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9

PRI

On Sunday, July 2, 2000, a former Coca-Cola CEO, Vicente Fox, won the presidential elections in Mexico as candidate for the right-wing PAN. For the first time in over seventy years, the PRI had lost the country’s most important elections. That day, Carlos Slim went to the national headquarters of the party that had fallen out of favor, and was photographed with PRI leaders such as Enrique Jackson and Jesús Murillo Karam, before saluting the defeated presidential candidate, Francisco Labastida Ochoa. The upset expression on the tycoon’s face coincides with the story that some current PRI leaders have told regarding his disappointment on the night when the international community was commenting on Mexico’s transition to democracy.

Octavio Paz said that the state created by the PRI was a faceless and soulless master who did not subjugate the people like a demon, but like a machine, and that as the evil grew, the evildoers stopped being exceptional and became smaller. We Mexicans summarized that period by saying: “The PRI used to steal, but at least they allowed others to steal too.” The central power in Mexico, Paz explains, did not reside in private capitalism, in trade unions or political parties, but in the state. The poet called it the “secular Trinity”: the state was the capital, the labor and the party, with the state belonging to an administrative technocracy and a political caste being led every six years by a different all-powerful president.

However, with Salinas de Gortari as president, the PRI again experienced a drastic change in its relationship to capital, and it publicly acknowledged, without any nationalist complexes, its closeness to the business community. That administration created a government department whose name was still reminiscent of Soviet bureaucracy: the Commission for Financing and Equity Consolidation. The aim of the commission would be to fundraise for the PRI among businessmen. Slim appears as one of the board members on a 1988 party document. Around the same time, the public charity Gilberto was being registered, headed up by first lady Cecilia Occelli de Salinas, with the purpose of helping the thousands of people affected by hurricane Gilberto, which devastated entire cities and villages. Soumaya Domit, Slim’s wife, also sat on the board of directors.

During the years in which Slim opened his wallet for the PRI, he rose to the Forbes club as if by private elevator. Before Salinas de Gortari’s term of office ended, according to the newspaper records of the time, Slim donated at least $25 million to the official party for Ernesto Zedillo’s electoral campaign, who would go on to become the next president of Mexico. In February 1993, Salinas de Gortari hosted a dinner party at which he asked Slim and other multimillionaires for that sum to ensure the triumph of the PRI in the following elections, and to allow it to retain tight control over the country the way the party had done ever since its creation in 1929—with each incumbent president naming his successor. After the Mexican Revolution overthrew Porfirio Díaz’s thirty-year dictatorship, the Institutional Revolutionary Party had in effect established its own dictatorship, despite running formal elections each year.

The newspaper El Economista was tipped off about the meeting, and published the news under the headline: “PRI sets quotas for big businessmen.” Days later, the former president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Antonio Ortiz Mena—in whose mansion Salinas de Gortari’s meeting with the multimillionaires was hosted—offered a press conference in which he explained that the PRI had been linked to government since its inception, but that now that circumstance was coming to an end, which was why the political institution needed an independent economic life.

It was no coincidence that such an important event was hosted at the home of Ortiz Mena, who had been the regime’s minister of finance for twelve consecutive years. He represented the PRI’s old administrative technocracy, which was breathing its last. Other multimillionaires present at the meeting were Carlos Hank Rhon, Claudio X. González, Emilio Azcárraga, Alberto Bailléres, Roberto Hernández, Adrián Sada and Lorenzo Zambrano. Slim was the only one of them who had long been a part of the PRI’s Commission for Financing and Equity Consolidation.

A year after that dinner party, with the elections underway, Slim was approached by a small group of reporters in the Constellations room of Hotel Nikko, during an event in support of Luis Donaldo Colosio’s recently launched campaign for the presidency of the republic. With the shadow of Telmex’s sale still lingering, the subjects of the financing of the PRI and the Zapatista uprising were the main points on the national agenda.

“How much will you donate to the PRI?” one of the journalists asked Slim.

“It’s not interview time.”

“Later, if you prefer.”

“No, I’d rather send you a document where I summarize my position regarding the country.”

“Tell me about Telmex. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas says that if you win the elections, the company will again be put to public tender.”

“But I only own 2 percent of the shares of the company: 75 percent of the shares belong to small owners. I can prove it.”

“Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas says the tender was conducted incorrectly. What’s your opinion?”

“That that’s a whole load of hogwash, along with all the other nonsense that man spouts. He’s being ignorant, quite frankly, and what’s more, not admitting it. I can send you documents for everything.”

“Sir, instead, please tell me about it.”

“No, no. Interviews don’t allow people to work in peace.”

“What’s your opinion about the conflict in Chiapas?”

“I’ll send you my document in due course.”

Over twenty years after that tumultuous 1994, I asked Slim if in 2015 he still considered himself a PRI supporter.

“No, I was never a member of any party,” he replied.

“But you were: you appear formally as a member of the PRI’s Commission for Financing and Equity Consolidation.”

“Yes, I was invited. It was a way in which… Look, there were two things: they wanted to separate, because the Ministry of Finance provided the funds for all the parties, all of them, except the PAN, which was using different model. So I imagine it was an attempt to do things differently.”

“Were you a member of the PRI’s Commission for Financing?”

“Yes, but we never held a meeting, to my knowledge.”

“Have you never considered yourself a PRI supporter?”

“Not me. I voted for the PRI for president and PAN for members of congress and senators. Always. From when I was twenty-one. That’s the way I’ve voted.”

“Is the PRI of today the same as it used to be?”

“We’d need to speak in more detail about that, but the PRI changed every six years. That’s like asking: is the current prime minister of China the same as the former prime minister. What China is doing now is the way the PRI used to do things.”