Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández accused in an interview with EFE the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador of exercising a “terrible censorship that suffocates” to her new book ‘The Secret Story: AMLO and the Sinaloa Cartel’, on social networks and media, which she compared to the threats she has previously suffered for her publications.

“It’s a virtual murder when they don’t let you say things, when they don’t let you communicate, when, on the one hand, they take away any possibility of explaining the investigation,” Hernández said.

“On the other hand, the President of the Republic has the monopoly of communication, through his ‘morning’ conference, where there are already several occasions that disqualify me and disqualify my work. There are insults, there is machismo, there is misogyny,” he continued.

Mexico is the war-free country with the most journalists killed in the last decade, according to figures from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an organization that has also denounced the increase in the hostilities of the current government towards this profession, which increases the danger of exercising it.

Anabel Hernández, who has suffered these aggressions, recalled her colleague Javier Valdez, executed after publishing about Los Chapitos in Sinaloa, a “very painful” experience that the author mentions in the book.

“Althout Javier and I didn’t talk very often, when we talked and looked at each other, it was very deep because we both lived in terrible isolation,” he described.

“Because after you receive death threats, you are not thinking only of yourself, but of ‘if someone comes and shoots me, the lady next door shoots him, or the child who is in the cinema’, or what do I know,” Hernández added.

The author of ‘Los Señores del Narco’ (2010) pointed out that at the beginning of the current government, López Obrador “congratulated” her for her investigations into Genaro García Luna, former Secretary of Security of the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), now imprisoned in the United States for the revelations she published 14 years ago.

“Only now that he is the one who is being investigated, now he does denoy journalism. No, the power does not understand that journalists are not here to applaud it, we are to investigate it,” he said.

The journalist explained that “there are two key witnesses who testified against García Luna in New York,” who also pointed out López Obrador’s links with the cartel.

One, according to Anabel Hernández, is King Zambada, “who has already declared in court, in a trial that did give money to López Obrador’s campaign.”

And the other is “Sergio Villarreal Barragán, alias El Grande, who has also already declared in the PGR (extinct Attorney General’s Office) and in the trial of Genaro García Luna,” about the links of both politicians with organized crime.

In addition, Hernández defended that his sources are “direct witnesses” of the facts, which is not easy to process as a journalist, since it is necessary to question it and contrast it again and again, which becomes “very exhausting.”

The book is published in the middle of the campaigns before the elections of June 2 and, even, the opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez quoted it during the last debate last Sunday.

But the journalist indicated that the work “was in process for four years” and it was not until the end of 2023 and 2024 that she found “very important” testimonies that “put the last pieces of the puzzle” with “strongness and clarity.”

“I realized that the investigation was over, seeing that there really was such solid evidence that López Obrador came to power funded by the Sinaloa cartel,” he said.

The book, based on dozens of testimonies and judicial files from the United States, narrates how the Sinaloa Cartel would have financed López Obrador’s campaigns from 2006, until the mid-term elections of 2021, when his party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), devastated almost all States.

In the last chapter, ‘The Heiress’, Anabel Hernández proposes that that structure will probably pass into the hands of the ruling candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum.

“What I do have are many testimonies that there are members of the Sinaloa Cartel who are calling for a vote in favor of Claudia Sheinbaum. There are those who are saying that they will be better off with her than with Obrador,” he said.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, held a first meeting with political leaders in New Caledonia on Thursday to try to relaunch a dialogue between communities that puts an end to the riots, without an institutional setback.

Macron bet on the return to calm, but warned that this cannot be done by reversing the institutional level, specifically on the result of the three self-determination referendums held in that territory of the South Pacific in recent years.

“The appeasement cannot be not respecting the popular expression that has already been manifested,” he said, according to the images of the meeting disclosed by the Elysée.

However, Macron did not clarify whether the controversial constitutional law that opens the electoral census of the territory, whose approval in the French Parliament unleashed the wave of protests at the beginning of last week, will be maintained.

At the beginning of the meeting, a minute of silence was observed for the six deaths of last week, four civilians and two gendarmes.

The meeting took place at the residence of the High Commissioner (Government delegate) in the autonomous territory, and attended by independence leaders such as the presidents of the regional government, Louis Mapou, and the president of the regional Congress, Roch Wamytan.

They also attended loyalist leaders, such as the president of the southern province (one of the three that make up the territory), Sonia Backès, or the mayor of the capital, Numea, Sonia Lagarde.

Macron was in favor of not renewing the state of emergency, declared by the Government last week and which expires on Monday the 27th, but he conditioned it to the return of the situation to normal and all the barricades on roads and streets mounted by independence groups to be removed.

He also said that the reinforcement of a thousand police and gendarmes sent last week to reinforce the 1,700 agents already present in the territory will remain “as long as necessary,” even until the end of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The latter conclude on September 8.

Macron arrived on Thursday morning local time in the territory for a visit of about twelve hours, with the aim of giving a boost to the dialogue.

Although the situation has improved with respect to the worst moments of last week, it has not yet fully normalized.

A large part of the population continues to have problems with access to food and basic hygiene products due to the destruction of shops and travel difficulties, according to local media.

On the other hand, the damage of the riots amounts to about one billion euros, as reported today by the Chamber of Commerce of Industry, with about 200 companies burned and more than 2,000 unemployed workers.

A man with an explosive device was arrested this Thursday at the headquarters of the Portuguese far-right party Chega in Lisbon, where he allegedly wanted to kill the leader of the formation, André Ventura.

A source from the Public Security Police confirmed the arrest to EFE and added that it could be a case of “mental health” and that the suspect is being examined in a hospital.

For his part, Ventura, who this Thursday is in Funchal, the capital of the Madeira archipelago, where campaign events are held for this Sunday’s regional elections, told the press that he had been informed that “someone had entered or tried to enter” his party’s headquarters.

“I have very little information because they notified me now that I was coming here, to the center of Funchal, that someone had entered or tried to enter our headquarters and that he said that he was carrying an explosive device and that he wanted to kill me,” Ventura said.

The far-right leader added that the police have established a security “perimeter” around his party building in Lisbon and in the Parliament, which is nearby.

“This is a bomb threat and I don’t have much more information,” said Ventura, who anticipated that he will evaluate with the Police if there are more risks to his security or if it is an isolated situation.

“It is unfortunate that this escalation of violence can continue,” he stressed. We are going to re-evaluate our own security that we have at the headquarters.”

This event comes after, on May 15, a 71-year-old man shot at the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, a left-wing nationalist, in the town of Handlová, in the center of the country, where he was seriously injured.