Comfort & Boldness in the Fourth Transformation

ByAlejandro Páez Varela

This editorial by Alejandro Páez Varela originally appeared in the May 18, 2026 edition of Sin Embargo. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

One. Cowardice

For a long time, we were content with things as they were. In many ways, it was convenient for us that the United States arrested and tried our corrupt officials. We knew that Genaro García Luna should be brought to justice for Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs; for the networks of corruption he wove, even involving an elite group of journalists who remain active today. However, we preferred to look the other way in the name of a supposed “national unity.”

So, the United States began doing the work that the Mexican justice system wasn’t doing. They located the major drug traffickers, the corrupt and thieving politicians, and the brazen murderers. And then they pressured us to hand them over. The credit always went to Washington. We, “terrified” by the corrupting power of those evil forces, didn’t even hold them in our prisons: we gave them over, along with all the useful information they had gathered.

PRI leader Alito Moreno, on one of his many pilgrimages to Washington.

What we’re experiencing today is partly a consequence of that. I don’t know if Rubén Rocha Moya is corrupt, but there are signs that others alongside him were. Weren’t they detected? No, Omar García Harfuch says no. But it often happens that when something is found on someone, it all comes to nothing. In a shameful mess of nothing. In a foul broth of nothing. There’s Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas: every Friday he travels to Washington to badmouth Mexico for about 20 minutes to some nobody (the last one was Corina Machado) and stays there for a lavish weekend with public funds, pretending to be a hero. A thief we turned into a hero. We didn’t do our job of putting him in jail, and now he’s playing the hero. And we have to swallow it. Everyone knows he’s a disgrace, and yet there he is. We all know he is a shameless parasite and there he is, free, because a handful of corrupt people in Congress did not process the removal of his immunity and because the Attorney General’s Office in the times of Alejandro Gertz Manero (and Andrés Manuel López Obrador) never requested the trial of admissibility to subject him to the removal of immunity.

Emilio Lozoya Austin, former director of PEMEX, was arrested in February 2020 in Málaga, Spain, by the Spanish National Police. He escaped the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and was apprehended abroad. The trial has been a disaster, and the major cases, Odebrecht and Agronitrogenados, yielded little. The only case we truly dedicated ourselves to in recent years was that of General Salvador Cienfuegos. He was arrested in Los Angeles in October 2020 on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. We secured his release from abroad so that the Attorney General’s Office could exonerate him. Those are our achievements.

César Duarte, the former governor of Chihuahua, was arrested in Miami in July 2020 for embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds. Then, the Attorney General’s Office under María Eugenia Campos, in open and obvious complicity, stopped pursuing the recovery of 50 properties that the corrupt official had purchased in the United States with public money. Did any federal authority do anything? Nothing. The shameless man went back to dancing in bars in Chihuahua, which is why he was arrested. It was a lack of prudence because he could easily have run for Congress with the Workers Party (PT), the Green Party, or even Morena.

And those are the cases that come to mind. If we don’t get involved, justice is served from abroad; if we do, it’s to ensure the accused go free, like with Cienfuegos. We’ve wasted wonderful years on that, years that will never return. We extradited Tomás Yarrington to the United States to face charges of money laundering and drug trafficking; they confiscated everything he owned there, and he served his sentence. Meanwhile, we kept Eugenio Hernández, another former governor of Tamaulipas accused of drug trafficking and money laundering, in Mexico, exonerated him, and made him a candidate for Senator for the Green Party.

I will never justify the gringos meddling in Mexico, but, hey, if for a long time we were happy with it being that way; if it was always convenient, in many ways, for the United States to arrest and judge our corrupt officials even though we know who the hell they are and where they are, don’t you see it as somewhat “natural” that they feel they have the “right” to say who they want now?

This isn’t something new, but I emphasize the last few years because the essence of the López Obrador movement is the defense of sovereignty. If for years we let the Americans tell us who our criminals were and pressured us to arrest them; if we gave them extraordinary power out of a lack of will or courage, then no one should be surprised that this nation, always expansive and always lurking, now uses that power as it pleases and according to its agenda. There’s a far-right president, and he’s using that extraordinary power against those on the left in power.

I insist: it bothers me immensely that the Americans are meddling in Mexico, but it doesn’t come without consequences. Since the justice system here only partially functions, and since there’s no courage to act, they stick their noses in wherever they please. We didn’t prosecute Moreno Cárdenas; now they’re using him against us. We didn’t prosecute Maru Campos, or at least we didn’t confront her: now they’re using her against us. Jorge Romero is unpunished in the Real Estate Cartel scheme: he’s an asset of Washington. The same goes for Francisco Javier Cabeza de Vaca, whom Alejandro Gertz Manejo allowed to escape, and the same for many others against whom we didn’t have, don’t have, and won’t have the courage. Unfortunately.

And most dictionaries agree that the opposite word of “boldness”, the only antonym of “boldness”, is “cowardice”.

Adrián Rubalcava Suárez (right), the fiscally-incompetent right winger with alleged connections to organized crime who for some reason was given control over Mexico City’s Metro, one of the world’s most important subway systems.

Two. Daring

Let me clarify from the outset that the movement that took control of the country in just 10 years is not, in any way, cowardly or anything of the sort. Listen, what we’ve seen is no small feat: the 4T has confronted media elites; party and government bureaucracies; journalists accustomed to banging their fists on the table to demand privileges; and cliques of intellectuals and academics who co-governed Mexico and were capable of twisting history to consolidate a right-wing project in a country with millions of poor people. No, that’s not being cowardly. That’s having courage.

That’s why I can’t understand the 4T’s lack of political will to hold the corrupt accountable. They said a thousand times in Mexico City that Héctor Serrano was corrupt, and now he’s the 4T’s viceroy in San Luis Potosí; he’s Governor Ricardo Gallardo’s right-hand man; both are from the Green Party, and Morena was about to give Serrano a candidacy in 2024, but someone got in the way (let’s see: anyone who dares deny it?). And that’s just one example. There’s a tremendous misunderstanding regarding loyalty and repaying favors, and I wonder—and this is another example—how Ricardo Monreal and Adán Augusto López remain in relevant positions (the latter slightly less so), and why, moreover, they put Adrián Rubalcava on the Metro to use the closed-circuit system and promote himself every day between 6 and 8 p.m. How is that decided? I have to question it because I don’t like it.

The CIA, doesn’t build bridges or distribute vaccines: it destroys nations from within and is capable of tearing off the arms of foreign or domestic children to prevent them from being immunized. That’s why Maru Campos’s case is so important. She must face justice; she must pay if she negotiated with the CIA.

Now, it’s one thing for someone not to like it. That’s just harmless complaining. The problem is when those assets become dead weight, and that dead weight threatens the ship we’re all on. The United States’ involvement in Mexico isn’t just a matter for Morena or the 4T: it’s a matter that involves all citizens. Everyone, even the most right-wing, should understand that foreign interference isn’t for our benefit. Everyone, in every party, should understand that the foreign activities of Lilly Téllez and Ricardo Salinas Pliego aren’t normal and could very well be part of a CIA plan—there are plenty of examples. (And let’s not take our eyes off Carlos Salinas de Gortari, wherever he may be.)

That agency, the CIA, doesn’t build bridges or distribute vaccines: it destroys nations from within and is capable of tearing off the arms of foreign or domestic children to prevent them from being immunized. That’s why Maru Campos’s case is so important. She must face justice; she must pay if she negotiated with the CIA. It’s an ethical and moral imperative, but also, it’s for the good of all.

And the heart of the matter isn’t about Lilly Téllez or Salinas Pliego and their ilk. Blessed is the Fourth Transformation (4T), not because of the 4T itself, but because the far-right opposition is truly impassable. These two figures are not very intelligent (except when it comes to money) and they exude so much resentment that they only hurt themselves. The sheer volume of lies and fake news generated by their media outlets, journalists, and cronies—for example—has already justified the State’s investment in a new apparatus to debunk them.

The underlying issue is that these two, along with thousands of others, find support in the United States because the current administration allowed this opening to remain. By permitting impunity; by justifying clearly questionable individuals in order to win elections; by failing to confront the corrupt—whether out of a lack of courage, cowardice, or whatever the reason may be—after having faced truly dangerous powers, it opens a crack for Washington to slip in.

There’s a campaign underway, supported from the United States and heavily funded from within, to portray the left as allied with drug traffickers. Narco-party, narco-government, narco-governor, narco-president, narco-everything. A member of my family told me that their grandchildren in the United States questioned them about why drug traffickers govern Mexico. Imagine the campaign. And there will be people in Mexico who believe what Javier Alatorre says simply because he’s there, every night, feeding them lies and corruption.

I think it’s time for the 4T (Fourth Transformation) to boldly confront its problems because, in fact, its problems are the problems of the entire country. That’s the power the 4T has: it represents the majority. Therefore, it must guarantee that those guilty of corruption go to jail; that drug traffickers go to jail; that none of its members are, or can be, linked to illicit activities. The 4T must invest all the necessary funds to undertake decisive actions for genuine transitional justice. It must say: we inherited a country where politicians flirted with drug traffickers, but that’s over.

The 4T (Fourth Transformation) hasn’t even been able to establish the idea that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) invented the subject of Narcopolitics 1, 2, and 3, and that the PAN (National Action Party) was its first student. The 4T hasn’t even been able to reclaim recent history, despite ample documents and testimonies proving that narcopolitics is not new and is, unfortunately, a disease of the last 50 years. It has the tools to do so, and it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it?

On Saturday, President Claudia Sheinbaum said: “No one who isn’t honest, who isn’t honorable, can hide behind the halo of the transformation of the Mexican people.” It’s a warning that offers hope. And it’s appreciated. But that statement still needs to tell us something: who will bell the cat, that is, who will point out the dishonest and who will be responsible for removing them? And I suspect it has to be now, that there’s no time to lose; that every minute makes us more vulnerable, not to those at home, who are a minor matter, but to the hungry beast from the north, which prowls the corrals to see where it can get in and who it will kill.