Mexican Revolution

Mexican Revolution is the novel’s historical point of reference for the political order that follows it, rather than a conflict narrated in its own right. The revolution supplies the founding date against which the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s long rule, manipulated elections, and bargains with the drug trade are understood. Its legacy is less a settled past than a claim to legitimacy that powerful institutions repeatedly exploit.

The Revolution as Political Foundation

The novel dates the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s one-party, pseudo-democratic rule to 1917, describing the party as having governed Mexico since the revolution. That claim gives the revolution a continuing political presence: it marks the origin of the ruling order, while the word revolutionary lends historical weight to a system whose democratic appearance conceals its durability. The narrative does not recount the revolution’s battles or leaders; it shows how the founding reference is invoked in the political life that came after.

That postrevolutionary order also includes a long, uneasy accommodation between the government and the Vatican. The account reaches back to the 1856 Ley Lerdo and the Mexican Constitution of 1857, which stripped the Church of land and political power, and describes the resulting estrangement between Church and state. By the time the story turns to the modern government, formal relations with the Vatican have not resumed, though the state has largely settled into grudging accommodation with the Church. The revolution’s political inheritance is thus presented as part of a longer struggle over who may govern and shape public life.

Elections and Cartel Power

The novel makes the ruling party’s historical continuity concrete through the 1988 presidential election. Four years before a later political bargain, the opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas appeared likely to defeat the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The computers counting the votes then malfunctioned, a terse account of electoral fraud that exposes the gap between the party’s claim to rule and the means used to preserve its position.

Cartel money is woven into that political continuity. Don Adán Barrera helps organize a fundraising dinner priced at $25 million per plate, with major drug traffickers and businessmen expected to contribute if they want to keep doing business. The payment is not depicted as an isolated bribe: it accompanies an understanding that the government needs funds for reconstruction and that the Federación will help the ruling party win the coming election. Political support, business access, and protection become parts of the same exchange.

At an earlier meeting, Barrera defines the arrangement in openly territorial terms. He proposes Guadalajara as a safe place from which to serve the Federación, offers to share his protection and connections, and answers a question about the cost by calling protection expensive. García Abrego’s observation that Barrera takes a fourth share for himself captures the hierarchy behind the offer. The scene presents the Federación not merely as a criminal enterprise operating under the state, but as a power positioning itself to furnish protection and set terms within the country’s political geography.

Revolutionary Threats and Security Policy

The revolution’s legacy also sits beside a different political language: Cold War warnings about communist expansion. John Hobbs describes Nicaragua as a potential entry point for regional insurgency and imagines a communist Mexico as a threat to the United States. He argues that covert action under Cerberus comes from the highest authority, presenting extraordinary measures as necessary responses to a danger that conventional policy cannot tolerate. These are Hobbs’s arguments, not a neutral account of Mexico’s history; their force lies in how they make intervention sound unavoidable.

The same logic reappears when insurgent activity in Chiapas and elsewhere is used to justify military assistance. Congress and Mexico are said to reject openly anti-communist intervention, yet helicopters and aircraft funded as part of the drug war are to be transferred to the Mexican army for operations against insurgents. The novel places this security logic alongside the domestic political bargains: the language of fighting drugs can authorize actions that serve a wider political struggle, just as the language of revolutionary inheritance can lend continuity to one-party rule.

The 1994 Order and Its Human Cost

By 1994, the Federación’s reach extends from political bargains to the national economy. After the new president takes office on December 1, two brokerage houses controlled by the organization begin buying tesobonos the next day. The cartels then withdraw capital from the national bank, precipitating a 50 percent devaluation; the Federación cashes in its bonds and buys property, businesses, land, and pesos at depressed prices. When the government invites the narcos to return their money to help revive the economy, Don Adán demands a favorable business environment in return. The old party-state order is still in place, but the cartel can now use financial crisis to dictate terms to it.

The novel also places this political and economic chronology beside private bereavement. During the 1994 Day of the Dead, Don Adán spends the day visiting nine graves and building shrines for relatives killed in a single night by Güero Méndez’s men. Güero Méndez, in turn, visits the elaborate family tomb of his wife and children at Jardines del Valle cemetery in Culiacán. These acts of remembrance do not explain the revolution, but they show the living world that the political order fails to protect: family dead are mourned and named while organized violence continues around them. In this way, the revolution remains the state’s founding reference, but the novel’s later scenes measure its promise against a present shaped by electoral manipulation, cartel influence, and loss.