Institutional Revolutionary Party

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the political structure through which Azucena Esquivel Plata rises from journalism into national prominence, hoping to use power to improve public institutions but discovering how readily the party turns political failure into political currency. Its influence also appears in the investigation of Kelly Rivera Parker’s disappearance: information gathered by Esquivel Plata points toward a banker with deep party connections and alleged cartel ties. The novel presents the PRI not simply as a political affiliation but as an institution in which access, publicity, and accountability are unevenly distributed.

Entry into the party and political ambition

Esquivel Plata’s route to the party runs through a personal history of political activity and journalism. In her account, she had been involved in the university Left and had visited Cuba before marrying and having a son; after her husband joined the PRI, she continued working in journalism. Her marriage lasted less than two years. She describes confronting her family, rejecting its expectations and its religious influence, and taking command of the household’s political and financial argument. That confrontation becomes, in her telling, the moment she became the forceful public figure she would remain.

Her decision to join the PRI is not represented as a conversion to disinterested service. Esquivel Plata says plainly that she wanted power and hoped to use it to improve public health and schools and prepare Mexico for the twenty-first century. She also acknowledges that she brought more hope than political hard-headedness to the project, and that she soon recognized the limits of her assumptions about reform. First she had imagined change from outside the party; then she thought that entry would give her greater freedom to act. Neither position, she concluded, guaranteed change.

The party’s political logic

Esquivel Plata describes a political culture in which errors made from inside the institution can cease to count as errors. Even failure, she says, can become a tactic: remaining present, attracting attention, and continuing to occupy the political stage may matter more than accomplishing the stated work. This logic helps explain how she moved from being well-known to famous. Her sharp public manner drew attention from different parts of the party, including its established leaders and its Left wing, while the attention itself did not establish that her goals had been achieved.

That account gives the party’s public visibility an ambiguous value. Esquivel Plata sees political participation as a possible instrument for change, but also describes how the institution can turn presence and missteps into media standing without making them effective. Her reflection is not that ambition was absent: she admits to seeking power. Rather, the party’s political machinery makes it difficult to distinguish influence from achievement, and publicity from reform.

Party connections and the Santa Teresa investigation

The PRI’s local reach becomes consequential in Esquivel Plata’s inquiry into Kelly Rivera Parker’s disappearance. After a trusted contact investigates the name Salazar Crespo, he reports that the banker is alleged to launder money for the Santa Teresa cartel, has several ranches outside the city, and maintains exceptionally deep relations with the party. The account suggests that those connections reach back to the entrenched party establishment—the political “dinosaurs” Esquivel Plata considers as she weighs whom she might approach. The source presents this as information from her contact and his sources, not as a publicly established finding.

Esquivel Plata travels to Santa Teresa and finds that the local officials she meets do not give her a coherent account. During two nights at the Hotel Mexico, she hears no mention of Salazar Crespo, and officials tell her that no one reported Kelly missing, although she knows that Kelly’s partner did. They also do not connect Kelly’s disappearance with the murders of women, which were already public knowledge. Esquivel Plata responds by holding a press conference, telling Kelly’s story, and pledging publicly to pursue the truth. The episode sets the party’s political networks beside the local failure to join information or pursue a dependable account.

Reform, the press, and institutional limits

Esquivel Plata’s later appeal to the press follows from her distrust of the available channels. She tells Sergio Gonzalez that she cannot take her information to the Mexican police, where she expects to be dismissed, or to the American police, partly because she is a Mexican congresswoman and wants the matter fought within Mexico. She says that the PRI must change, even if pursuing that change means harming people she does not want to hurt. For her, the press remains a possible means of pressure: her years as a reporter have left her with some faith in journalists, and she regards freedom of expression as a protection the party has generally respected, though not without exception.

The party’s significance therefore lies in the tension between political access and practical constraint. Esquivel Plata can command attention, make accusations in public, and invoke her position as a congresswoman; yet her investigation encounters silence, unreliable official explanations, and connections she understands as reaching deep into the party’s established power. The PRI offers a place from which to act, but the novel’s account of her experience repeatedly tests whether being inside that place can produce accountability.