There was no doubt that Mexico was going through a crisis.
This was evident in the lines of people who stretched the city blocks to refill the oxygen tanks. Howling ambulance sirens. In clouds of smoke coming out of crematoriums late at night.
But in the past few days, the frightening feeling that the coronavirus is everywhere has been amplified by the news that three of the country’s most powerful men are now sick with COVID-19.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 67, a center-left populist known for his legion of fans as AMLO, said on Sunday that he had tested positive for the virus and isolated himself in his apartment in the National Palace of Mexico with “mild symptoms” .
On Monday, Carlos Slim’s son, an 80-year-old telecommunications mogul and the richest man in Mexico, reported that his father has been suffering from COVID-19 for a week and is being treated in a hospital.
It was a flurry of shocking news for a country that was already closely monitoring the condition of Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, a 78-year-old retired archbishop who has been in intensive care since January 12.
The illness of three men who represent the country’s traditional axis of power – church, state and commerce – is a powerful reminder of how bad things have become in Mexico.
The country recorded nearly 150,000 official deaths from COVID-19 – the fourth highest number of deaths in the world. Even so, the authorities recognize that the true count is much higher. Mexico recorded 274,486 more deaths of all types in 2020 than in a normal year, and health experts said the vast majority are probably attributable to the pandemic.
The current increase in cases seems to be linked to the Christmas holidays, when families have gathered in large groups, despite requests from health authorities. For days, hospitals in several of the country’s major cities were nearly full, and many were forced to refuse desperate patients.
Some analysts said they expected the contagion of key Mexicans to be a necessary warning.
“Yesterday the president, today Mexico’s richest and most successful businessman,” said Gabriel Guerra Castellanos, a former diplomat and political analyst, on Twitter. “They add up to the approximately 1,800,000 cases officially confirmed so far in our country. Obviously, serious self-criticism and an urgent rethinking of the strategy is necessary.”
The López Obrador government has been criticized worldwide for its indifferent response to the pandemic. Mexico refused to invest in widespread testing, allowing contagion to spread undetected, and the president chose not to wear a mask even in public settings.
He announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday, shortly after returning to Mexico City from a multi-state trip, where for three days he held several meetings and participated in two events.
Local media cites unidentified sources within his government, who claim that López Obrador fell ill with flu-like symptoms on Saturday and took a COVID-19 test that day. Many criticized his decision to take a commercial Aeromexico flight home the next day, despite already feeling bad.
The president has repeatedly minimized the risks of the virus. In June, he told reporters that one of the tricks for not getting sick was good moral conduct. “Without lying, without stealing, without cheating, it helps a lot to not get the coronavirus,” he said.
Slim, on the other hand, has been one of the main defenders of the virus. He pushed for an agreement to supply mass vaccines in Latin America, and his charitable foundation was licensed by AstraZeneca to supply 150 million doses of the vaccine to the region.
Slim was once considered the richest man in the world, although he now ranks 21st on the list of Forbes billionaires, with an estimated fortune of about $ 60 billion.
Rivera was Mexico’s main Catholic leader before retiring in 2017.
A church spokesman said the former archbishop was in stable ventilation conditions at a hospital in Mexico City. He added that Rivera had received his last rites.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.