Morena's Tabasco Narco Scandal
The cartel security chief shakes but doesn't shatter the Sheinbaum government
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Among the many quotes on Mexican corruption, two stand out for being concise and darkly funny. “No general can resist a cannonball of 50,000 pesos” is attributed to revolutionary general and president Álvaro Obregón although it could be apocryphal. Even more famous is the gem attributed to Mexico State governor Carlos Hank González; “Un político pobre es un pobre político,” he supposedly said, which means “a politician who is poor is a politician who is bad at politics.”
There are other phrases to illustrate corruption there aren’t attributed to anybody. The infamous “plata o plomo” option illustrates whether officials would prefer to take the bribe of silver or the lead of a bullet. I prefer the rhyme of “el que no tranza no avanza,” which means, “if you don’t cheat, you don’t get ahead.”
Narco corruption also affects the United States, as I write about here. But there are so many phrases about corruption in Mexico because it’s so deeply ingrained that it’s baked into the system. British journalist Alan Riding acutely observed in his 1984 book Distant Neighbors that corruption is like an oil and glue that actually makes the cogs turns. The official gets that license done because he has a financial incentive to do it. Money rises up like gas and power flows down like water.
Riding wrote before the cartel wars ripped Mexico apart in the 2000s. Anybody with a clue knows that a core problem in the current bloodbath is that so many gangsters have officials on their payroll. Yet there are contrasting ways of interpreting how this cartel corruption functions.
Some paint it is as a top-down system in which the federal government can pick and choose which cartel wins. For example, federal forces are widely accused of supporting the Sinaloa Cartel against the Zetas in the 2010s.
Yet others, myself included, see a more chaotic corruption system, in which nobody is fully in control. Cartels fight over domination of state governments and police forces. Politicians take bribes from multiple competing forces. Sicarios assassinate officials who took their cash but failed to deliver.
This corrupt chaos fuels the violent dance of death that are the cartel wars. And the truth that has confronted those in the presidential palace, from Calderón to Peña Nieto to AMLO, is that they cannot fully impose their will on the gangster warlords and pacify the country.
Within this shifting dirty system, the latest scandal tugs at the heart of the ruling party Morena and shakes the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum. The scandal is rooted in Tabasco, home of AMLO, who founded Morena and chose Sheinbaum as his successor. Yet it’s not just a local problem but runs deep into Morena’s control in Congress and its broader system of power. It also comes as the Trump White House is hawkish on the cartel corruption issue.
“But we didn’t know he was a cartel boss”
The scandal is typically twisted and complicated so I’ll break it down. Topping the cast of characters…
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