Every morning of his life, before anything else, Héctor (son of José Vasconcelos and the great pianist Esperanza Cruz) sits at his piano and plays Bach, Mozart, Ravel. (In my 90th birthday, he played Schubert.) Being the son of Vasconcelos must not have been easy, but Héctor, who is now a senator for the Morena party, takes advantage of everything that Vasconcelosism represented and, ultimately, an artist and diplomat, chose to ally himself with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and be part of those who gathered at Lilia and Chema Pérez Gay's house to plan the Mexico he would lead.
–Héctor, when did you become interested in Andrés Manuel’s proposals?
–In January 2006, AMLO launched his first campaign, and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo invited me to breakfast with 200 people. I accepted immediately. I had seen Andrés Manuel in two or three interviews; I found him to be very intelligent and very sincere. I had never been affiliated with any political cause or party; I was a diplomat with PRI governments, although I didn't belong to the PRI. As soon as I heard AMLO speak, the impact was enormous, because I felt a radical difference between him and the politicians I'd known very closely throughout my life, who were all of them, from López Mateos to Fox; some were friends of my family, like López Mateos, leader of Vasconcelism in the State of Mexico. I knew the Mexican political class by heart; I'd heard them all my life, but when I heard López Obrador, I thought: This is an extraordinary phenomenon
. Then he invited me to a rally, and I saw his connection with the people, the devotion they have for him, the faith, the trust. I saw 70-year-old men burst into tears in his arms, telling him their problems, and women of more than precarious economic circumstances offered him 10 pesos for his campaign. This reinforced my impression of being a witness to an unprecedented phenomenon, and I decided to join in January 2006: " There's something about AMLO that I feel is genuine and sincere
," I declared in the public square. We met frequently; there was a magnificent chemistry, and by the end of the 2006 campaign, I was already integrated into his closest political group.
