Accompanied only by five unarmed aides and a small collection of amulets, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador makes police and flight attendants alike tremble when he embarks on air travel, always in economy class.
Lopez Obrador stops for photographs with everyone, allowing them to kiss, hug or even grab him by the waist.
“Of course, whatever photos you like,” the smiling president said to a woman trying to snatch a photograph with her smartphone as he walked to the airplane ahead of a trip to Sinaloa, the dangerous state made famous by narcotics kingpin Joaquim “El Chapo” Guzman.
Lopez Obrador’s acquiescence sparked a near stampede as others swirled around the president looking for their own memento.
All the while, there was no security to push back the throngs.
Mexico’s leftist leader has done away with the thousands of military escorts looking after the president and sent them to work “for the benefit of the people.”
The presidential jet, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bought for US$218 million, is now on sale in California. Lopez Obrador traveled to Sinaloa on a cramped Embraer jet.
“How can I board this plane when there’s so much poverty in Mexico,” he had said about the Dreamliner.
Now he travels with a small retinue of aides headed by Daniel Asaf, a restauranteur of Lebanese origin and former candidate for Mexico City’s legislature.
The security services might be in a fluster, but Lopez Obrador is the most popular president in the country’s history with an 80 percent approval rating, a Mitofsky poll found.
Part of that popularity comes from his campaign promises to reduce his own salary and those of the government’s top officials.
However, Mexico City’s airport police are less impressed with Lopez Obrador’s humble availability.
“When he has to cross the entire airport, it’s the worst,” an anonymous airport police officer said. “People pounce on him. If one day someone wants to do something to him, we won’t be able to stop them, because he doesn’t like being guarded.”
“He can’t continue like this, he has to use the VIP room,” the officer said.
On this journey, Lopez Obrador was heading to one part of Mexico infested with drug traffickers and violent gangs. However, he has no fear of being attacked, believing himself protected by an assortment of talismans.
“I have a lot of protection — this is a shield,” he told reporters, holding up an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Among his other protective amulets, Lopez Obrador carries a four-leaf clover and a US dollar given to him by a Mexican migrant.
Upon landing at Culiacan International Airport, Lopez Obrador was met by throngs of supporters and angry widows of police officers killed in the fight against drug traffickers.
After all the commotion of his humble journey, the president had no time for the waiting masses and was whisked away by the local governor’s security detail.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the