The Mexican president’s petulance is a reminder that Mambí’s new owners can’t afford to make a Spanish-language Fox a Spanish-language MSNBC.
By WLRN – Tim Padgett
Jun 8, 2022
It’s tempting in Miami to blame the dominance of right-wing Spanish-language media – and its disinformation – on some intrinsic reactionary mania in the Cuban, Venezuelan and other Latino communities. But liberals and moderates who go that route can sound as narrow-minded as some of the talk-show hosts they decry at outlets like Radio Mambí.
True, Mambí (WAQI AM) is one of South Florida’s highest-rated radio stations because it perfected the art of McCarthyist mendacity long before Fox News ever hit cable. But Mambí’s had something else going for it: the fact that the Latin American left, especially in Cuba, so often can be as extremist as Mambí’s on-air personalities rant that it is. That reality, in turn, helps them convince their listeners that anyone Mambí decides is a “socialista” – a Democratic presidential candidate, a critical journalist, a Black Lives Matter activist – is Fidel Castro in sheep’s clothing.
We’re reminded again this week, at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, of how eagerly the Latin left services right-wing radio like Mambí – thanks to leftist-populist-narcissist Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO.
López Obrador is staying away from the summit President Biden is hosting. The reason: he’s protesting Biden’s eminently understandable decision not to invite the repressive left-wing dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to a gathering of hemispheric democracies. But while López Obrador wants you to think he’s a principled liberal, he looks instead like the sort of petulant lefty whose affronts help sell abogado de accidente ads on Miami radio.
For starters, López Obrador is declaring to the world that his jaded Che Guevara ideology matters more than the outrage of Cubans today being sentenced to one, two or even three decades in prison for merely protesting their communist government. Or that a fifth of Venezuela’s population has fled the country thanks to a socialist regime that U.N. has accused of crimes against humanity. Or that Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s own blood-stained leftist caudillo, “won” re-election last fall by tossing every one of his election opponents in jail for “treason.”
AMLO and the Latin American left are taking advantage of this week’s Summit of the Americas to once again show us how eagerly they service right-wing radio like Miami’s Mambí.
But here’s what else should make López Obrador the Halfwit of the Hemisphere award winner at the L.A. summit’s closing ceremonies: by promoting those three tyrannies, he’s also helping stoke the desperate migration that’s flowing out of or through them in unprecedented waves today, exacerbating an immigration crisis not only at the U.S. southern border but across the Américas.
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Read More: WLRN – Oh, AMLO. The Summit of the Américas is a warning to the buyers of Radio Mambí
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