They’re liars, Mexico’s President on U.S.

Obrador

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has termed the U.S. as liars.

Media reports said:

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly called as AMLO, bristled over his government being accused by the U.S. State Department of human rights abuses, dismissing his country’s neighbors to the north as liars.

Speaking at a press briefing on Tuesday in Oaxaca, Mexico, Lopez Obrador responded angrily to Monday’s U.S. State Department report on human rights.

President Joe Biden’s administration claimed there were credible reports of unlawful killings by Mexican authorities, as well as forced disappearances, torture and otherwise inhumane treatment of civilians. The U.S. also chided Mexico for corruption, rampant crime and low rates of offenses being prosecuted.

Asked by a reporter about the accusations, Lopez Obrador said: “It is not true. They are liars. It is not worth getting angry about.”

The Mexican President added: “That is how they are.”

Lopez Obrador made his comments before a scheduled meeting later on Tuesday with former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, now Biden’s climate envoy.

Relations with Washington have soured in recent weeks amid a spate of kidnappings of U.S. citizens in northern Mexico, including a case in which two people were killed by a group associated with a drug cartel.

The Mexican president has suggested that an “anti-Mexico” conservative element in the U.S. government has inflamed tensions between the countries and used the fatal kidnapping incident to make attacks on his country’s safety record. “Mexico is safer than the United States,” he told reporters last week in response to the controversy.

AMLO said the U.S. government’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the ongoing political persecution of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange shows the U.S. State Department’s accusations of human rights violations in Mexico “should not be taken seriously.”

The U.S. State Department issued its annual report Monday on “Human Rights Practices.” The publication criticized the Lopez Obrador administration’s treatment of journalists and claimed that in Mexico, “impunity and extremely low rates of prosecution remained a problem for all crimes, including human rights abuses and corruption.”

In a stinging rebuke broadcast during his daily news conference, AMLO described the allegations as politically motivated, and said America’s obvious double standards mean the report “should not be taken seriously.”

“Let’s see, human rights? Why do not you release Assange?” he asked, referring to the jailed WikiLeaks publisher who faces potential extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges after revealing war crimes committed by American forces abroad. “If you are talking about journalism and freedom, why are you holding Assange?”

“If you talk about acts of violence, how is it that an award-winning United States journalist tells us that the United States government sabotaged the Russian-European gas pipeline?” the president continued.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently published a bombshell exposé revealing US divers used C-4 charges to demolish the Nord Stream pipelines, which had been providing Germany with cheap Russian gas.

“Why is a cartel, or several cartels, allowed to operate in the United States, freely distributing the fentanyl that does so much harm to young people in that country?”

“With all due respect, that is their nature,” Lopez Obrador said of the U.S. foreign policy elite, adding “they do not want to abandon the Monroe doctrine and the so-called Manifest Destiny.”

The U.S. officials behind the report, the president pointed out, “believe themselves to be the government of the world, and they only see the speck in the other’s eye and not the error in their own.” “But it is not worth getting angry over,” he explained, noting “that is just that’s how they are.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel responded to Lopez Obrador’s criticism on Tuesday by defending the U.S. allegations against Mexico’s government: “The reported involvement of members of Mexican police, military and other government institutions in serious acts of corruption and unlawful arbitrary killings remain a serious challenge for Mexico, and that is why they were highlighted in our report.”

The U.S. State Department is mandated by the U.S. Congress to produce its report on Mexican human rights annually, Patel said, adding that the U.S. has domestic challenges of its own. The official said: “We have never been ones to indicate that we are the government of the world or some kind of edict like that.”

Mexico’s administration was not the only Latin American government with choice words for the authors of the State Department report.

Bolivia’s foreign ministry issued a statement condemning U.S. allegations of human rights violations in the Andean nation as “interference in internal affairs,” criticizing the ‘unilateral’ report for failing to maintain objectivity.

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