In her own way, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is putting her house in order. Let’s just say it’s not in the same way that General Lázaro Cárdenas ended the Maximato on April 10, 1936, when, fed up with Plutarco Elías Calles’s interference in his government, his meddling in everything and preventing him from governing, he ordered him to leave the country immediately.
Not long ago, Alejandro Gertz Manero left the Attorney General’s Office. He was, let’s say, a thorn in the side of Claudia Sheinbaum’s government. He was there under López Obrador’s wing and oversaw the administration of justice, although it’s now known that he acted selectively in some cases. He had clashes with some members of the current cabinet, and his departure was expected, until Thursday, November 27, 2025, when he submitted his resignation to the Senate.
Francisco Garduño, so unpopular in the country, not only for his highly questionable tenure as head of the National Migration Institute (INM), where he displayed insensitivity toward a social phenomenon that deserved special attention: the migration of Central and South Americans to the country…
But this already widespread discontent escalated to unprecedented levels because he was in charge of the INM on March 27, 2023, when the Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, immigration detention center caught fire, leaving 40 foreigners dead and 41 injured. Garduño emerged unscathed from his position and is now an official at the Ministry of Public Education, where he will likely remain hidden to avoid complications.
Adán Augusto López, the close friend of former President López Obrador, was removed from his leadership role in the Senate and from the Political Coordination Board, though he retained his parliamentary immunity as a senator. He still needs to respond to certain accusations, which he should clarify. Now, he says, he will dedicate himself to traveling the country to secure a Morena majority in the 2027 elections. However, this remains a problem for the current administration.
The spotlight has now shifted to a lower-ranking official, Marx Arriaga Navarro, who held the position of Director General of Educational Materials at the Ministry of Public Education.
From the beginning of his tenure, he was a highly controversial figure. But he also enjoyed strong support from the then-President of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his wife, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, for whom Arriaga served as an examiner for her doctoral dissertation in Humanities from the Autonomous Metropolitan University.
He is an official with a dogmatic, hardline, and intransigent Marxist ideology. He was in charge of producing the free textbooks for basic education starting in 2022, which were heavily criticized from the outset not only for their editorial shortcomings (inaccuracies, spelling mistakes, basic errors…), but also for their heavy emphasis on indoctrinating children instead of universal, objective, and pedagogical knowledge.
In a way, he decided what the content of these books should be. During AMLO’s administration and even at the beginning of the current one, he was allowed to do so, constantly promoting a program called the “New Mexican School,” of unclear origin and intent.
According to Marx Arriaga himself, the “New Mexican School” is “a critical, humanist, and community-based educational model that seeks to form students with a comprehensive vision and social awareness. It centers learning on the community context and social transformation.”
All well and good; in fact, Mexican left-wing movements seek that: social transformation. But this will occur within a social, democratic, and participatory framework. The Mexican left seeks social justice, equality, and a system where everyone has everything they need. And that’s a good thing.
However, Marx Arriaga’s contribution to this transformation involved indoctrinating children, taking advantage of their lack of critical awareness. His books instill historical hatred instead of providing a universal education that fosters understanding of the world and its circumstances, enabling children to make their own decisions along the way—not decisions imposed through dogma and intransigence.
According to Arriaga himself, on February 13th, when he was informed that his office would be transformed—which amounts to saying goodbye—that within the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), “There are public officials who were not trained in the Obrador movement, but rather in the neoliberal cesspools of institutions that are operating to benefit private interests…”
…“Corrupt authorities,” he said, “asked me to change the content of the textbooks. But I refused,” he stated, because in his view, it was necessary to maintain this critical and irrefutable tone to strengthen this “New Mexican School”…
Source: imparcialoaxaca
