The Mexican government rests on a bed of lies. That is the foundation upon which it has built itself, and it is what will ultimately destroy it. They have lied about everything, and then had to build further lies on top of those falsehoods to buy more time. But nothing lasts forever.
López promised that the economy would grow faster than before. Instead, it has grown at barely one-third of its previous pace. He promised a toy airport—the AIFA—that would outperform the airport he chose to cancel, even after paying almost the full cost of that canceled project. He promised a Maya Train that would bring development to southeastern Mexico, and a refinery that would make us “sovereign” and energy self-sufficient. Every one of those promises was a lie.
He promised fiscal responsibility, yet drove the fiscal deficit to its highest level in four decades while simultaneously destroying the government’s capacity to govern effectively. He promised there would be medicines. He promised a gigantic national pharmacy. He promised a public healthcare system comparable to Denmark’s. Lies.
Lies, however, require constant effort to sustain because, little by little, they are exposed. To convince Mexicans that the economy was performing well, the government not only built white elephants and expanded cash handouts; it also falsified economic data. For more than a year, INEGI published false information about the construction industry, quietly revising it years later without ever announcing the corrections. Today they are doing the same thing with housing construction data, but also with information on oil refining and wholesale trade, inserting distortions here and there so as not to make the manipulation too obvious. It is on the basis of those figures that some people believe the economy is regaining momentum, when it is plainly evident that it is not.
They have lied about Pemex’s debt by concealing its obligations to suppliers, in large part by preventing invoices from even being entered into the accounting system. They eventually acknowledged roughly half of those liabilities, but kept them outside the regular accounts in order to create the illusion that the fiscal deficit had declined in 2025. It had not, and it has not. We are now seeing unusual behavior in the government’s gross debt figures and in its broader financing requirements—the measure that is supposed to capture the full scope of government obligations. We no longer know with certainty how large those obligations truly are. If, in addition, they are manipulating GDP figures to make the debt burden appear smaller, then they are deceiving their creditors.
To deflect the well-founded accusation that they are responsible for the fuel-smuggling operation—which was also used to finance election campaigns—they have accused Ernesto Ruffo, an honorable businessman, perhaps a naïve one. They did something similar not long ago with Jesús Murillo Karam, whom they blamed for conducting a flawed investigation into the Iguala massacre, only for that very investigation to be subsequently accepted in its entirety by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. They persecute people to distract attention, to deceive, to lie—because lying is their very nature.
The heart of that machinery of deception is the presidential morning press conference, la mañanera, and it has been ever since the previous administration. By intimidating media outlets and business leaders, those lies are echoed in headlines, news broadcasts, and front pages. From the days of “I have other data” to the current president’s unsupported assertions, falsehoods are a constant feature of the mañanera.
They are counting on the fact that, in the age of social media, nothing is perceived as entirely true or entirely false—that we have reached a point where contradictory information breeds only distrust and ignorance. They believe that will be enough. But with each passing day, another person goes without medicine; another family loses a loved one to murder or disappearance; another person loses time and opportunity because the electricity fails, because traveling at night is unsafe, or simply because there are no jobs.
In the end, once credibility is lost, everything is lost. That is especially true where creditors are concerned. Lying about the size of the debt and the size of the economy is an unforgivable offense. Once that becomes unmistakably clear, the curtain will fall.
Only a few months remain.