Mexican president stopped by protest, misses news conference

MEXICO CITY – The SUV carrying Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was stopped and surrounded by a extremist teachers’ radical Friday, preventing him from starring his accustomed regular greeting quality conference.

The incidental occurred successful the confederate authorities of Chiapas. López Obrador’s conveyance was allowed to procede aft a mates of hours.

The president sat wrong the conveyance and refused protesters’ demands that helium clasp a gathering with them past and there. In a unrecorded watercourse from wrong the SUV shown astatine the property conference, López Obrador said helium could not let himself to beryllium held hostage by peculiar interests.

“I cannot let myself to beryllium blackmailed by anybody,” the president said. He was stopped conscionable a fewer miles from the tract wherever the quality league was to beryllium held, and different officials already contiguous carried connected with the briefing successful his absence.

But López Obrador besides stressed that the incidental was an illustration of his argumentation of non-violence and avoiding the usage of force. He noted that helium was stopped connected a roadworthy successful beforehand of a subject barracks, but would not telephone retired the service to disperse the protesters.

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“This is what (Nelson) Mandela did, this is what (Martin) Luther King did, this is what (Mahatma) Gandhi did, non-violence,” López Obrador said.

But the little holding of the president was besides an lawsuit of however immoderate of his ain policies person backfired connected him.

López Obrador has been kinder to extremist teachers than immoderate of his predecessors, endorsing their demands for less-stringent teacher evaluations and amended conditions. Past administrations had cracked down connected the extremist teachers' national known arsenic the CNTE, which has been known for blockading roads, railways and full cities.

By Friday, adjacent López Obrador admitted that the national enactment successful immoderate states had gone bad.

“In Chiapas state, and besides successful Michoacan, the leaderships person go peculiar interests,” helium said. “I cannot surrender to immoderate peculiar involvement group.”

López Obrador has besides refused to usage the statesmanlike jet, preferring to question with a tiny unarmed information item and utilizing commercialized flights and crushed transport wherever helium can.

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His instructions to police, soldiers and the National Guard to debar confrontations whenever imaginable has besides fixed freer reign to cause cartels, vigilantes and different groups successful immoderate areas.

It was 1 of the fewer times that López Obrador has been absent from the unprecedented regular greeting quality conferences helium has held astir each weekday since helium took bureau Dec. 1, 2018.

When the president caught COVID-19 successful precocious January, helium handed implicit the quality conferences to then-Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero for a mates of weeks earlier returning.

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