempts at damage control and controlling the narrative revived memories of “The Historic Truth.” The then-attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam coined the phrase during the investigation to reinforce the supposed veracity of the flawed official investigation into the 2014 attack on the 43 Ayotzinapa students. That narrative insisted the young men were kidnapped, turned over to a drug cartel, murdered and had their bodies burned in a funeral pyre. Subsequent investigations proved it was a lie. Then-president Enrique Peña Nieto also pushed the idea that the Ayotzinapa atrocity was an entirely local matter.

Sheinbaum wants to avoid another “historic truth,” especially with US scrutiny focused so intently on Mexican security. She’s also blaming local officials from a government not under her party’s control. But the government response to an atrocity causing popular outcry and attempts to push an official narrative feel uncomfortably similar.