“Everything is politics”

“Everything is politics” is the conclusion Tirofio presses on Adán Barrera: political life is not a separate arena one can simply opt out of, because violence, money, and power reach into the conditions of ordinary survival. The expression gains force from the contrast between Tirofio’s account of being driven into armed struggle and Adán’s narrower language of money and power. Elsewhere, the book shows that this principle applies not only to personal choices but to the Federación’s dealings with presidents, elections, and the Mexican economy.

The Expression and Its Setting

The phrase comes during a conversation about whether Adán has politics. Tirofio begins with his own history, locating the start of his fighting in 1948, in the period known as La Violencia. He had been a woodcutter in a small village and, by his account, had regarded left-wing and right-wing politics as irrelevant to the work he had to do. That indifference ends when a local right-wing militia arrives, binds the village men with their elbows behind their backs, and cuts their throats in the village square. The attackers also rape the men’s wives and daughters. Tirofio finds his neighbors, friends, and family among the dead.

Tirofio explains that the militia’s reason for attacking was that villagers had allowed a left-wing group to dig them a well. The detail makes politics concrete: a resource needed by a village becomes the pretext for a massacre, while a factional division determines who is punished. Tirofio returns to the hills and joins the guerrillas. His account does not present his change as the result of abstract political conviction; it presents a personal catastrophe that makes apparent neutrality impossible. The maxim is thus grounded in a sequence of specific acts and consequences rather than offered as a detached slogan.

Tirofio’s Challenge to Adán

Adán answers the story with his own compact account of how the world works: “There’s money and the lack of money, and there’s power and the lack of power. And that’s all there is.” The sentence reduces politics to possession and deprivation, naming the material forces that organize his understanding without accepting Tirofio’s proposed movement from injury toward political commitment. Tirofio smiles and tells him that he is already half a Marxist. The exchange is pointed: Adán’s vocabulary seems to confirm that he is describing political relations even as he disclaims any wider political meaning for them.

Tirofio then gives the expression its explicit form: “One day you will come to see that everything is politics, and you will act from your heart instead of your pocket.” He follows this with the promise that on that day Adán will find his soul. The contrast is not simply between selfishness and goodness. Tirofio places Adán’s present decisions in the language of the pocket—calculation, money, and advantage—and imagines a future in which action comes from the heart. That future is held out as a change in how Adán acts, not merely in what he says he believes.

The conversation also takes place while Adán is weighing a deal and whether he can secure enough guns to make it work. He agrees to the arrangement and shakes Tirofio’s hand. The juxtaposition leaves the lesson unresolved: Tirofio offers a moral and political interpretation of Adán’s life, while Adán continues to conduct business. The expression therefore functions as both counsel and challenge, naming a way of understanding power that Adán has not yet accepted as a guide to action.

Politics as Protection and Position

The larger narrative gives the expression a concrete institutional counterpart. In an earlier discussion, García Abrego questions Barrera’s division of the world and asks why he takes a fourth part for himself. Barrera answers by describing Guadalajara as a safe place from which to serve the Federación, rather than a border position. He offers to share what is his, including his friends and protection; when García Abrego asks the price, Barrera calls it a modest fee and remarks that protection is expensive. The exchange presents political power as an arrangement of territory, access, security, and payment. Protection is not outside politics: it is one of the means by which the organization distributes influence and secures cooperation.

The same entanglement appears in the account of the 1988 election. Four years before the later crisis, the opposition candidate, the leftist Cárdenas, seemed certain to defeat the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had held power since the 1917 Revolution. The computers counting the votes then malfunctioned, and the narrative states that the Federación had helped the president steal the election. This episode makes electoral procedure part of the organization’s political reach: the apparent technical failure changes who holds office, while the criminal organization helps sustain the governing party’s position.

Economic Power and the Meaning of the Maxim

The Federación’s influence becomes even more visible in the account of the peso crisis. The new Mexican president took office on December 1, 1994. The next day, two brokerage houses controlled by the Federación began buying tesobonos, or government bonds. The following week, the cartels withdrew their capital from the national bank, forcing the president to devalue the peso by 50 percent. The Federación then cashed in its bonds, contributing to the collapse of the economy. During the Christmas period, it bought property, businesses, raw real estate, and pesos, positioning itself to benefit from the collapse and the subsequent recovery.

The president had to invite the narco lords back into the country with their money to help reinvigorate the economy and repay the loan. The account explains how the cartels had gained billions: after cashing in the pesos for dollars, they used those dollars to buy devalued pesos, which rose again when the Americans issued a massive loan. The sequence is described as buying the country, selling it high, buying it low, and investing again. Here, politics operates through financial timing and the state’s dependence on the very actors whose wealth helped destabilize it.

Adán accepts the president’s invitation, but demands a favorable trade environment in return for bringing the Federación’s narco-dollars back. The president may speak publicly about breaking the cartels, the narrative says, but must not act against them. The Americans know of the arrangement and provide the president with a list of Institutional Revolutionary Party officials on the Federación’s payroll. Three are appointed state governors; another becomes transportation secretary; another becomes the head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs. The movement from private payments to public appointments shows how the organization’s power reaches into the staffing of government.

Against these events, “Everything is politics” reads as more than a lesson about Adán’s personal conscience. Tirofio’s village is destroyed over a well; Adán understands money and power as the basic divisions of life; and the Federación turns financial leverage and protection into political influence. The expression draws those scales together without making them identical. Tirofio speaks from remembered violence and urges Adán toward action from the heart, while the later episodes show a system in which economic interest, public authority, and coercion continually meet. Its force lies in the gap between recognizing that entanglement and choosing what to do within it.