Alito in the US: Betrayal, Escape or Both?

This editorial by Miguel Ángel Velázquez originally appeared in the August 4, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

The fate of the person currently officially leading the PRI is already sealed. Nothing and no one will be able to save the man from impeachment and the consequences it will entail for Alito [Alejandro Moreno], who, we’re told, is running around Washington offering his services as a traitor.

Alejandro Moreno Cardenas, better known as Alito, some legislators tell us, will not be able to shake off the second accusation from the Campeche prosecutor’s office. He has already settled all his outstanding political scores, and no one is willing to reach out to him. Just mentioning the PRI member’s name raises eyebrows among those who hear it.

Not even his closest accomplices intend to help him, and although publicly they appear to be on Moreno’s side, privately they launch very strong accusations against the man who now presides over a PRI that has lost everything, even its sense of patriotism.

A significant number of politicians who left the organization precisely because they didn’t support the Campeche politician have now gathered to reconsider their reinstatement whenever Alito leaves the party.

There are many high profile and low-profile former members who would return to the ranks of the PRI, but more importantly, there are those who have studied ways to reform that party, freeing it from the right-wing line imposed on it by the current party presidency and returning it to a more defined path towards social democracy that, according to them, was once practiced in their party.

Rethinking the PRI, placing it in the political arena with clear ideas and well-established paths, is, ultimately, the work that was not done in the past—and that is being suffered in the present—which allowed corruption to take root, and to protect with cloaks of complicity all the bad maneuvers that led them to their current bankruptcy.

Many are on the starting line who claim that the PRI could wage a political battle if Alito leaves the party in any way, and today they are excited by the possibility that this, the impeachment, could happen with all its consequences.

Those who openly express their optimism do so because they claim that Moreno Cárdenas did not go seeking political agreements for his party, but rather fled to the United States, from where he has no intention of returning. What’s more, the matter is so clear, according to those exiled from the tricolor party PRI, that it’s likely that Alito will end up joining the ranks of the “silent bells” of Mexican politics who have ended up in Madrid.

No doubt: Zedillo [former Mexican President, from PRI] has mixed the poison, Alito wears the shroud. Be careful.

By the way, we mustn’t neglect another of the political monstrosities that Morena collects. We’re referring to Hugo Eric Flores, a well-known right-wing agent who currently chairs the investigative section of the Chamber of Deputies, which will decide the merits of complaints against the man from Campeche.

It us common knowledge that Flores was one of Moreno Cárdenas’s cronies, and no one believes that he can bring justice to the PRI leader.

In terms of that, of justice, Flores should step aside in this trial because we already know that he is capable of seeking some legal trick, one of those that go back and forth between lawyers and deputies, to save Alito’s head, which we all know is firmly in the pillory.

So, be very careful with Flores. The real PRI members should keep a close eye on his actions, lest one of these actions ruin their hopes.