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.

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“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.

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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.”

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“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.

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