Three photographs in the book of President Claudia Sheinbaum, Diary of a historical transitionare eloquent regarding the closeness with former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The image on the cover, where both look at each other and smile while walking through one of the corridors of the National Palace; the second from the chapter “Photographic File I”, taken in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, while passing through a customs in a fraternal embrace, and the closing one, during the transmission of the Executive Power.
The power of the image capable of synthesizing the smooth transition between presidents—diametrically opposed to the old custom of taking distance—detailed in 220 pages full of anecdotes and political and social references.
“Never in the history of the country has a transition like this been seen. Not even in the old days of PRIism. In the past, the elected President used to distance himself from his predecessor, chart a new course,” Sheinbaum points out in the first chapter.
History proves him right. In the 70s, José López Portillo sent his “lifelong friend,” Luis Echeverría, to the embassy in the Fiji Islands, almost nine thousand kilometers away as the crow flies. Twenty years later, Ernesto Zedillo forced Carlos Salinas de Gortari into exile in Ireland, a country without an extradition treaty.
Perhaps that is why it is very difficult for some to accept a relationship between the President and the former president without the need for a breakup that legitimizes the successor or the marking of ideological distances to define their own political course. On page 178 Sheinbaum clarifies reasons: “He [AMLO] is the origin. We, continuity.”
Within this structure of continuity, work from the territory takes on capital relevance. There is recognition of the management that the now Head of Government of Mexico City, Clara Brugada, had as Mayor of Iztapalapa, with three central programs that transformed daily life: Paths for Free and Safe Women, the Utopias and Mercomuna. “A great leader, honest, creative, great organizer and good ruler,” the President writes of her.
The unity of the movement is even sustained by the diversity of profiles. Regarding speculation about her support for a candidate in the internal contest in CdMx, between Omar García Harfuch and Brugada, Sheinbaum was clear: “I never personally supported one or the other.” Morena brings together a large sector with diverse profiles, where the legacy of Obradorism and its movement, in the words of the same author, “does not belong to me or its children or grandchildren.”
Diary of a historical transition It not only documents the transition from one administration to another, but also the construction of a different way of exercising power in Mexico.
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