Sentido Comun: Every weekday AMLO has a morning press conference, a mañanera. How do these differ from the press conferences he gave as the mayor of México City from 2000 to 2005?

As mayor, AMLO governed as more a traditional politician. But as the presidential candidate of a new party, he made himself into a political figure outside of the old system. Since becoming president in 2018, his style has become more popular, direct, and clear.

After 2018, for the first time, AMLO began using humor, and doing something that was formerly unthinkable for a tough politician. He began to humanize himself. He speaks personally, in his own voice and style.

Yes, AMLO has the help of a group of colleagues, but unlike other politicians, coached on how to smile and what to say and when, he breaks with those traditional forms of political marketing and creates a new form of political communication.

AMLO presents a new reality. He gives the historical background. He presents his projects, his alternatives. I invite you, the people, to join us, he says. The mañaneras have become more than an axis of communication. They have become the axis of government, in the sense that the people are learning what decisions are being made and why and how projects are progressing. They’re experiencing the substance of political debate.

For the first time, the people have a flesh-and-blood representative, no longer just an abstraction making speeche in a vacuum. AMLO is speaking to the people. The mañanera is not for the journalists, not for the media, not even for the politicians. In the communication process, the people see their president as the political subject — and take him seriously. This constant communication has increased his power.

AMLO talks a lot about history, doesn’t he, not just current affairs?

AMLO has the ability to tell the history of México from his perspective, with humor, culture, and music. This opens up people’s minds to stories that had been buried by previous administrations. Let's remember that neoliberalism closed memory, closed history, and, in so doing, closed the nation's independence project.

Back in 2010, under a neoliberal government, the political debate revolved around how we integrate into the United States. We had lost the Bolivarian dream of an independent, united Latin America. The market, they told us, amounted to our only choice. To integrate with the United States, we had to erase our historical memory.

AMLO is helping us recover our memory and history. The politician has become the teacher. He shares his historical knowledge, his political reading of history, to help us reflect on and understand the present. He is presenting us with a rare opportunity. From academia, we mostly get historical anecdotes, questions that don’t orient us politically — for example, did Pancho Villa escape dressed as a woman or not, or is that story just an urban myth?

What difference is there between the first mañaneras in 2018 and those today?

The first ones focused much more on trying to explain why we were doing what we were doing, because everything was happening so fast that even the government officials themselves asked where are we going. We had no time for “we’re going to do some studies, we’re going to do a feasibility analysis, we’re going to create a budget and then maybe in two or three years we’ll see where we can move forward.”

In an announcement about the fast timeline for Tren Maya, AMLO threw in a quote from a famous Mexican comedy that went viral. The rough translation:
“I’m on it, man!” View video

Andrés Manuel was moving fast: Let’s go here for this, for that. At the mañanera, he would explain what had already happened, almost like describing a train that had already passed. You learned where it passed and why. But now he talks more about where we are going. He engages in political debate with the opposition. Why is there opposition? What are the causes? Why does it oppose the fourth transformation? The mañaneras have become much more of a debate.

How do you and AMLO prepare? Do you meet five minutes beforehand? Do you set the agenda and prepare materials?

AMLO and I both know the issues of the day. I’m at cabinet meetings, so I can see what materials we can use. We consult, and AMLO will ask me to find information for him. I have various functions, and only one of them is producing the mañaneras.

Foto: J. Raúl Perez

AMLO takes questions and responds without any written notes in hand. Sometimes I’ll pass him a note card with a specific piece of information about something that’s happening — for example that Ecuador has dismissed the National Assembly — so he will be informed, nothing more. He comes up with his own answers.

You don’t see the mañaneras as a traditional press conference. How do you see them?

The mañaneras are constructing the narrative of the 4T, the Fourth Transformation. They take into account information — and disinformation. We inform the people where that disinformation is coming from. 

We let people know the agenda we want to set. We cannot let the opposition set the agenda by derailing us with non-issues, and that is why AMLO does not address the falsehoods directly. He may address them sideways, or go the other way.

Our communications have put in place a different political culture, one where people see how the president governs, the circumstances in which he is governing, and how he thinks in order to make decisions. So people feel informed, people feel empowered. They feel that we are paying attention to them, democratizing the country and constructing a citizenry with the tools and desire to exercises its rights.

You see the mañanera as the core of governance. To communicate is to govern, to govern is to communicate.

We aspire to represent the interests of the people, and so we don’t just talk, we listen.
For me, the most beautiful part of our communications happens when journalists, YouTubers, and people who work in social networks genuinely express the complaints and concerns of our citizens.