Breakdown of No afirmamos que la calumnia los haga desprestigiar al cliente.
no
no, not
hacer
to do / to make
que
that / than
el cliente
customer
afirmar
to state
los
them (masculine direct object)
la calumnia
slander
desprestigiar
to discredit
a
personal 'a' (marks a human direct object)
Questions & Answers about No afirmamos que la calumnia los haga desprestigiar al cliente.
Why is haga in the subjunctive here?
The phrase No afirmamos que (We do not state that) is a negative communication trigger. When verbs of communication—like decir, afirmar, or mencionar—are made negative, they deny a statement or introduce doubt rather than declare a fact. This requires the following verb to be in the subjunctive (haga). If the sentence were affirmative (Afirmamos que...), you would use the indicative hace.
How does the phrase los haga desprestigiar work to mean "makes them discredit"?
This is an example of the causative hacer structure, which means "to make [someone] do [something]." You conjugate hacer (here, haga) and leave the second action in its infinitive form (desprestigiar). The pronoun for the people being caused to do the action (los) is placed right before the conjugated verb.
If desprestigiar has a direct object (al cliente), shouldn't "them" be the indirect object les instead of los?
According to strict textbook grammar, yes. When the infinitive in a causative hacer structure takes its own direct object, the person performing the action traditionally becomes the indirect object (les). However, in everyday Latin American Spanish, it's extremely common to use the direct object pronoun (los) anyway, treating "them" as the direct object of the "making" action. You will hear both used naturally by native speakers.
Why do we need al before cliente?
The word al is a mandatory contraction of the preposition a and the article el. The a here is the "personal a." Even though the client is the direct object receiving the action of desprestigiar (to discredit), Spanish requires this preposition whenever a direct object is a specific, identifiable person.
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