July 5, 2022
photo: Bill Hackwell
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, made an interesting comment on July 4, calling for the Statue of Liberty to be taken down if Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is not acquitted of all charges by the United States.
“If they take him to the US, they will give him a maximum sentence and he will die in prison,” said López Obrador during his morning press conference. “We have got to start a campaign to take down the Statue of Liberty, given to them by the French, in New York, because it is no longer a symbol of liberty.”
In order to start this campaign to defend the founder of WikiLeaks, López Obrador called for a convergence of the most important media platforms in the world. “If they don’t do it, their reputation will be tarnished,” he said.
He added that he will address this topic during his next meeting with US President Joe Biden, which is scheduled for July 12, in Washington. Mexico has repeatedly offered asylum to Julian Assange
López Obrador made these comments after being asked by the president of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), Fernando de Yarza, about the journalists murdered in Mexico, which de Yarza said was “unacceptable.”
“It is more of the same. It is the smear campaign against the government of Mexico,” said the Mexican president. He criticized WAN-IFRA as that association which “appears when they don’t like a government or a government isn’t doing what they want, or they protect outlets in Mexico that are angry because they don’t get the subsidies or advertisement money that was given to them before.”
While the hegemonic media still holds a lot of power in Mexico and even receives “grants” and funds from US government cutouts like National Endowment for Democracy (NED), it is the independent journalists or those working with smaller or regional outlets who remain the targets of organized crime in the country. Recently, journalist Antonio de la Cruz was murdered in the state of Tamaulipas on June 29. He was the 12th journalist killed in Mexico in 2022. López Obrador has promised to bring all murderers of journalists to justice, and the government recently extended the social security program to independent reporters or those who collaborate with small media outlets and have limited income.
Source: RT, translation Orinoco Tribune