Mexico’s President criticized the majority of news outlets in that country calling them corrupt and conservatives for calling him out after he said a joke and pretended not to hear questions about five kidnapped teens. The teens are believed to have been tortured and killed by cartel gunmen.

On Thursday morning, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador began his morning news conference claiming that news outlets purposely took things out of context to attack him.

“I didn’t hear anything, anything, that is why I told a joke,” Lopez Obrador said. “In a perverse fashion, all day yesterday they claimed in the sold-out and rented press that I had made fun of the young men that had been murdered, and disappeared in Los Altos de Jalisco.”

The issue began earlier in the week during another news conference where as Breitbart Texas reported, Lopez Obrador can be seen on video appearing to make light of the cartel kidnapping while multiple journalists shouted questions about the case.

The incident began last week when a group of gunmen kidnapped five teenagers from Jalisco who were hanging out in an area that overlooks the city known as El Mirador in the city of Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. Since then the teens have not been heard from or seen again. However, as Breitbart Texas reported, cartel gunmen leaked a photograph that shows the teens kneeling and bound, with signs of torture.

Cartel gunmen also leaked out a video that shows one of the teens being forced to beat, stab, and slash the throat of another teenager, while other teenagers appear to have already been killed. Authorities also found a vehicle that belonged to one of the teens that had been set on fire with human remains inside, authorities in Jalisco have not revealed if the murdered teens were inside that car.

Authorities reported that they showed the videos to the parents of the teens who claim that the video does show their loved ones, however, officials have not officially confirmed that the teens have been killed and are still calling the case a “disappearance.”

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com

Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.