Adán Augusto López knows that in mountaineering—and Mexican politics is high-risk mountaineering—climbers are linked by the same rope to form a team.
Adán Augusto, a skilled climber, has fallen, but his political protégés don’t have their own ice axes to keep themselves afloat.
The leader of the team in the Senate has fallen, and his protégés from Jalisco, Chihuahua, and Nuevo León will fall too. Especially those from this northern state.
Adán Augusto’s people in Nuevo León will pretend they can save themselves; that they cling to the solid rock (sic) of Morena and not to that of their ousted patron.
They are wrong. Adán Augusto will drag them down with him, and the others will plummet into the abyss because they don’t have—they never had—their own anchor points. Only selfies in the nothingness of Instagram, in the empty heights of YouTube; in petty events and ceremonies without solid ground.
Adán Augusto threatened to plant his ice axe on forbidden rock. He made a show of joining forces with other Senate climbers, with Ricardo Anaya, even with Alejandro Moreno, “Alito.” He pushed Attorney General Gertz Manero off the rope, assuming that would save his own skin. Roma traditoribus non praemiat (Rome does not reward traitors).
He was left hanging over the precipice. Adán Augusto went privately to Guadalajara. He came to make secret deals in Monterrey. He gathered his political group here. Nothing. The ice axe didn’t sink deep. The rope loosened. The weight of La Barredora, of Hernán Bermúdez Requena, of his unconfessed complicity, defeated him.
Three tense meetings with the president. A slammed hand on the table at the National Palace. Several fruitless calls to Tabasco. And then Marco Rubio’s arrival in Mexico City. A leaked blacklist. All fake. But in one genuine one, his name did appear. A demand for hostages without any ransom.
There’s a French joke—the French are subtly cruel, and Adam Augusto, who speaks fluent French, knows this—about a poor man who slipped from a considerable height. As he plummeted down with deadly speed, the poor man said to himself, “So far, so good.”
Source: elhorizonte
