Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has criticised criminal charges against Donald Trump, suggesting that they were politically motivated to hurt his 2024 election prospects.
“Supposedly legal matters should not be used for purposes of electoral politics,” Lopez Obrador told reporters on Wednesday, a day after the former US president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to alleged hush-money paid to an adult film star.
“That’s why I don’t agree with what they’re doing to former president Trump,” Lopez Obrador added during one of his daily press briefings, in which he often opines on wide-ranging topics.
He described the charges against 76-year-old Trump, who has already announced another White House bid, as a “smear campaign.”
It is the second time in recent weeks that Lopez Obrador, 69, has come out in defence of Trump.
On March 21, he had suggested that if Trump was indicted it would be to stop him running for president next year.
“It should be the people who decide,” said Lopez Obrador, who said he could not say whether Trump was guilty or not.
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Personal motivations
Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist, had cordial relations with Trump despite the right-wing populist’s fiery rhetoric, such as during his 2016 election campaign when he branded Mexican migrants “rapists” and drug dealers, aside from Trump’s plan to build a wall between the two countries.
Apart from the United States, Mexico’s president has also waded into the politics of other countries, most notably Peru, whose president was removed from office late last year.
Lopez Obrador has repeatedly described the ouster of Pedro Castillo, who attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, as “illegal.”
Those remarks have sparked a diplomatic spat between the two countries, with Peru expelling Mexico’s ambassador in late February.
Lopez Obrador’s motivations for defending Trump may be personal.
Beginning in 2004, Lopez Obrador, then the mayor of Mexico City and the frontrunner for Mexico’s presidential election in 2006, was the subject of a judicial process that he said was a political plot by Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox.
The federal government’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to put Lopez Obrador on trial for charges of contempt of court threatened to keep him from running for president.
Lopez Obrador went on to lose the 2006 and 2012 presidential election — results he did not accept, alleging massive voter fraud.
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