Rocha, Cerimedo and the Beast

ByAlejandro Páez Varela

This article by Alejandro Páez Varela originally appeared in the August 24, 2026 edition of SinEmbargo, a Mexican digital news outlet.

One

What of Fernando Cerimedo. What of Javier Negre. I mean, yes, they matter, because they’re the ones who stick their hands in the toilet to plug the drain and let the filth spill over. They matter because they’re the trained monkeys who lift the wallets of the unwary. But what of them. Deep down they are nothing more than two boys trying to reach the ballroom through the sewer pipe, even knowing that once there they’ll be turned away for the color of their skin and their origin, because they speak Spanish and because, plainly, they stink.

The organ-grinder. The one who should really worry us is the one who plays the barrel organ for them, the one who fits them with a vest and a chain around the neck; the one who trains them to stick their filthy hands into democracies and contaminate them from within, as they did in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and as they want to do in Mexico. The far-right organ-grinder with temporary offices somewhere in Latin America, but with a permanent address in the CIA and in the Mossad and in Washington. The dark and dangerous organ-grinder who plays tunes about “freedom,” but can’t help himself and tortures those who serve him his soup and clean his windows. The perverse one who violates every democratic rule to supposedly defend the rules of democracy. That is the one who should worry us.

And, of course, the Cerimedos and the Negres matter, and the bootlickers who for three pesos dance at some C-PAC event, like Javier Milei; those who fund farms of bots and trolls and media outlets and dirty, pestilent journalists, like Ricardo Salinas Pliego; and the privileged elites who take cover behind the filthiest to impose brainless clowns of the Abelardo de la Espriella type, or who encourage votes for mediocrities of the Rodrigo Paz or Flávio Bolsonaro type. They matter. But you must never take your eye off the organ-grinder, or off the one who dresses up as the organ-grinder but is really a beast of many masks. Now it wears the mask of an apparently incontinent old man: Donald Trump; now it puts on a suit like Marco Rubio, or leather jackets like Elon Musk.

For some time now, many have made the effort to defend a United States that vanished; the one of jazz, literature, rock, the desire to democratize access to well-being. Gone with the wind. What remains is the grim-eyed beast that can’t control its impulse when it sees oil or rare minerals: it steals them, in broad daylight and in plain sight, and that’s that. A beast that explains, every single day, why it killed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and that opposes Latinos leaving their neighborhoods and going to school, and that would rather give heroin to Black people than allow their emancipation. The old beast that sees Latin America as its loot and wants to help itself to it without leaving so much as a tip. The white beast that imposes presidents and imposes poverty and inequality, because it’s in its interest that it be so.

What of Cerimedo. What of Negre. The organ-grinder who fits the vest on Salinas Pliego, on Claudio X. González, on Milei or on the Bolsonaros, and sets them dancing and teaches them to lift the wallets of those who approach in good faith. You must never lose sight of the one who really matters: the beast.

Two

So we have to ask ourselves: Whose boots are they licking? What do they want from the United States? Few of us have asked that question amid the rush of the days. What do Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, Maru Campos, Salinas Pliego, Enrique Krauze, Lilly Téllez, or Claudio X ask of Washington? They organize meetings in the shadows, give interviews to Fox News, show up at the Embassy, or speak with congressmen as elderly as they are radical, who find them disgusting for their dark skin, but who agree to see them out of their fascination with the worms, or because they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with the worms who will soon devour them. What is it about over there that attracts them so much?

Because they aren’t looking for a “democratic United States” that doesn’t exist; because that country has long been broken and resembles anything but a democracy. They know that the United States they appeal to is the worst of its era; with its corrupted electoral system; with its police designed to serve and protect white people, and not dark-skinned people like them, or like any of us Mexicans; a United States with its caste society and with a social class made up of drug addicts, the zombies of the cities. The United States with insensitive, incontinent tech elites who shit on their poor and their exploited from supersonic planes and from 100-story yachts. That is the United States the Mexican far right appeals to; that is the United States they beg to urgently intervene in Mexico, with the hoax that we are less than the white folks and need to be re-educated.

Whose boots are the Mexican worms licking if there is no democratic United States —if there ever was one— and the one that remains is so brutal that it no longer bothers to give lessons in morality and ethics while it steals the diamonds of some, the oil of others, the water of all, and the sky and the air of those of us who are nearby?

The Mexican far right licks the boots of a United States that tests drones on girls’ schools in Iran; that dissolves the bodies of entire families with napalm in Vietnam; the one that had slaves in forced labor and now has migrants so as not to miss them. A United States always armed, always ready to bomb and to cause pain. A United States that plays without honor; that manufactures white phosphorus bombs that are banned, or lets others produce them on its behalf.

They pray to that beast that plunders peoples: they believe that if they wag their tail for it, it will give them back power; they believe that if they kiss its paws, it will save them from their own insignificance. They believe the beast will return their privileges and give ratings back to their TV networks. To that United States they pray, the wretches. And they know it full well. They want that armed beast, as bad as the worst of them, to get into our homes. And fortunately, only fortunately, the beast barely pays them any attention. A beast represented today by Donald Trump, but one that changes masks without losing a single wrinkle.

Three

When they criticized Tanzania for being a supposed dictatorship, Julius Nyerere, as President, used to say that the United States is a one-party State “except that, with its usual extravagance, they have two.” Nyerere, who was or is a socialist saint blessed by the Pope and by the African cardinals, whose dream was “to light a candle and place it on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro so that it may shine beyond our borders, giving hope to those who are in despair, putting love where there is hatred, and dignity where before there was only humiliation.”

That same Nyerere who stayed on good terms with the People’s Republic of China, with the Soviet Union, and with the United States, while at the same time nurturing the idea of a great pan-African nation that would defend its resources and scare off the vultures.

Doreen St. Félix writes this week in The New Yorker that the beast has a little heart of its own or, at least, has feelings or, at least, has carnal desire. The beast that devours Natalie Harp, a 35-year-old woman who sleeps beside the President of the United States with a portable printer strapped to her waist. She writes love letters to Donald Trump while her country watches, in real time, how evil devours her.

Doreen, born in New York and the daughter of Haitian migrants, whom some would like to destroy for having written that the young actress Sydney Sweeney represents, for some of her fans, an “idealized Aryan princess,” writes this week about Natalie and Trump’s undeniable decline in the midst of a winter love.

She says, verbatim: “Trump is declining. He is declining in the approval ratings. He is declining physically. Is he wearing diapers? Is Harp behind the scenes, pulling the strings, in the style of Joan Quigley, the astrologer in [Ronald] Reagan’s White House? (The images of Trump dictating social media posts to Harp —who is apparently the person behind some of those strange capitalization decisions— recall the stories of Zhang Yufeng, Mao Zedong’s private secretary, speaking on behalf of the CCP chairman after his strokes.) Trump as one of the poles of a bipartisan gerontocracy (worse still, is this a necrocracy?) is surrounded by frailty, with his hawk Lindsey Graham dying suddenly and unexpectedly, and with his former accomplice Mitch McConnell out of the picture after spending weeks in the hospital. A sex scandal [Natalie Harp’s] would at least give a sign of vigor.”

The man in diapers or without them; publicly accused by 28 women of inappropriate sexual conduct (which includes rape, sexual assault, kissing or touching without consent, and improper remarks); a corrupt man who has added more than 4.5 billion dollars to his fortune since he reached the Presidency. That is who the Mexican sellouts pray to. The one who climbs on top of the bombs and sends them off with kisses before they kill children in Gaza or in Iran.

That is the beast they want to bring into our house. And in a careless moment, as has happened in many parts of Latin America, they let it in.

Four

What of Rubén Rocha Moya. He mistook the defense of sovereignty for the defense of a person, himself. For the fools who believe Rocha Moya means something: there stands his second resignation, an even more humiliating one. What of Rocha Moya. Criminals are handed over like candy at Christmas; what would it matter to hand him over if he were one? The issue is not him, however much he may misunderstand it. The issue is not handing him —or anyone— over to the beast. The United States must present evidence, and then yes, by road or by plane, criminals who have already been tried are handed over. The United States demands evidence when Mexico asks it to hand over former governor Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca: let it accept, at the very least, that Mexico asks it for evidence before handing over a governor on leave.

But Rocha misunderstood everything. He thought the defense was for him, not for sovereignty. He thought he had the best women and the best men at his service to return to power or, perhaps —I hope he isn’t that naive— he thought he could return because he’s skilled at scheming local intrigues and no one would notice. But what of Rocha. Not handing him over is a contribution to a greater cause: containing the beast on the other side of its own wall. Leaving it over there, inside its own castle. Not summoning it, not trying to let it into our house on any pretext, as the far right wants.

What of Rocha. What of Cerimedo. What of Negre. What of “Alito” and the other worms. The issue is the beast that drools and growls on the porch of our house. May God deliver us from it, and may Mexicans rein in those who, from within our own country, hold out scraps of bacon to it to coax it into breaking down the door and coming in to tear us apart.

Alejandro Páez Varela
Journalist and writer.
He is the author of the novels Corazón de Kaláshnikov (Alfaguara 2014, Planeta 2008), Música para Perros (Alfaguara 2013), El Reino de las Moscas (Alfaguara 2012), and Oriundo Laredo (Alfaguara).