The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-09-24)

86 The New York Review

Dr. John Ackerman, both academics, in-
explicably managed to accumulate prop-
erty worth $3 million over the past two
decades. Worse still: in her declaration of
assets, which is compulsory for all public
employees, Sandoval omitted information
so as to prevent her fortune from looking
too outrageous. A formal complaint against
her is before the Secretaría de la Función
Pública.”
Sandoval and myself are not worth $3
million; nor did we omit any information in
our declaration of assets.
Krauze is referring to the media reports
of Carlos Loret de Mola, someone noto-
rious in Mexico for fabricating false news
“scandals.” For instance, in 2005 Loret
staged the fake capture on live television
of an alleged French kidnapper, Florence
Cassez, on orders from former federal
police chief Genaro García Luna (www
.sinembargo.mx/11-12-2019/3693451).
García Luna is now locked up in New York
on drug-trafficking charges.
Indeed, Loret has lost so much credi-
bility in Mexico that he has been reduced
to anchoring a YouTube show produced
in Delaware (latinus.us/2020/07/30/latinus-
originals-loret-capitulo-9/). In calling Loret
an “investigative journalist,” Krauze is en-
dorsing a paradigmatic creator of “junk
news.”
In our own case, Loret did not “inves-
tigate” or “reveal” anything. His report
merely reproduces, and grossly misrep-
resents, the very same information orig-
inally included in Sandoval’s own assets
declaration. The “journalist” invents mar-
ket values for our house, acquired long be-
fore Sandoval became a public servant, and
intentionally ignores both the inheritance
she received from her deceased father and
the financial support I have received over
decades from my parents, Bruce and Susan
Ackerman, both professors at the Yale Law
School.
Many readers of The New York Review
may not be aware of the fact that my wife,
Irma Sandoval, currently serves in Presi-
dent López Obrador’s cabinet as his comp-
troller general (Secretaría de la Función
Pública). As a consequence, she is playing
a central role in his historic crusade against
the pervasive corruption that prevailed
during the previous administrations of En-
rique Peña Nieto and Felipe Calderón.
Krauze’s endorsement of an outrageous
“formal complaint” lodged by opposi-
tion politicians defending impunity for
Peña Nieto and Calderón, and based on
junk news reports by a collaborator with
Calderón’s notorious police chief, García
Luna, marks a tragic moment in the career
of a once-respected intellectual.

Dr. John M. Ackerman

Professor, Institute of Legal Research

National Autonomous University of

Mexico (UNAM)

Mexico City, Mexico

Enrique Krauze replies:

I find it striking that neither the letter from
Edward Blumenthal and James Cohen nor
the letter from John Ackerman makes even
the briefest reference to the tragic situation
that Mexico is in today. Since “Mexico’s
Ruinous Messiah” was published [NYR,
July 2] there have been another 330,110
people infected with the coronavirus and
the death toll has risen from 29,189 to
61,450. The economy continues to nosedive,
with an estimated drop that is no longer 8.4
percent for this year but 9.9 percent, and
the number of murders—17,982—in the
first half of 2020 marks a twenty-five-year
high. But none of this appears to matter to
Blumenthal, Cohen, and Ackerman, whose
evident purpose is to praise López Obra-
dor’s “anti- corruption crusade.” That it is a
crusade is not in doubt. López Obrador has
declared, “I’ll put a mask over my mouth
when corruption is over.” In the meantime,
the numbers of sick people, poor people,
unemployed people, deaths, and crimes all
pile up.

At the head of the anticorruption cru-

sade is the comptroller general (Secretaría

de la Función Pública), Irma Eréndira

Sandoval, Professor Ackerman’s wife. My

comments regarding the origins of their

real estate properties are based on formal

accusations made in the Mexican Congress

by elected representatives, who have a le-

gitimate interest in the case. The National

Action Party (PAN) federal deputy Ernesto

Alfonso Robledo Leal filed a complaint at

the Secretaría de la Función Pública that

Sandoval heads, pointing out inconsisten-

cies between Sandoval and Ackerman’s in-

come and five property acquisitions made

within a nine-year period when their in-

come working at the National Autonomous

University of Mexico was disproportion-

ately lower than the cost of the proper-

ties.^1 My comment and concerns also echo

allegations by multiple journalists that are

in the public domain regarding Sandoval.^2

Robledo Leal and the PAN senator Xóchitl

Gálvez demanded that Sandoval step down

from her position and that an investiga-

tion be launched.^3 No investigation is yet

underway.

Ackerman denies any validity to the

accusations because they come from pol-

iticians who are “defending impunity for

Peña Nieto and Calderón.” I am defend-

ing no impunity, not now and not ever. My

criticism of both those governments, be-

fore this “tragic moment in the career of a

once-respected intellectual,” can be found

in “Mexico at War” (NYR, September 27,

2012) and in “Confidence in Mexico” (The

Nation, March 16, 2016). My criticisms of

López Obrador’s political messianism have

been public since 2006.^4 These are the crit-

icisms for which Ackerman cannot forgive

me. And I’m not surprised: he defends Ven-

ezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s gov-

ernment on Russia Today,^5 applauds López

Obrador’s attitude toward Donald Trump,^6

and in 2015 granted James Cohen an inter-

view to laud “the new Mexican revolution,”

which is now being led—from the trenches

of the Palacio Nacional, and with no mask

on—by President López Obrador.^7

FAILURES OF DIPLOMACY

To the Editors:

Steve Coll’s well-informed and insightful

review of Samantha Power’s The Education

of an Idealist [NYR, May 28] gives, rightly,

large play to the Obama administration’s

decisions about Libya and Syria, and how

Power’s own views about “idealism” and

“realism” align with those decisions. But

more attention should have been paid, I be-

lieve, to the decision to abandon the non-

Arab people of Darfur, who in 2008 were

enjoying their last year as a true human

rights cause célèbre.

Before entering the administration,

Power had been a powerful voice in point-

ing out that the counterinsurgency against

Darfuri rebels waged by the regime of Omar

al-Bashir was “genocidal”—that the real

targets of the brutal militia forces and regu-

lar Sudan army were civilians perceived as

supporting the rebels. Obama himself had

declared as candidate for president that,

When you see a genocide in Rwanda,

Bosnia or in Darfur, that is a stain on

all of us, a stain on our souls.... We

can’t say “never again” and then allow

it to happen again, and as a president

of the United States I don’t intend to

abandon people or turn a blind eye to

slaughter.

But in fact, over whatever protestations

Power might have made privately, the

Obama administration did turn a “blind

eye,” that blindness most conspicuous in

the selection of a hopelessly incompetent

and unqualified special envoy for Sudan,

Air Force Major General (Ret.) Scott Gra-

tion. Gration—who had no history as a dip-

lomat, no particular knowledge of Sudan,

and no Arabic—managed in the two years

of his tenure to set back immeasurably the

prospects for any peaceful resolution of the

Darfur conflict or for holding accountable

those in the al-Bashir regime responsible

for genocide (Gration’s singular virtue was

having served the Obama campaign well

with the military establishment). Al-Bashir,

who was deposed last year, had earlier been

served arrest warrants by the International

Criminal Court in 2009 and 2010, charging

him and others in his regime with genocide

and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Yet for someone who had gained fame

as a historian of genocide, Power seemed

unable to find her voice in public commen-

tary on the continuing catastrophe. The real

determination of US policy in the face of

genocidal conflict whose death toll now ex-

ceeds 500,000—with some 2.5 million non-

Arab Darfuris either internally displaced

or refugees in eastern Chad—was gov-

erned by the US intelligence community’s

lust for a relationship with Khartoum that

would yield “valuable” counterterrorism

information.

Some might see this as the quintessence

of “realism”; others might see it as the ul-

timate failure in the face of conspicuous

genocide. Some discussion of how Power

came down in arbitrating the competing

claims of these world views would have

provided a fuller view of her “education as

an idealist.”

Eric Reeves

Smith College

Northampton, Massachusetts

To the Editors:

In “The Struggle for Better” Steve Coll sug-

gests that the Obama administration’s fail-

ures to use the military to contain mass vio-

lence in Libya and Syria reflected America’s

historic temerity “in high-risk cases” that

are neither “politically popular at home”

nor “aligned with national interests.” How-

ever, his review ignores the existence of

alternative international diplomatic initia-

tives to reduce and end those killings and

how they were undermined by US military

interventions he declines to discuss.

As Coll notes, US-led NATO air attacks

succeeded in defending rebel-held Ben-

ghazi from onrushing Libyan government

troops. Yet he does not mention the suc-

ceeding seven-month air and covert action

operation that enabled the fledgling rebel

grouping to overthrow the Qaddafi regime

(and by the way, exceeded the UN authori-

zation of force). Nor does he take account

of an alternative diplomatic initiative by the

African Union to achieve a cease-fire, im-

plant a UN peacekeeping force, and foster

a gradual democratic political transition.

Rather than assist this diplomacy, which

might have prevented tens of thousands of

deaths during the anti-Qaddafi campaign

and subsequent civil wars as America’s

fragmented rebel client imploded, the US

subverted it.

Similarly, Coll’s portrayal of the Obama

administration’s military “passivity” in

Syria does not reckon with the publicly

acknowledged CIA paramilitary arms

and training program for severely frag-

mented rebels. “Operation Timber Syca-

more,” which reportedly cost up to $1 bil-

lion a year, was coordinated with a larger

multibillion- dollar effort by Saudi Arabia,

Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan. The Assad re-

gime countered with escalating support

from its own allies: Hezbollah, Iran, and

Russia. Despite the opportunities provided

by a long military stalemate, the US did not

adequately back UN mediators who sought

to concert the considerable leverage of the

external actors to haul the obdurate Syrian

parties toward a cease-fire and realistic po-

litical solution. Consistent US support of

this peacemaking effort—also ignored by

Coll—might have prevented some of the

horrors that continue to unfold today.

The Obama administration (including,

regrettably, Samantha Power) slighted the

largely nonmilitary “toolbox” of statecraft

to prevent mass killings that Power had pre-

viously recommended in her prize-winning

antigenocide book. While we cannot know

for sure how US-backed diplomacy would

have fared in Libya and Syria, any progress

toward reduced mass violence would have

been better than what we have today. Ac-

tually, from 1990 to 2013 a larger percent-

age of civil wars were resolved by negoti-

ated settlements than by military victories.

These included internationally mediated

settlements in Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia,

Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Sal-

vador, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Sudan

that too many policymakers appear to have

forgotten. No one knew that those arduous

negotiations would succeed until they did.

At the very least, promoting diplomacy

should have been the administration’s first

choice.

By ignoring the counterproductive mili-

tary measures the Obama administration

took amidst mass violence in Libya and

Syria, Coll also misses how they harmed

more hard-headed US national interests.

These regime- change interventions seri-

ously damaged the administration’s “re-

start” policy of warming relations with

nuclear-armed Russia, reinforced nuclear

weapons proliferation hawks in North

Korea and Iran, and contributed to the

spread of armed jihadism in West Africa

and the Middle East.

Stephen R. Weissman

Reston, Virginia

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out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of

the next issue will be October 8, 2020.

(^1) “Acción Nacional Denuncia ante la SFP a
su titular, Eréndira Sandoval, por presuntas
faltas administrativas,” Boletín 720, Grupo
Parlamentario del PAN, July 7, 2020.
(^2) Óscar Constantino Gutierrez, “Los
Ackerman- Sandoval cobraron varios miles
de pesos al INAI, el organismo que AMLO
golpetea,” Etcétera, August 3, 2020; “Quién
es Pablo Amílcar Sandoval, el hermano
incómodo de la Secretaria de la Función
Pública,” Infobae, July 21, 2020; “Aparece
casa de Amílcar Sandoval... desaparece
otra,” Grupo Reforma, July 20, 2020; Cit-
lal Giles Sánchez, “Denuncian a Amílcar
Sandoval ante la Fepade por mal uso de
los programas,” La Jornada, July 28, 2020;
Guillermo Sheridan, “Pequeña rebelión en
la granja,” El Universal, August 4, 2020;
Guillermo Sheridan, “Ackermans y San-
dovales: ‘La familia es familia,’” El Uni-
versal, June 16, 2020; Guillermo Sheridan,
“... Pero Algunos son más Ackerman que
otros,” El Universal, July 13, 2020.
(^3) “Denuncia presentada por la senadora
Xóchitl Gálvez ante la SFP,” Grupo Parla-
mentario del PAN, Senado de la República,
June 24, 2020; “Solicita Xóchitl Gálvez
auditoría voluntaria de la evolución pa-
trimonial de Irma Eréndira Sandoval por
inconsistencias en su declaración,” Grupo
Parlamentario del PAN, Senado de la
República, June 24, 2020.
(^4) “El mesías tropical,” Letras Libres, June
30, 2006.
(^5) “En Venezuela se juega el futuro y la
dignidad de toda América Latina,” Febru-
ary 12, 2019.
(^6) “We Should Celebrate Trump’s Meeting
with López Obrador as a Strategic Triumph
of Reason Over Politics,” The Washington
Post, July 7, 2020.
(^7) “L’ordre politique mexicain, la violence et
le rôle des États-Unis: Un entretien avec
John Ackerman,” Politique américaine,
Vol. 25, No. 1 (2015).