Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party

The Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the entrenched governing force around which the novel’s Mexican political order turns: it has held power since the 1917 Revolution, yet its authority is shown as neither secure nor separate from the drug economy. The party’s longevity provides a framework for political patronage and local loyalty, while a stolen election, cartel financing, and the abrupt reversal of protection expose how readily public power can be bent by private interests.

A Dominant Party and Its Political Geography

The PRI’s long rule gives the party an institutional reach that extends from national elections to neglected neighborhoods. In one description of Guadalajara, the city is valued not for crops or a border but as a safe base from which to serve the Federación. That arrangement links the geography of Mexican political and criminal power: a city can matter less as a productive frontier than as a protected center for operating and extending influence.

At Lomas Taurinas, near Tijuana, party loyalty has a more material face. The poor settlement occupies a ravine of improvised shacks, where residents had depended on rivulets running through their homes and where muddy ground remained an open sewer and a slow-moving garbage dump. Recently installed piped water and electricity are presented as rewards for loyalty to the PRI. The provision matters, but so does its setting: basic infrastructure arrives as a political benefit in a place where hardship remains pervasive, making public services part of a patronage relationship rather than evidence that deprivation has been overcome.

The Stolen Election and Cartel Influence

The novel ties the PRI’s electoral continuity to fraud. In the 1988 election, the opposition candidate Cárdenas appeared likely to win and dislodge the party. The Federación helped the president steal the election; the computers counting the votes then supposedly malfunctioned. The account makes the failure of the vote-counting machinery the hinge between a possible transfer of power and the continuation of PRI rule, while placing a criminal organization inside the process that determines political legitimacy.

The arrangement is not limited to election day. When the Federación offers protection and a share of its resources to García Abrego, the conversation presents political and criminal power as mutually useful: protection has a price, and the offer extends the Federación’s network of friends and influence. The episode does not make the PRI itself the speaker or sole architect of cartel policy; instead, it shows the environment in which access, protection, and political authority can be negotiated together.

Crisis, Appointments, and a Favorable Trade Environment

The peso crisis reveals how cartel wealth can become leverage over national policy. After the new president took office on December 1, 1994, brokerage houses controlled by the Federación began buying government tesobonos the next day. The following week, the cartels withdrew capital from the national bank, forcing a 50 percent devaluation. The Federación then cashed in its bonds and profited from the resulting collapse, before using its gains to buy devalued pesos and Mexican assets.

The president subsequently had to invite the narco lords to return their dollars and help reinvigorate the economy. Adán accepted, but demanded a favorable trade environment: the president could publicly claim to be breaking the cartels, but was expected not to act against them. The bargain turns economic rescue into political constraint. The government needs the money, while the organization that supplies it gains room to continue business.

The United States knew that PRI officials were implicated: it gave the president a list of PRI figures on the Federación’s payroll. The ensuing appointments deepen the implication of that disclosure. Three people on the list became state governors, another became transportation secretary, and another became head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs. The passage does not establish that every appointment was itself a direct payment or spell out each official’s conduct; it does show that the boundary between a cartel’s political payroll and the government’s senior offices had become difficult to defend.

Security Policy and the Limits of Political Protection

The party’s rule sits within a wider security landscape in which anti-Communist arguments and the War on Drugs can authorize overlapping forms of intervention. John Hobbs describes the possibility of insurgency spreading north from Chiapas as a regional threat, invoking poverty and geography to present Mexico’s stability as a matter of American security. He also insists that Cerberus comes from the highest authority in the United States, framing covert action as a necessary response rather than an autonomous decision by the CIA.

The practical consequence is a mismatch between the public justification for assistance and its intended use. Congress would not openly fund a package of seventy-five Huey helicopters and twelve C-26 aircraft to fight insurgents, nor would Mexico openly accept it on those terms. The same equipment is funded as assistance against drug traffickers and then quietly transferred to the Mexican Army for use in Chiapas and Guerrero. This context does not establish that the PRI directed the covert operation; it shows the political environment surrounding the Mexican state and the way drug enforcement can serve as cover for a different security objective.

Finally, the party’s connection to cartel power is not a guarantee of lasting protection. When Adán is forced from safe houses and receives no warning from his well-paid friends in Mexico City, he suspects that PRI politicians may have turned against him because they are frightened. His suspicion remains a character’s interpretation, not confirmation that the party has collectively decided to abandon him. Even so, the silence marks a consequential change: political access that once helped sustain the Federación can become unreliable when the risks of protecting its leader rise.