The Cherry Boy

I met Jorge González Torres during the 1988 election campaign. He had broken with the PRI, in which he held modest positions, and had founded the Mexican Green Party—an organization that was not registered at the time—which joined the presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas .

I met him again six years later, as the presidential candidate for his party, now renamed the Green Ecologist of Mexico. That time I interviewed him in an office he had in Copilco. He welcomed me into a dimly lit room, where copal was burning in a clay pot. González Torres and a group of indigenous women were putting together a puzzle on a dining room table. “This is very important for our strategy,” he told me, very seriously, still scanning the pieces.

In 2000, the PVEM (Poverty Reduction Party) formed a coalition with the PAN (National Action Party) to bring Vicente Fox to the presidency. The following year, González Torres stepped down as party leader and placed it in the hands of his son, Jorge Emilio González Martínez , who began to become embroiled in various controversies.

In February 2004, while a senator, he was the subject of the first video scandal, when he was recorded in a conversation aimed at facilitating permits for the construction of hotels and golf courses in the Cancún tourist corridor.

"And how much money will we get?" he asked his interlocutor, who raised two fingers, a gesture to which González Martínez put words: "Two million dollars."

The media dubbed him "El Niño Verde" (The Green Boy ) because of his age—he was barely 30—for having inherited the leadership of a party that was more dedicated to business than environmentalism, and because he was a political novice, something that never stopped him from sniffing out when a partner was in decline and replacing it with another. Thus, the Green Party abandoned the PAN for the PRI, upon the rise of Enrique Peña Nieto , who then joined Morena, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador was slated for the presidency.

What El Niño Verde never learned was how to shake off the nickname, which became so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination that many no longer remember its bearer's name. Nor did they learn the stigma of being a greedy and unscrupulous party leader. His most recent scandals occurred in 2012, when he called members of the #YoSoy132 movement "ninis" (a group of people who weren't trained in alcohol), and in 2013, when he failed the breathalyzer test and ended up with El Torito.

From then on, González Martínez chose to disappear from the public eye, letting others speak for the PVEM, thus avoiding media criticism. However, his nickname has remained, a paradigm of business dealings under the protection of power.

More than a decade after El Niño Verde 's retirement, another junior politician has chosen to follow in his footsteps. Andy López Beltrán was appointed to the Morena Party's Organization Secretariat, with no other background than that of being the son of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador . The apparent intention is to launch a candidacy from there, which could even be the Presidency of the Republic in 2030, if his father so decides.

Last week, he made an unusual appearance to respond to criticism for the ruling party's failure to win the capital of Durango in the last election, an operation he led, and to demand that they not call him Andy , as he has been widely known for years, but rather Andrés Manuel López Beltrán . Calling him Andy , he said, would take away his "legacy."

But too many people call him that. Even Representative Ricardo Monreal , who bizarrely called referring to López Beltrán as Andy "vicarious violence," was caught on video the day he received López Obrador 's son during the party's re-credentialing campaign, a meeting in which he familiarly referred to him as... Andy .

Apparently, López Beltrán never learned a basic schoolyard rule: asking not to be called a certain name is a sure way to be called exactly that name.

But there must be worse things than being known as Andy , the nickname I suppose he was given as a child. They could call him, for example, The Cherry Kid .