Leftist in Name Only

Jorge Fernández Menéndez doesn't think much of the supposed leftists hanging around Martín Esparza:

The best photo. The advancing march. There one would expect to find the best of the Mexican left concentrated. Well, together with Esparza there were Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Manuel Bartlett, Gerardo Fernández Noroña, Jaime Cárdenas: none of them has ever been of the left. Muñoz Ledo, a man who was intelligent and now, in any forum or restaurant, like the street corner speakers from Hyde Park, limits himself to demanding the overthrow of Felipe Calderón. The same man who praised Díaz Ordaz for the massacre in '68, who was secretary of labor in the Echeverría government and organized the repression...of the SME. And the same man with a long history of betrayals and abandonments: of Cárdenas, Fox, and the PRD.

Bartlett has worked since 1988 to be in that group and only now is he achieving it. In 1987, he was the pre-candidate of the PRI of Porfirio and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas: if he had been unveiled by Miguel de la Madrid the PRD wouldn't have been born. What a paradox: he wasn't and it was his job to handle the election of 1988. He had his prize: with Salinas he was the secretary of education and governor of Puebla, both by presidential designation, but Manuel says that he was never a salinista. And he still managed to be senator for six years. Bartlett is an intelligent and sophisticated man, who somehow must have enjoyed that the SME protesters received him with applause rather than pictures of the dinosaur Barney.

There was the now rock-hard deputy Jaime Cárdenas. But now is his political origin even remotely of the left. Jaime began to shine when he was designated counselor of the IFE: he wasn't proposed by the PRD, but rather by the priísta Fernando Ortiz Arana, to whom he was close adviser. Once in the IFE his enemy was Zedillo (origin is destiny) and he displayed an independence that took him even to demand a life-long pension upon leaving the Institute. And immediately after he presented himself as a loyal follower of López Obrador. Why even mention Fernández Noroña? When was the now-ferocious deputy ever a part of the left? In his days as an IMSS worker? Now, like all good converts, he is the grand inquisitor of the "new left".

[Break]

[O]ur new left has ended up together with marginal provocateurs, together with the restorers of the oldest priísmo, allied with the broadcaster that it hated before, and with the most conservative wing of the church.