Institutional Revolutionary Party

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the political center of a system in which the appearance of electoral government coexists with entrenched one-party rule and an increasingly intimate bargain between officials and drug traffickers. In the novel, the party’s relationship with the Federation moves beyond individual corruption: cartel money helps sustain the ruling order, while political protection and state access help the Federation expand its power. The arrangement ultimately reaches elections, security policy, and the national economy, making the party both an institution of government and a channel through which criminal influence operates.

Identity and Political Position

The PRI has ruled Mexico since 1917 in a one-party, pseudo-democratic system. Its longevity is presented as a political fact with practical consequences: even a candidate expected to win office does so within a structure whose continuity is treated as nearly certain. The party is not portrayed as simply abolishing its opponents. Rather, its authority is maintained through an interlocking system of political control, accommodation, and, when needed, the manipulation of elections.

The party’s relationship with the Catholic Church offers another measure of that system’s flexibility. After the Ley Lerdo of 1856 and the revolutionary constitution of 1857 curtailed Church property and power, the Vatican and Mexican government remained without formal relations. Yet the party did not attempt to abolish the Church in a largely faithful country. Instead, the state’s anti-clerical legacy coexisted with petty restrictions, including a ban on clerical garb, and a grudging accommodation. Political authority is therefore shown operating through selective pressure and practical compromise rather than through a single, consistent ideological program.

Cartel Patronage and Political Protection

The Federation’s relationship with the ruling party is built through money, protection, and reciprocal access. In one account of the political arrangement, García Abrego questions why the Federation’s leader divides the world into three parts and takes a fourth for himself. The response presents Guadalajara as a safe base from which to serve the Federation. Don Adán Barrera then offers to share his protection and connections with García Abrego, describing protection as a service with a fee. The exchange makes the political logic plain: influence is organized as a network of obligations, and security is something the cartel can provide—and charge for.

The 1985 earthquake intensifies this compact. With reconstruction requiring funds, the government has only two major sources available in the account: the Vatican and the drug traffickers. The Church has contributed, and the Federation is expected to contribute as well. But the money is not represented as an unconditional gift. Adán expects a reciprocal agreement, and the Federation also plans to finance the PRI’s victory in the coming election, consistent with the party’s record of winning since the revolution.

To organize that political financing, Adán helps García Abrego arrange a dinner at which every major trafficker and businessman in Mexico is expected to contribute $25 million per plate. The scale and compulsory character of the fundraising make it more than ordinary campaign support: participation signals a willingness to do business within the system. Following the disruption caused by the Ernie Hidalgo affair, Adán regards renewed relations with Mexico City as a way for the Federation to return to business as usual. The party’s political needs and the cartel’s commercial recovery reinforce each other.

Election, Office, and State Capture

The account of the 1988 election reveals how that financial relationship is joined to electoral fraud. The opposition appeared likely to defeat the PRI, but the computers counting votes reportedly malfunctioned; the election commissioner then announced that the ruling party had won. The narrative links the stolen result to violence against election officials, while distinguishing responsibility within the cartel leadership: García Abrego arranged the murders, and Miguel Ángel Barrera was understood to have known of and approved them. The episode presents the party’s continuity not as a neutral outcome of voting, but as something secured through a combination of political finance and coercive intervention.

The political rewards extend beyond the election itself. After taking office, the president nationalizes the banks, telecommunications industries, and oil fields, which are then purchased below market value by men who had attended the fundraising dinner and contributed $25 million apiece. The sequence binds campaign finance to economic opportunity: those who helped secure the political order benefit when state assets change hands. The novel thus depicts the PRI’s governing power as a means of distributing access to public wealth as well as retaining office.

Evidence preserved by Cerro makes the connections broader and harder to dismiss as isolated misconduct. Tapes and documents include the president, his brother, the attorney general, the secretary of the interior, the PRI chairman, and officials across police, military, and intelligence institutions. The material concerns the dinner financing, the election theft and killings, and the solicitation of traffickers to fund political operations and commit violence. It also connects officials to the torture and murder of the American agent Hidalgo. Parada recognizes that the evidence describes not merely corruption but a country sold to traffickers; he also concludes that no one in Mexico can or will act on it.

Crisis, Bargaining, and Economic Power

The party’s entanglement with the Federation persists after a change of president. The new president takes office on December 1, 1994. The next day, two brokerage houses controlled by the Federation begin buying government tesobonos. A week later, cartel withdrawals from the national bank help force a 50 percent devaluation of the peso. The Federation then cashes in its bonds and profits from the collapse, using the crisis to acquire property, businesses, land, and pesos at depressed prices. The crisis turns political access into financial leverage on a national scale.

The government subsequently has to invite the traffickers’ money back into the country to help reinvigorate the economy and repay the loan. By then, the traffickers have increased their wealth by moving between dollars and devalued pesos and benefiting when the peso rises again after the American bailout. Don Adán agrees to return the Federation’s money only in exchange for a favorable trade environment. The president may publicly denounce the cartels, but the bargain leaves little room for effective action against them.

The PRI’s reach is also visible in appointments. The Americans provide the president with a list of party figures on the Federation’s payroll; three are appointed state governors, one becomes transportation secretary, and another is made head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs. These appointments suggest that the Federation’s influence does not stop at private payments. It has penetrated the personnel of the state institutions expected to govern and police its activities.

Security Politics and Narrative Significance

The party’s role also intersects with the novel’s account of anti-Communist covert action. John Hobbs describes Cerberus as having come from the highest authority in the country, while presenting the danger of a Soviet-aligned Nicaragua as justification for extraordinary action. He argues that the United States must act against the perceived threat, even through the Contras and other violent allies. In the evidence Parada later examines, Operation Cerberus is a conspiracy to fund and equip the Contras through cocaine sales; Operation Red Mist coordinates right-wing operations across Latin America, with support from drug cartels and the PRI. The party is thus implicated not only in domestic political protection but also in a regional security network where anti-Communist aims, cartel finance, and state power converge.

That convergence makes the PRI’s relationship with the Federation structurally significant. The cartel supplies money for elections and national recovery, while political institutions provide protection, appointments, and a climate in which public opposition can coexist with private accommodation. The party’s durability is not simply a backdrop to the drug trade: it is one of the conditions that lets criminal networks convert wealth into political influence, and political influence back into wealth. The novel’s recurring reversals—an election that confirms the ruling party after its count fails, a public crackdown that leaves cartel power intact, and an economic collapse that enriches the Federation—show how state authority can be weakened even as its formal institutions continue to function.