Mexico's President Claims To See 'Elf Cryptid' As Protestors Mass Against His Crackdown On Free And Fair Elections

February 27th, 2023 - 7:53 AM EST by Aidan Walker

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AMLO, a picture he claims is an alux, protestors in Mexico City.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has had quite an interesting weekend. While in the middle of controversially deciding to defund the country's election watchdog organization, he found time to post about an interesting photo taken near a construction site depicting what he claims is a kind of elf cryptid.


The bizarre picture shared on Saturday by President López Obrador's personal Twitter account quickly racked up almost 40,000 likes as protests in the country began picking up the following day.

The Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE) has managed Mexican elections for over 30 years, helping to make sure that they are fair and fraud-free. López Obrador contends that the organization is bloated and inefficient, but critics say that his effort to cut its funding is allegedly an attempt to fix the next election for his party.

A massive crowd showed up in Mexico City's main square on Sunday to protest the proposed changes to Mexico's young democracy, many of them wearing pink, which is the color associated with the INE.


While this crowd gathered in the capital, President López Obrador posted what he claims is an "alux," a kind of elf or leprechaun-like creature from Mayan mythology.

Folk tradition defines the alux as a smallish creature that likes to play tricks on humans, and it is frequently represented in ancient art from Central America.


One of President López Obrador's core political constituencies is Mexicans of indigenous descent, whose languages and traditions have often been marginalized in Mexican politics previously. The alux was purportedly spotted by an engineer at work on the "Maya Train" project — an infrastructure initiative to build a new railway around the Yucatan peninsula, which is one of the President's signature programs.

He went on to post about how the people of the Yucatan have responded to the train, arguing it has become a part of the "collective imagination" of the region.


Some eagle-eyed posters claimed that the President was lying about the alux photo, which had actually been taken years before in 2021. Others, familiar with Mayan language grammar, also corrected the President: The singular is "alux," not "aluxe."


Some then noted the similarity between the supposed alux photo and a widely mocked Instagram post by President López Obrador's wife, which showed her climbing a tree.


The photo made the rounds of the internet, generating controversy and discussion in other countries as well. Many notably speculated that it's possible the alux-spotting tweet was a kind of distraction or that the cryptid is a signal to a constituency and region that López Obrador believes is key to his continued stay in power.




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