Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
El Rey del Cash (The King of Cash) reveals that we lack compatibility between social morality and the perverse urges for power. This essential flaw explains why this book has raised so much controversy. Knowing the immorality of the ruler when he demands thousands of bureaucrats to hand over 10% of their salary in cash to pay AMLO’s whimsical “Cause”, now those same workers are burdened with a guilty silence that does not allow them to recognize that they were forced to betray their personal ethics. How can they explain this harmful social and collective behavior that combines transgression, shame, humiliation, and then complicit silence?
There is always a first time for everything. It is not the first time in the history of humanity that a people mimics a ruler and allows themselves to be led down a path that leads to its own destruction. But it is the first time it has happened in Mexico.
So it was for the German people with Hitler. Hypnotized by his offer of a future full of glory and victory that guaranteed them moral and racial superiority over the rest of the world, they marched into a cruel war that meant holocaust, suffering, and death for millions. After the war and defeat, they could not recognize what they had supported and endorsed, ignoring the concentration camps and worldwide devastation. It took them decades to come to terms with their history.
The same is happening today to the Russian people, approving and accepting the consequences of Putin’s fantasy of “restoring the Great Russian Empire”. Many continue to support the leader and accept the progressive and accelerated establishment of an autocratic, kleptocratic, and dictatorial regime, along with the slaughter of the Ukrainian people, based on the alleged “historical justification” of that fantasy.
The fantasies of the grandeur of some leaders lead their people to moral bankruptcy and the destruction of the foundations of their present and future prosperity and progress. Mexico is in that danger. What is exposed in the King of Cash is, without purposely intending it, the description of a people like the German or the Russian, led to believe in the fantasy of a luminous future offered by the perverse leader and is ready to throw itself over the precipice in silence, subordinated and subdued, after having been an accomplice in the construction of an authoritarian present. Why does it remain silent? This is the question we must ask ourselves.
Criticism of the book has focused on two aspects. One is about the author and her “intentions” in writing the book, for being a woman and former partner of a relevant Morenista official. And second, for lacking documentary sources. Evidence! They clamor for it. Of course, the joke tells itself: it is a book about the mode of operation precisely with cash, so there is no documentary trail to follow. It is an ingenious and cynical system created to deceive people and hide the dishonesty of their brains.
The first criticism, for being a woman and a scorned couple (which we are unaware of), does not deserve comment. It is not surprising, but it is despicable to take the discussion to that level. But the Morenist kingdom is full of despicable things.
Regarding the lack of documentation, it is obvious. It is a mechanism designed without paper trails. The underlying question at first is: what did AMLO and his family live on for 18 years, campaigning and moving work teams all over the republic?
This book explains it. He lived on money extracted from two primary sources: money from the legal prerogatives of the PRD as a registered political party. Hence the testimony of Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, when he explains all the party resources that he gave to AMLO when he was the national president of the PRD. Guadalupe gave him money legally received by the party but without knowing its destination. Guadalupe’s mistake.
The origin of the rest of the money, undoubtedly the most significant amount of the resources obtained, is the key to the discussion in the book because it has been demonstrated, since 2013, that the associations Honestidad Valiente (Courageous Honesty) and Austeridad Republicana (Republican Austerity) were the concentrators of billions of pesos in cash. So much so that there came a time when, in attention to banking regulations on cash deposits, banks began to reject biweekly deposits of so much cash whose operatives could not prove their lawful origin. The banks canceled the accounts of both associations, as reported and proved by the PRI in 2013.
It is a system created to deceive and to be able, immediately afterward, to wield the argument of “courageous honesty” when that is precisely what it lacks.
During AMLO’s six-year term as head of the Mexico City Government, the original mechanism to raise funds for the “Cause” was the mandatory contribution of all public servants to donate 10% of their salary every two weeks to avoid being fired. These stories have haunted the civil servants of that time. Some did it convinced of the purpose, others out of necessity, and others with bitterness and anger. But all knew they were committing an act outside their ethics and the moral standards of society. They committed an act that shamed them and, to this day, humiliates them, which explains why they dare not, years later, denounce what they did. It was not necessarily illegal, but it was immoral.
It was as shameful as having been raped, and they dared not denounce it out of shame, fear, or humiliation. Because if they dared to denounce those facts from those times, then, and only then, the people of Mexico would understand how AMLO came to manage exorbitant amounts of money. And how he became President: claiming courageous honesty and being a thief without the slightest guilt of his deeds, close to psychopathy. He had at his disposal funds that were not only the money of public officials turned into enslaved people. He also extracted money from police retirement funds and other government trusts. When the author explains how Ebrard turned the Metro into the piggy bank for AMLO, and surely for himself, she is simply explaining the system created by AMLO years before and institutionalized over time. There is Delfina, AMLO’s brothers, his children in Texas, Bejarano, Imaz, and a long etcetera. They are all part of a system of collecting illegal money from public funds, where a part stays in the recipient’s pocket, and the rest supports the “Cause”.
They have lived so many years extorting through the udder of the public budget that they cannot imagine anything else. Hence, we witness how corcholatas today make extraordinarily expensive campaigns with public resources while acquiring properties and companies. Today they control the oversight bodies, which allows an actual assault on the public treasury for political and personal purposes. Hence, also the need to count on the complicity of the Armed Forces. The mantra seems to be: hands in the till. The inclusion of the Army is one of the most tragic phenomena of this process because it gives strength of arms for the continuity of the corrupting process and destroys the positive image of the military institution.
We are corroborating this daily with the hacking of Guacamaya.
It is the same method used by AMLO to involve the PRI in the criminal scheme through complicity and co-participation in the fleecing of the public treasury. Between organized crime allied to AMLO and Morena, including the PRI and the Army, in the feast of taking the public treasury as private, Mexico is experiencing the moral corruption of the State. If we add to that the hiring of Cuban doctors as enslaved people, the drift towards a civil-military regime based on imposition and corruption is perfectly rounded off. Add to that the complicit silence of a frightened, humiliated, and ashamed people, just like the German people after World War II or the Russian people today.
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