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The biography of Carlos Slim, one of the richest people of all time, is not just the tale of the first man from a developing country to ever reach the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. It’s also the story of a businessman who, at crucial moments, supported the PRI—the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for seventy-two uninterrupted years, until 2000—and capitalized on the country’s mass privatization of national services and banks, promoted since the 1980s by the United States and other world powers through the Washington Consensus, which consolidated neoliberalism in Latin America.

Slim has been immersed in the world of business since early childhood, thanks to his father, Julián Slim Haddad, a Lebanese émigré who made his fortune as a merchant in Mexico and whose political ideas were aligned with those of Al Kataeb—the Lebanese Phalange Party, an organization created by the Gemayel family, taking inspiration from Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Spanish Phalanx.

After studying civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)—and standing as a personable student who, as well as being a math lecturer and catcher on the college baseball team, championed the use of the then-cutting-edge electronic calculator—Slim married Soumaya Domit Gemayel. She was a niece of Bachir Gemayel, the Lebanese president who ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which the Phalangists killed over 2,000 people, many of them Palestinian refugees from the war with Israel. The priest who celebrated their wedding was Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic order whose scandals surrounding child abuse and corruption led the Vatican to intervene. On his wedding day, Slim was accompanied to the altar by his mother, Linda, and his elder brother, Julián, an active commander of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the political police of the PRI regime, which, in the context of the Cold War, killed, tortured and forcibly disappeared those in opposition.

After the wedding, Slim combined letters from his own and his wife’s name to found Carso, the group whose operations have resulted in a net worth of over $80 billion, which has on occasion surpassed the fortunes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Amancio Ortega, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and other famous billionaires. His wife Soumaya did not live to see the family empire consolidated at a global level, as she died of chronic kidney disease in 1999. Two years earlier, Slim had also been at death’s door after he underwent heart surgery in Houston, Texas—an event that caused his companies’ shares to plummet in the New York Stock Exchange and elicited rumors of his possible retirement from the world of business.

But by 2015, Slim had recovered from these difficulties—and from some of his most controversial relationships. He is no longer suspected of being a front man for ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, currently considered one of his adversaries in Mexico, along with Televisa, the most important Spanish-speaking television network in the world. Now, Slim’s name is associated more closely with those of other former presidents around the world, such as the democrat Bill Clinton, the socialist Felipe González and even Fidel Castro. During Mexico’s electoral crisis in 2006, according to associates of ex-president Felipe Calderón, Slim quietly intervened to support left-wing presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his mission to annul the questioned elections.

In terms of philanthropy, Slim says he does not like playing Santa Claus, and although he has donated money to altruistic causes through his foundations, his efforts may appear pretty miserly compared to other members of the global ultrarich elite. Instead, his presence as a benefactor has focused on strategically exerting power in politics and further afield.

Drawing from interviews with his friends and enemies, as well as extensive research into historical and confidential archives obtained from intelligence agencies, and from Slim’s own testimony through a series of interviews conceded especially for this book, this biography builds a profile of the richest Mexican in the world, going beyond the cold, hard numbers and clichéd business success stories. With the advantages and disadvantages this entails, he is seen from the distance of a journalistic catwalk, such as the one in Washington, DC, in 2010, where a Getty agency photograph shows Slim striding across a hall, dressed in a tuxedo and wearing the lanyard of a White House special guest, with a painting of ex-president Grover Cleveland in the background.

This book is not financial reportage or an economic view on his empire; rather, it is a portrait of Slim’s social influence and the way in which he builds political relationships, and how his actions or omissions affect public life in Mexico and the eighteen countries of Latin America where he has investments. At the same time, I hope it is a journey through key moments in Mexican history, such as the years after the Revolution, the Tlatelolco student massacre in ’68, the dirty war, the financial crises of the ’80s, the wave of privatization under Salinas, the government turnover of the year 2000, the post-electoral conflict of 2006, the so-called War on Drugs and the return of the PRI to power with the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

Journalism in Latin America tends to come from the top and address those at the bottom. It represents a way in which power tells its truth to the people, not necessarily one in which the people tell the truth to power. In 2007, when I first started to do journalistic research on Slim, the idea was to provide a portrait of my country from a different angle. At the time I had just covered the teachers’ uprising in Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states, and the stories I wrote about elsewhere in the country were always linked to marginalized communities. How, then, to report on power? What would I find if I started to look into the richest man in the world with the same passion with which I followed a popular uprising or visited a hunger-stricken community? What would that point of view reveal about Mexico?

When I started writing this book, my political mindset was very agitated. In addition to the Oaxacan revolt, where I witnessed the extrajudicial execution of several protesters, I had been involved in the Other Campaign, launched by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the initiative led by Subcomandante Marcos under the guidelines of an anticapitalist manifesto known as the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which I signed as an adherent. But writing a book like this one with that particular political mindset would prove impossible. As a journalist, I needed other traits, which I had to learn over the years the way we learn the most important things in life: by doing them. Aiming to improve the way in which we view the lives of the powerful and famous within their own environments, I followed and wrote extensive profiles on Mexican actor Gabriel García Bernal, Puerto Rican reggaeton duo Calle 13, Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez and writer Juan Villoro. In addition, I codirected a documentary about Mauricio Fernández Garza, one of the most extravagant businessmen in Mexico, and another entitled El poder de la silla (The Power of the Saddle), about the ex-governor of the northern state of Nuevo León. Although these figures differ greatly from Slim, each one of these portraits trained me to develop the patience required for Slim’s project, and to look deeply into the contradictions that we all tend to live by.

In 2008, a year after Forbes’ announcement that a Mexican had topped their list of the ultrarich, I learned that Slim’s brother, Julián, had been subdirector of the Federal Security Directorate during its most infamous era, and that he had been a PGR (Office of the Attorney General) commander during the 1980s. For several weeks I thought Slim’s brother was an apocryphal character, that his life represented an unfortunate coincidence for the owner of Telmex. However, as I researched more I confirmed that the brothers were extremely close, as I detail in one of the chapters of this book. This was the first surprising fact that I encountered in my research, and in a way it was what stoked my interest in exploring the figure of Carlos Slim. It was not easy to officially prove the trajectory of Julián Slim as first commander of the PGR. His former colleagues were reluctant to talk about him due to his brother’s notoriety. I had to turn to the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information and make several appeals against the federal authorities who refused to provide me with their files, but in the end I succeeded. Someone who also helped me fundamentally in this kind of work was María de los Ángeles Magdaleno C., who carried out historical research in different sections of the National Archives, the historical archive of Mexico City, and the archives at El Colegio Nacional and the national newspaper archive.

Although my main project for eight years was to research and write about Slim, I was committed to many other stories: that’s why I also researched and wrote about the fire that killed forty-nine children in a nursery in Sonora and the intricate web of corruption behind it; about the political manipulation behind the War on Drugs launched by president Calderón; and about the social collapse caused by the drug cartel Los Zetas in the northern states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila.

Over the years I was working on this book, I was warned by many of my interviewees that it would not be easy to publish it, and that all the publishing houses would be fearful of the effect it might have on their commercial relationship with Sanborns, the biggest chain of bookshops in Mexico—owned, of course, by Slim himself. These kinds of comments did not shake my determination as much as other warnings around the book being potentially ignored by the media (owned, again, by Slim) or even the risk of being legally annihilated by his lawyers. One of the people who warned me of that possibility was the editor of one of Mexico’s most influential magazines, which Slim sued through five different agencies of the public ministry simultaneously on the same morning, over a mild criticism. His case, as that of other activists and critics who have condemned Slim, never became public knowledge.

I traveled to New York, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro and several other cities to research Slim; I was near him during some of his public appearances and private functions, such as the inauguration party of Saks in Mexico. As the ribbon was being cut on the first Mexican branch of the New York store, I ended up standing two meters away from him, which later led some of the guests at the exclusive drinks reception to believe that I was someone close to the richest man in the world, and to treat me extremely kindly, though they soon turned the other way when they found out that, although I knew many things about Slim, at that time the man and I had never exchanged words.

With the aim of providing a view of Slim from several different angles, I formally interviewed over a hundred people, from mere associates to the magnate’s most senior business friends or foes, such as Bernardo Gómez and Alfonso de Angoitia, two of the three executives who steer Televisa along with Emilio Azcárraga. In Mexico, the prevailing perception is that this company, the most important Spanish-speaking television broadcaster in the world, aggressively intervenes in public power by grossly manipulating information. Other important members of the political and economic class also gave interviews but have refused to be cited explicitly. That was not the case for Jacques Rogozinski, the official operator of the privatization of Telmex and other state-run companies, who gave me an extensive interview with permission to quote him.

Before having the first of three long conversations with the magnate, in which I heard his version of his story for this unofficial biography, I looked at many of the interviews that Slim had given in the past. Perhaps some of the most revealing ones were those with the American journalist Larry King, who became his business partner and who, some speculate, will author Slim’s official biography, although the tycoon assured me he would write it himself. They have both been part of interesting conversations at business congresses in the United States. At the 2013 Milken Institute Global Conference, in a session available on YouTube, King introduces Slim this way:

About two and a half years ago, Carlos Slim has this big conference in Mexico City in which he gives out scholarships, and they called and asked me to be the keynote speaker. And I went down and they said I was limited to twenty minutes, which to me is like phoning it in. So they extended my time and we became friends, he came to my house, we had dinner, we did my show, and then finally we formed Ora TV which is now on the Internet, we’re distributed by Hulu, we started in July, we’ve done over 170 interviews already, increasing every week; so, he is my partner. He was poor, he needed help [smiling]. He is an incredible man.

Slim already has a short official biography published on his website. This book gleans some information from there, but crucially it adds political angles that have been scarcely explored. It also contradicts or contextualizes, based on testimonies and documents, other aspects of Slim’s (auto)biographic narrative. As is necessary in the kind of journalism I value, there is never an intention to lynch him, nor is the aim to glorify him.

Other journalist colleagues have already written about Slim’s life. The most extensive piece was by José Martínez, the generous author of a text added to this book, but my purpose was to create something that did not exist: a biography that also examined the influences and political relationships around the richest Mexican in the world. In this sense, this book is not financial reportage or an economic analysis of his empire, but a portrait of Slim’s social influence, as well as his political relationships, and his actions or omissions and the way these affect public life. At the same time, I hope it is an overview of key moments in the history of Mexico, such as the years after the Revolution, the Tlatelolco massacre in ’68, the “dirty war,” the economic crises of the 1980s, Salinas’ privatizations, the change of power in 2000, the postelection conflict of 2006, the so-called War on Drugs and the return of the PRI to power with the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

After I carried out the research, I tried out several ways of writing this biography: using the literary device of a letter to the richest Mexican in the world, or the polyphonic techniques masterfully demonstrated by Ryszard Kapuściński in Imperium and Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Anarchy’s Brief Summer. In the end, looking at my subject’s character traits and the information gathered, I opted for a more streamlined register as the best way to tell Slim’s story. So my research about him is interwoven with his own point of view.

I should mention that despite my difficult questions in my interviews, Slim always maintained an attitude of respect. If anything, when asked about controversial issues he chose to respond only briefly. I should thank him for the more than seven hours he conceded me for this book, which, as I mentioned, I started working on eight years ago. During our meetings, he showed me photographs of his visits to the dentist, we listened to songs by Chamín Correa, we chatted while he got his hair cut before an event with the president, he gave me the autobiography of his friend Sophia Loren and a biographical essay about Genghis Khan, and he shared with me his process of preparing for a conference that was held in September 2015 with the interns at Fundación Telmex about the evolution of societies over the history of humanity. At some point the tycoon, half reprimanding and half joking, said to me: “You made me say a lot of things I’ve never said before.”

Although this biography may have special force because it includes the direct voice, rarely heard, of its main character, I hope above all that it posits the challenge of getting to know and understand one of the most important figures in the world today, based on information and questions. Questions such as whether he has truly helped combat poverty and whether one can live for money alone, with the belief that the economy is not connected to social and political issues. Whether the richest man in the world can be a good person was one of the guiding questions during the immersive research for this book, although in the end I decided not to openly address it in the text, to give the readers the freedom to consider for themselves this or any other question during their reading. An intelligent friend reminded me of what Javier Cercas says in The Impostor: in order to tell someone’s story, we first need to understand it, and that understanding tends to bring us closer to them. Therefore, the exercise of narrating in a way reduces any distances that may exist—in this case, imposed by money—and provides readers with a more accurate perspective.

It’s not easy to analyze a millionaire beyond the good or bad stereotypes that exist about them. The French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller, a disciple of Lacan, even believes it’s an impossible task when it comes to the ultrarich. In an interview for the weekly magazine Marianne, he said that in 2008 he saw a millionaire patient who told him how in those days he earned or lost a million dollars speculating until he was ruined by the financial crisis that year. “If you are truly rich, you are un-analyzable, because you are not in a position to pay—that is, to give up anything meaningful: analysis slides like water off a duck’s back,” explains Miller, who believes “money is a signifier without the signified, that kills all meaning. When one is devoted to money, truth stops making sense.”

This specialist, who studied alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, believes that there are usually three motivations for the great accumulators of capital. The first has to do directly with death and is reflected in the fear of illness and the desire to perpetuate in their offspring. The second is linked to pleasure and is reflected in immediate consumption and extravagant spending. Neither of these two seemed to fit with Slim’s motivations. Perhaps Miller’s third classification would apply: that of having money for money’s sake, for the pure pleasure of owning in itself and the drive to keep earning more.

But this book may say other things about Slim, depending on each reader. It may be the story of a Lebanese immigrant who added his mathematical abilities to his entrepreneurial vision to create a global empire; or it could be the record of economic inequality that is present throughout the world, especially in Mexico, where the wealth of millionaires—with Slim at the top—grew 32 percent between 2007 and 2012, despite the rest of the world’s falling by 0.3 percent according to the Global Wealth Report 2014.

Others may find here instead the story of a character who represents the neoliberal mentality of our times, which mistrusts politicians, believes that the market is the most efficient mechanism for everything, even to combat corruption, and sees philanthropy as a social investment and businesses as an aspect of collective wealth.

What is clear to me is that domination and resistance are two concepts that have marked me, sometimes unconsciously, when reporting and writing this and all my other books. My most important journalistic questions reside in that dispute between any kind of established power and the opposition that organizes to combat it. I agree with Bolivian philosopher Raúl Prada in that Marx’s theory of social struggle is not akin to a catalogue of plant species, as many dogmatic Marxists seem to believe. Instead, there is an aspect of performativity to it, “through the drama of conflict between two historical protagonists: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It is not just a critical but also a dynamic theory of class struggle.”

It has fallen to me to witness and tell the story, from different perspectives, of the existence of that class struggle. My first book, Oaxaca sitiada (Oaxaca Under Siege), tells of the first insurrection in Mexico in the twenty-first century, in a state that had long been poor and subjugated. It tells of the conflict from the barricades, although I also interviewed the questioned the governor and members of the political class in power at the time, including the police chiefs who lead the repression.

In contrast, what I tried to do in this book was to tell the life of one of capitalism’s greatest figures; class struggle propels my stories and those of many other narrators living through this dynamic era riddled with inequality.

To refuse to see the class struggle behind an insurrection of the people or behind the life of the richest man in the world would be delusional. It is around that drama that history revolves.

Diego Enrique Osorno

Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca,

October 2015