Movements, actors or political parties usually choose symbolic dates for their founding or launch, which reveal something about their historical interests, ideas or objectives. Thus, for example, Morena decided to found itself as a Civil Association on a very significant October 2, an indelible date for the Mexican left; The PAN chose to be founded as a party on September 16, national day; and the extinct PRD opened the route on May 5; victorious anniversary in Mexican history.
That is why it is striking that a man like Ricardo Salinas Pliego has chosen a revealing occasion to exacerbate his political proclamations: none other than his birthday party. Like a good right-wing narcissist, the evading tycoon assumed that his seventieth anniversary was a forum with enough impact to question the President of the Republic and throw tantrums there.
Let’s ignore for a moment the political harangue expressed there and, in an exercise of imagination, let’s project what the birthday party of the irresponsible pseudo-businessman must have been like. And first a background must be made. Always one of the Salinas Pliego companies, TV Aztecahas been a garbage dump that, like a broken clock, gets it right from time to time.
In that sense, the best thing your television station has had in years, apart from certain sports commentators, is the famous classic series The Simpsonsa program that, in its first seasons, is a magical cocktail of criticism and acid humor. And it is precisely in that series where Salinas Pliego is best explained, comparable to that impious oligarch that is Mr. Burns, who in the satire, once his company was discovered with thousands of technical flaws, instead of fixing them, he decided to compete to be Governor and from political power change the rules and not have to fix anything. Very similar to the fact of wanting to start a political agitation to avoid paying taxes due since 2008.
Or, as the journalist Daniela Barragán recalled, Mr. Burns is also the type of businessman who forces his employees to attend his birthday party, where he humiliates them or exhorts them to serve as his shoeshine boy, either through coercion – as he does with Homer Simpson, forcing him to be the piñatero of the party -; that is, through conviction – as Smithers does, the servant who exercises genuine abjection before his master Burns.
Having said this by the way, at Burnsie’s party, I mean, “Uncle Richie’s”, people like Héctor de Mauleón or Lourdes Mendoza, who present themselves as journalists, attended – who knows if out of conviction or coercion -; while pamphleteers who define themselves as liberals, like Enrique Krauze, expressed their flattering congratulations via Not only because of its fiscal evasion traps – which date back more than three decades – or violent ones – such as the way it took over Channel 40 -; but also for their pathological and McCarthyist language, whether insulting women or regurgitating the worst of the cold war in their newsreels that accuse textbooks of “communism” just because they mention the word “assembly.”
With this mix, what would your party have been like? Subject to the criteria formed by your television station, we can imagine the following. In a forum of twenty thousand people chanting “’Uncle Richie’ President,” the tycoon wipes away a tear of emotion at such spontaneous seal of admiration. Unlike his example Javier Milei, the loneliest man in the world who doesn’t know how to blow a birthday cake because no one has ever made him one before, Ricardo shows a smile accustomed to displays of affection.
It doesn’t matter whether the screams and applause are spontaneous or milked. Salinas Pliego has enough anti-charisma to attract naive people, whether they love him out of ignorance, interest or, the most curious specimens, the arrogant mirreys who see in him not an adult with whom they are united by appreciation, but an example of an ambitious person who teaches that it is okay to be irresponsible, not follow the rules and want to get your way. This is shown in a jovial photo where several young people in strawberry club attire, full of whiteness, pose smiling in front of the camera that captures them in an unforgettable moment for them.
To each of the twenty thousand attendees – as the newspaper reported The Country– He received a voucher valid for free food and beer, along with the delivery of a caricature of the tycoon. If in 2006 the massive imprint made its own, genuinely and by millions, the caricature of López Obrador saying “smile, we are going to win” (which today adorns items and decorations of popular art throughout the country); A robust ego like Salinas’s could not be left behind and had to be seen in the artistic vein of a cardboard. It matters little whether this has been ordered or not. And all the humor, enlivened with the cacophonous chants of Lupillo Rivera or the dancers of a group called Cumbia Machine, who surely did not sing the Santanero chorus of “Take chocolate and pay what you owe.”
The aesthetic background of the party is revealing: a huge illustration that, in the style of the children’s program Rico McDucksays “Uncle Richie” in golden letters not as big as the narcissism of the person being celebrated, while the basis of that nickname is a mountain of coins with a “B” for bitcoin; which in itself is a declaration of principles for anarcho-capitalism, the one with which Milei, once again, justifies his embezzlements and frauds with cryptocurrencies against the Argentine public interest.
However, the best stands out immediately. True to his trash TV style, Salinas forgets that on one’s birthday the usual thing is to receive affection, not to expel your enmities. Missing from the party was the guest of honor, the one who lives in the tycoon’s mind without paying rent. And that guest was the Government of Mexico, which the Salinas Group parodied in a pitiful satire projected at its birthday party. Sad anniversary of the one who, instead of putting his most important biographical memories on screen, exposes his most unjustifiable frustrations.
But you cannot deny consistency to Salinas Pliego. And we remember that your trash television station, faithful to copying nonsense no matter how bad it is, at some point had its own pirate version of the Telettubbiescalled “Telechobis”, that is, babbling fools who distinguished themselves by obsessively repeating the same incomprehensible gibberish.
This is said because Salinas Pliego’s telechobis, like a certain Manuel López San Martín, today want to invade the Mexican press, and like their boss’s ventriloquist dummies, they babble lies and excrescences that range from denying their boss’s status as an evader; misrepresent that you do want to pay taxes; assume that you only have to pay 10 percent of your debt or invent that you had default or evasive agreements in the last six years.
At the moment, these telechobis are the army of verbal agitation of the Salinas Pliego campaign, a campaign that is not known where it is headed, but has two predictable objectives: economically, to keep Salinas as a tax defaulter, and politically, to make the State an enemy, despite the fact that, with loans like the one Raúl Salinas gave him, it is the source of his ill-gotten wealth and with which he even entertained his other teletubbies, voluntary or not, guests in their celebration.