Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has come under a lot of fire at home and abroad for shaking hands with the mother of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of the world's bloodiest drug traffickers. But I wouldn't be surprised if Lopez Obrador is quite happy with all the criticism he's getting.
Much like President Donald Trump, Lopez Obrador is a master of deflection. He constantly creates artificial scandals to divert attention from the things he doesn't want his country to talk about. And these days, there are a lot of things that Lopez Obrador doesn't want Mexicans to talk about.
First, shortly before his handshake with Maria Consuelo Loera last weekend, Lopez Obrador had become a global poster child for irresponsible leadership in the face of the coronavirus crisis.
As late as in mid-March, months after the virus' outbreak in China, Italy, Spain and the United States, Lopez Obrador was minimizing the pandemic. He kept organizing mass rallies around the country and shaking hands with hundreds of people, against all experts' recommendations to maintain social distance.
What's worse, he had called on Mexicans to keep hugging one another and to go to restaurants for dinner. He even posted a video on his Twitter account kissing _ and jokingly biting _ a little girl on the cheek, before beginning to admit the seriousness of the virus at the end of March.
Second, Mexico's economy _ which had come to a halt even before the coronavirus pandemic _ is falling at a faster rate than many expected.
With oil prices plummeting, tourism coming to a halt, exports collapsing because of the U.S. recession and capital flight increasing because of Lopez Obrador's failure to understand that Mexico can't grow without private investments, economists now project a negative growth rate this year.
Before the coronavirus crisis, most economists were predicting that Mexico's economic growth would be near zero this year. But now, most are now forecasting it will be of at least minus 5% or more, unless the government unveils a sweeping economic-recovery program.
Third, homicide rates _ one of Mexicans' main concerns before the outbreak of the pandemic _ have risen to record levels under Lopez Obrador. While homicides fell slightly during the first two months of 2020, they reached a 20-year record of 34,582 in 2019, according to official statistics.
Fourth, and perhaps most important to him, Lopez Obrador's once sky-high popularity rates are beginning to fall. A recent poll by Mexico's daily Reforma shows that his approval rate fell from 78% early last year to 59% today.
If Lopez Obrador didn't plan for his handshake with El Chapo's mother to be taped and go viral in social media, he must be welcoming the national debate it triggered.
Critics rightly say that, in addition to a handshake at a time when he should be an example of keeping at a safe distance from others, Lopez Obrador, in effect, also gave the mother of a mass murderer social respectability. Why did he greet her while refusing to meet with leaders of Mexico's leading anti-violence civic groups, critics ask.
In the 30-second video released Sunday, Lopez Obrador is seen walking to the car of the drug lord's mother during a tour of the northwestern state of Sinaloa, shaking hands with her and telling her that he had "received the letter." Lopez Obrador later explained that she had sent him a letter asking for help to visit her son in a U.S. prison.
In a way, the scandal around Lopez Obrador's handshake is no different than Trump's March 22 tweet bragging about his "record" TV ratings during his daily coronavirus briefings, at a time when growing numbers of Americans were dying.
The media rightly called it scandalous, but it helped Trump divert public attention from the much more important criticism that he had minimized the coronavirus crisis for two months _ a critical time during which he should have ordered test kits, masks and respirators to help prevent the current death toll.
The bottom line is, we should all beware of leaders who _ like magicians _ constant distracting our attention with new scandals to overshadow much more important ones.
