The president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea, said that he received pressure during the government of Felipe Calderón to protect relatives of his wife Margarita Zavala, for the case of the fire in Guardería ABC de Hermosillo, Sonora, in 2019, where 49 children died.
“Today I can attest to a state operation to protect the family of the president’s wife, to protect the high public officials of that government that today comes to talk about the rule of law and autonomy and I do not know how many things, without any authority to say it,” said the president of the SCJN.
During the presentation of his book 10 years of rights. Jurisprudential autobiography, Arturo Zaldívar accused that the then Secretary of the Interior, Fernando Gómez Mont, visited him in his office to pressure him to change the draft sentence, where he pointed out the responsibilities of IMSS officials and relatives of Margarita Zavala.
Read: IACHR Admits ABC Nursery Case Because 11 Years Later, Mexico Has Not Clarified The Reasons for the Fire
“At one point the secretary says to me, ‘The president says we don’t support you for this’ and I said’tell the president that he nominated a minister, he didn’t appoint a secretary of state, that I’m not his employee and I’m not going to carry in my conscience the death of 49 children. And that’s where the talk ended,” he said.
When the fire occurred, which left more than 100 children injured, the children’s stay had as a partner Marcia Matilde Altagracia Gómez del Campo Tonella, cousin of Margarita Zavala.
He recalled that the case of the ABC Nursery was his “baptism” as a minister and when he took office some of his colleagues tried to surprise him to vote in favor of Calderón’s “authoritarianism”, which he did not accept.
“And the size of the move that my fellow ministers wanted to make to me, they thought that what I was going to do was validate the authoritarianism of Felipe Calderón and his government, and they never, ever expected that I was going to present a project like the one I presented,” he said.
Read: 11 years after ABC Nursery: zero detainees, one hundred families without reparation, and an incomplete law
Lelo de Larrea recalled that he gave instructions to make the draft sentence public and deliver it to the press before the possibility of not being presented before the Plenary of the Court. He also said he received “veiled threats from fellow ministers” and several warnings of different kinds, until the discussion of the issue was reached for three days.
In 2019, Arturo Zaldívar had already declared that he had been pressured by Felipe Calderón, who has denied that he had exerted pressure against him or the Supreme Court.
This morning, the deputy of the National Action Party (PAN) and wife of Calderón, Margarita Zavala, said that the minister of the Court “lies” by ensuring that he received pressure from the former president.
“Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea is also lying when he says that there was an operation to protect my family. The concession was years before Felipe Calderón entered the presidency. And it was the federal government itself that denounced and obtained arrest warrants even against a sixth-grade relative of mine and others,” he wrote.
“Focus on your work, which is justice in Mexico and you have done little for it in these years,” Zavala emphasized.
Zaldivar lies, lies @ArturoZaldivarL
Yesterday, while spending the public treasury at the presentation of his book he said that: while listening he “came up with” “tell them a story” and told many lies
I open thread
— Margarita Zavala (@Mzavalagc) February 23, 2022
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