Government of Mexico

The Government of Mexico is depicted as a contested system whose public authority is repeatedly entangled with the drug trade. Its officials announce campaigns against the cartels, yet political bargains, compromised agencies, and covert operations make enforcement selective and reversible. The resulting gap between official policy and actual power lets the Federación move from paying for protection to influencing elections, security policy, and the conditions of national economic life.

Political Bargains and Electoral Interference

The relationship begins with protection arranged as an explicit exchange. During a meeting with García Abrego, Adán Barrera describes Guadalajara as a safe base from which the Federación can operate and offers to share his protection and connections. The arrangement makes cartel influence more than a matter of individual bribery: a criminal organization presents itself as a provider of security and a broker of relationships, while the payment for that protection remains to be settled. The scene shows how private power can begin to function alongside, and in place of, public institutions.

The novel later connects that influence to national politics. Adán knows that the Federación helped the incumbent president win the disputed 1988 election. The opposition candidate appeared likely to defeat the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, but the computers counting the votes reportedly malfunctioned. The account makes the cartel’s contribution part of a larger political bargain: its money and capacity to arrange violence help preserve the governing order, while the resulting administration operates in a landscape shaped by the organization that assisted it.

Evidence assembled by Cerro makes the pattern appear systemic rather than confined to one deal. Tapes, meeting memoranda, and notes name senior political figures, including the president, the attorney general, and the secretary of the interior; the record also implicates cartel leaders, police, military and intelligence officers, and Institutional Revolutionary Party officials. The material describes payments connected to the election, interference with the vote, and cooperation in crimes, including the killing of American agent Ernie Hidalgo. In the novel’s account, the evidence does not merely show that some officials accepted money: it suggests that parts of the state and the cartels had become partners in governing through illicit arrangements.

Security Policy and Covert Operations

The Government of Mexico is also situated within a regional security politics that blurs the boundary between counternarcotics and anti-communist action. In John Hobbs’s explanation of Cerberus, he presents the threat of a Soviet-aligned Nicaragua as the rationale for supporting the Contras and argues that the operation originated at the highest level of authority. His argument turns a covert intervention into an asserted national-security necessity. The scene presents that reasoning as a political justification, not as neutral proof that every official or institution shared the same motive.

The wider network called Red Mist coordinates operations against left-wing movements across Latin America. Sal Scachi’s role is to share intelligence, distribute assets, and coordinate targets among organizations that often do not know they are part of the same effort. The network encompasses right-wing militias and their drug-lord sponsors, military officers and troops, intelligence agencies, and police forces; the Church is also included in the account of its reach. The Government of Mexico thus appears within a transnational field in which state agencies, private armed groups, and criminal sponsors can contribute to a common campaign without operating as a single transparent institution.

That overlap returns in later debates over assistance to Mexico. Hobbs sees left-wing insurgencies gaining strength amid the economic damage of the Peso Crisis and the disruptions associated with North American Free Trade Agreement implementation. The proposed transfer of seventy-five Huey helicopters and twelve C-26 aircraft is publicly funded as assistance against drug trafficking, although the equipment is intended for the Mexican army’s operations in Chiapas and Guerrero against insurgents. The drug-war rationale makes military assistance politically available where an overt anti-insurgency program would be difficult to authorize or accept. The novel therefore shows security language changing the form in which policy is presented, while the equipment serves a broader purpose.

Crackdowns, Complicity, and Impunity

The state’s public posture is not uniformly permissive. After the Guadalajara airport violence, the president appears before cameras, declares an intention to crush the cartels, announces the exposure and dismissal of more than seventy corrupt officers of the Mexican Judicial Federal Police, and offers a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to Adán and Raúl Barrera and Güero Méndez. The announcements place the government visibly on the side of enforcement. Yet the three targets remain at large, and the scale of the purge itself indicates how deeply compromised the police force has become.

The novel sets this declaration against a political settlement that grants practical immunity. After Adán and Raúl’s unintended role in Cardinal Juan Ocampo Parada’s death, the papal nuncio gives them absolution for that role. Adán believes the government has already absolved them in a political sense for other killings, as part of the exchange that enabled Parada’s death. At the same time, the Government of Mexico restores the Catholic Church to full legal status, and a briefcase of incriminating information passes from Adán to government ministers. The sequence ties religious recognition, evidence, and the resolution of political violence to a single quid pro quo: the state can punish or pardon according to the terms of an arrangement, rather than applying law consistently.

This arrangement has consequences for who can act on evidence. After listening to Cerro’s tapes and reviewing his documents, Parada concludes that the names reach so far into government and the security apparatus that no one in Mexico can or will pursue the matter. Cerro brings the record to him because the ordinary channels of accountability are compromised. The Government of Mexico is therefore not represented only by its presidents or public announcements; it also includes agencies and officials whose interconnections make evidence dangerous and enforcement uncertain.

Economic Leverage and the Return of the Federación

The state’s vulnerability becomes especially visible during the Peso Crisis. After the new president takes office on December 1, 1994, two brokerage houses controlled by the Federación begin buying government bonds. The cartels then withdraw capital from the national bank, the peso is devalued by half, and the organization cashes in its bonds as the economy collapses. The episode makes financial instruments part of the same struggle for power as police protection and political financing: the organization can exploit the state’s economic exposure and profit from the crisis that follows.

The new president subsequently invites the cartel lords to return their money to Mexico to help revive the economy and repay a loan. Adán accepts, but demands a favorable environment for trade. The demand constrains the government’s freedom to act: officials may speak publicly about breaking the cartels, while the bargain requires them not to disrupt the conditions on which cartel money and economic recovery now depend. The account presents the Federación as able to turn the state’s need for capital into political leverage, rather than merely evading state policy from outside it.

Enforcement Under Pressure

Later, the Government of Mexico authorizes a forceful campaign in Baja California. Following John Hobbs’s argument that Adán is supplying arms to left-wing insurgents, Mexico City removes the restraints on Antonio Ramos’s pursuit of the Barrera brothers. Ramos’s officers raid safe houses in Tijuana’s wealthy neighborhoods, and he publicly names Adán, Raúl, and Fabián Martínez while promising to jail cartel-linked young men known as the Juniors. He also dismisses dozens of Baja federal officers for serving the cartel rather than opposing it. The campaign demonstrates genuine state capacity to mobilize police and make arrests, but its immediate cause is a new security concern, and its targets remain beyond reach.

Ramos’s televised challenge to the city’s residents turns enforcement into a public test of loyalty: he asks who will stand with him against the Barreras. That appeal follows years in which local protection and official inaction have helped the organization thrive. Across the novel, the Government of Mexico consequently occupies two positions at once. It is the formal authority able to fund operations, dismiss officers, and announce national policy; it is also an arena whose personnel and decisions are repeatedly shaped by cartel money, political bargains, and covert security priorities. The contrast between the crackdown on screen and the bargains behind it is central to the novel’s depiction of state power.