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NXIVM: Prologue: Mexico, The Salinas Family, and NAFTA · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you a story.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a story you will find in any account of Nexium I am aware of, even though it involves one of the most important members in the cult.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody so foundational that a person could easily argue they were as important or more important than Keith Rainier himself.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: In my personal estimation, I would say it isn't even close.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: His father is Carlos Salinas.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's 1951 and Carlos is three years old.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: He is with his brother Raul, who is five, and another eight-year-old child from one of the most elite families in Mexico, but we don't know his name.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: We know they are in a villa in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Mexico, but it's unclear which one exactly.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: The event definitely happened.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It has been repeated in memoirs, in interviews with journalists, and in accounts from people who were close enough to the family to know what occurred.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: But we know very little about the specifics, because efforts were made to completely scrub this story from existence, and they were largely successful.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: For decades, it was spoken of in the sorts of rooms where regular people weren't allowed, or whispered between security guards, servants, or other workers in close enough proximity to have some awareness of it, but little enough power that they could lose their livelihood at best, and their lives at worst, if the shared story was ever traced back to them.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: The story goes like this There was a maid working for the Salinas family, a 12-year-old girl who is no longer alive.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Her first name is Manuela.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the family, law enforcement, and the media never bothered to learn her last name.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it would be more accurate to say they refused to learn it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, one of the three kids, or maybe all three, got a hold of a gun, something happened, and she died.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: State security personnel quickly entered the scene, cleaned up the mess, and disposed of her body so thoroughly we still have no idea what her last name is.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: According to sources at the scene, three-year-old Carlos would say Yolamate, roughly translating to I shot her.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: But Carlos's father would take the credit for it, as his three kids ran around the police station and innocently played.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: His father was a Harvard-trained economist who held major posts under several presidents.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole thing was chalked up to an accident and buried for decades.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: As we will see all throughout this story, I am hoping to tell you about the Nexium cult.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: The powerful certainly have a way of erasing inconvenient truths.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: By the time Carlos would run for president in 1988, any evidence of the crime ever happening would be totally erased and impossible to find.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The story would only re-emerge years later, once Carlos was a disgraced former president, and Raul was in prison for another murder that he may or may not have committed.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Salinas family would go on to be a powerful political dynasty to this day.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in the late 2010s, Emiliano Salinas, Carlos Salinas' son, head of the Mexican branch of Nexium, would slip away from accountability just as easily as his family usually does.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: We still don't know who the maid was.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: By the time this series is over, she is far from the only child who will disappear without any record of who they ever were.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dust Light Archives.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, welcome back.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for tuning in to my brand new series.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to structure this thing.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because as I looked into Nexium, the story became a lot bigger than I was originally expecting.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew very early on that one thing I definitely didn't want to do is I didn't want to start it with Keith Rainier.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the vast majority of Nexium narratives start.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you one thing that originally kind of set off my my you know spider senses a little bit, or whatever you want to call it, like about this whole thing was that your regular Nexium story will paint him as some sort of a mastermind.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you believe that, I would encourage you to listen to this absolutely mid-witted schlub talk for 30 seconds.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just any clip of him you can find anywhere of him saying anything.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: But this one was particularly offensive to me because I don't know, like there's a there's a wild charisma that uh Charles Manson has that is captivating in some sort of a way.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: There is a I don't know, a strange hypnotic cadence to Marshall Applewhite, and Jim Jones, I mean, he was taught old preacher tricks.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, say what you want about the guy, and certainly I I don't buy into the uh you know the mainstream narrative of Jonestown, but I mean the guys the guy's got some spice, and man, Keith Raineerie does not.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Keith Rainier is so dull and so deeply uninteresting, deeply unconvincing, that I don't care what kind of tricks you are using, I'm sorry.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I refuse to believe this man brainwashed anybody.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll definitely get more into that later on, but that's kind of laying a few of my early cards on the table.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you right away that that's that's the baseline I was kind of starting from when I was putting this together.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so then it if if you follow that through line to its logical conclusion, then you you really have to reassess what is going on pretty much totally in Nexium because who was in charge then?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something I would really like you to I I would think it would be very useful for you to keep this in mind as the series is going on to regularly ask yourself who's actually running things here.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's something I definitely did a lot in my research, and I think the answer is very complex.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's a simple answer, but I think it is one that is worth constantly searching for because it will reveal all sorts of weird truths.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you start realizing all of the different people that were surrounding this thing and their level of power, who these people were.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, so this is a story that involves Canadian bootlegging billionaire families, it involves old Yugoslavian royalty, human traffickers, intelligence from multiple countries, uh, old DC families that own massive amounts of real estate and have long ties to the Pentagon.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And as I kind of you know pointed to in the intro, Mexican government and a lot of the oligarchy that runs things in Mexico, both uh in the private and public sector.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when you start keeping all of that in mind, now not only do you have to convince yourself that this absolute dope, Keith Rainier, managed to manipulate all of these incredibly powerful people, which I'm not kidding you, that is the story that you will be told in just about every documentary you watch.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I will say oftentimes they construct facts in a way where you know they they undersell exactly who these people are and how much power they have, but either way, you have to believe this absolute fucking just schlubby dip shit managed to I don't pull the strings of all of these incredible, in some cases, geopolitically important people, or you have to accept that the story that you have been told about this is leaving things out and not accurately representing the situation.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I chose to start this prologue in Mexico because I think the way that I want to structure this thing is to basically have each episode, or god forbid, if it becomes too long, uh batch of episodes about one node of Nexium or one group of people.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you have the Bronfmans, you have the Oxburgs, and they'll definitely get their own episodes, uh Mark Vicente, uh, which my my god, we'll we'll just leave him there for now.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I I kind of want to do like a like a Roshamon type of thing where we kind of re-examine this same thing over and over again from the different perspectives of the these different groups involved.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Mexico is the largest, most complicated node, I would say, of any of these.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it okay, what great example actually to explain just at a very basic level the importance of Mexico to this story, is that there's a graphic you will see of Keith Rainier and his inner circle that is in a lot of Nexium books or a lot of Nexium documentaries, and they'll flash it.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it usually what they're trying to do is they're trying to say, like, this is him and these are there's like the circle of women that he was all manipulating.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you actually look at the names of these people, I want to say there's 11 of them, and seven of them are Mexican, and that right there, I think, is a pretty good indicator of the importance of Mexico to this story.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of these other nodes we're going to explore too, you know, we can kind of start where Nexium itself starts.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not all of them, but most of them.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Mexico, I think, is the one where you actually kind of have to we have to we have to do a little bit of history and we have to place ourselves in the correct context.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: So with that in mind, I am going to start this story a little bit far back, but I can promise you by the end of this episode, we will be caught up and ready to go as far as the timeline of Nexium is concerned.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So most of our story today takes place in the 1980s and 1990s.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: But to understand that era, you have to understand the very strange political system Mexico was operating under.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a kind of aristocratic oligarchy that performs democracy symbolically.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay, it's not entirely unlike the United States.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, that is one thing when I was reading a lot of books on Mexican history would drive me nuts, is it would do that like exotifying thing where you know it acts like, ooh, like the strange land of Mexico where the powerful can get the police to do whatever they want or whatever.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it it is such bullshit or when they control the media as if like the US government doesn't control the media, as if the U.S.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: ruling class doesn't do the same thing.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: But there are some unique aspects specifically to Mexico and how Mexico is run.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, most of these mechanics grew out of the Mexican Revolution, and one day I'd love to do a full series on it because it is genuinely fascinating.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: But for now, we're just gonna do a very broad overview, just enough context to understand the world our story takes place in.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Mexico was run by a man named Porfirio Diaz.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was an authoritarian modernizer whose regime was deeply unequal and completely undemocratic.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: In 1908, Diaz gives an interview where he muses about retiring and letting Mexico become a democracy.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when this happens, this kind of opens up a weird door that wasn't open prior in the Mexico of the late 1800s, and a man named Francisco Madero kicks that door down.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: He is a wealthy businessman, and he uses this opportunity to call for free elections.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: When this happens, Diaz has him jailed, but Madero escapes, he calls for revolt, and his supporters capture Ciudad Juarez, Diaz resigns, elections are held, and Madero wins in a landslide.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: But then what happens is that Madero refuses to purge the old regime.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which I I think history has shown is almost always a fatal mistake after a revolution.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I if history has taught us anything, it's I'm sorry, after a revolution, purge purge those old motherfuckers.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: They are all criminals, they all deserve it.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Get them out of there.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not that not that Madeira was some sort of great guy either, but just broadly speaking, I would say letting these people live and be free never seems to go well.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the old guard regroups, launches a military coup, and kills him.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point, this triggers a full-scale civil war.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the Mexican Civil War.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so, to make an extremely complicated story as short as possible, there's a faction made up of middle-class reformers and technocrats called the Constitutionalists.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: They win the war with quiet support from the United States, by the way.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to make that clear.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: The US, since its inception, has never stopped deeply meddling with Mexico.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so, to legitimize their new government, they adopt the imagery and rhetoric of the more radical agrarian revolutionaries like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was trying to think of a good way to describe it, and uh it reminds me of the civil rights era to a degree, you know, where a lot of the neoliberals or reformists or people who were already part of the ruling class to a degree, petty bourgeoisie at best, win out, but they still want to keep the image of the revolutionaries because those are the actual heroes.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the people you can build a propaganda campaign around.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so people like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata become these kind of mythological heroes of the ruling elite.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're symbolic, of course, they're both assassinated.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So to prevent another civil war, the winners build a hybrid political system.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay, so it's technically a democracy, but it in practice it's a one-party state where the ruling party always wins, and each president handpicks their successor.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this party will change names a few times, but they tend to be small name changes, and they're still very much functionally the same party.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Keep things simple, I'm just gonna call it the PRI.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: The PRI is the name it has in the 1980s, where most of our story today is going to take place.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So to keep it simple, we're just gonna refer to it as that throughout.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if the Mexican Revolution and the PRI created a new political machine, Raul Salinas Lozano, uh uh, which by the way, I've really tried to pronounce these names correctly out of respect.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: I am obviously in a Midwestern English speaker, so if I fuck it up, no offense, and I apologize.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but Raul Salinas Lozano, a man that I'm just gonna call him Raul Sr.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: going forward to distinguish him from his son, who was also named Raul, was one of the first people who learned how to operate this new system.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this guy, he wasn't a revolutionary hero or a general or a landowner.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: He was something new, and he was something that would continue to heavily influence Mexico going forward to this day.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: What this man was was he was a U.S.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: educated technocrat, and he was part of the first generation of Mexico's ruling class to be trained in American universities and to run the modern Mexican state.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this would become almost ubiquitous.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, by the 1980s in the 1988 election, which we will be getting into in a little bit, there's a culture where you either basically had to be educated in an Ivy League university in the US, or in some cases you had to lie about it.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: You certainly couldn't make it far in political life without doing one of those two things.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, Raoul Sr., he was a middle class driver from northern Mexico, and he went to Harvard, he earned a PhD in economics, and these guys love economics, by the way.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: These guys are economics PhDs you will find scattered all over the Mexican ruling class from Ivy League universities, which uh I think is a really important fact, too, because political science that would be another one that these people gravitate towards, city planning is another one, but like there's really a handful of different disciplines that Mexico's ruling class, especially in the government, will get degrees in from these US Ivy League universities.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing about economics and political science and city planning is these are not neutral sciences, these are ways of thinking.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're ideological training grounds.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're taught, they're not taught facts, they're taught a worldview.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, worldview where markets are natural, privatization is progress, nationalism is backward, and US leadership is inevitable.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: These future Mexican officials, they weren't just Learning technical skills.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were absorbing a framework for how a country should be run and who it should be run for.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And also, obviously, they're at these universities rubbing shoulders with American elites, future CEOs, senators, intelligence adjacent policy people.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, the entire ecosystem that orbits places like Harvard, Yale, or MIT, Caltech.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: Later on in 1994, NAFTA would supercharge US-Mexico integration, but the groundwork was already being laid decades earlier in all of these classrooms, dorms, think tank offices.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Long before that treaty, the two countries, they were already sharing a ruin class.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, with the US being the dominant force out of the two of them.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: So from 1964 to 1982, you have the dirty wars, and these share a lot in common with America in the American civil rights movement.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: They also share a lot in common with what was going on in South America, in places like Chile and Ecuador and Guatemala and places like that.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh kind of a popular left-wing resistance that is being violently stamped down by a technocratic, neoliberal, or in many cases, flat out fascist ruling class.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: So Carlos and Raul Jr., who are, I'll remind you, those are the kids that we were talking about in that beginning segment.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're basically we're we're caught up to them now.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they grew up inside the world their father helped build.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is a world of chafors, bodyguards, private schools, and gated neighborhoods in Mexico City, where the children of the new technocratic elite lived almost entirely apart from the country they were supposedly modernizing.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: And their father wasn't just a cabinet secretary, he was part of a small, tightly knit class of U.S.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: train managers who ran the Mexican state like a corporate enterprise.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that meant his children were also raised in an environment where power was ever present but invisible, where the rules were different for families like theirs, and where the machinery of the PRI can make problems disappear before they ever reach the newspaper.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I one of the uh things I found interesting when I was researching this is I read this book called Bordering on Chaos by Andres Oppenheimer.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And to kind of show you how interconnected the US and Mexico is throughout all of this, this this man he's very much a uh a U a pro-US neoliberal journalist.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think he he worked for the Miami Herald, if I remember correctly, and this man will go on and on about how the media is controlled by the Mexican government and is in bed with them and manipulating elections.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I I was like, this sounds not that different from the US.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I did a little bit of digging and found that a lot of these same people who were working for the state Mexican news channels also had worked or would work for cable news in the US.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, these skills translate, and oftentimes, especially, you know, managers, even some correspondents would actually bounce back and forth between the two.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's how interconnected these were.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: But either way, the technocratic aristocracy had become the dominant force in Mexican political life, and the Salinas children were growing up at its center.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: They were protected, insulated, and surrounded by a system designed to shield them.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So by the early 1980s, the old revolutionary generation was aging out, and the U.S.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: trained technocrats had completely taken over.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mexico was in the middle of an economic crisis.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: The PRI was losing its ideological coherence, and the party's survival depended on a new kind of leadership.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Men who spoke the language of Harvard in the IMF, not Zapata or Cardinus.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, at this point, they pretty much completely abandon even the symbolic revolutionary roots that they claim in basically completely openly go all in on this kind of US neoliberal sort of methodology.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And Carlos Salinas rose straight through that opening.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was young, brilliant, impeccably credentialed, and perfectly aligned with the technocratic project his father had helped build.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: By the time he entered the cabinet and then the presidential race, the PRI's internal machinery, the security services, the patronage networks, the intelligence apparatus, was operating at its most disciplined and its most opaque.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: This was the environment that could make a maid's death disappear without a trace.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the environment that would soon elevate the Salinas family to the very top of Mexican political power.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the time we get to the 1988 election, this PRI system of one party and the previous president picking the new president and then them winning in a landslide vote every time, oftentimes against parties that would be similar to like the US Green Party or Libertarian Party, you know, something like that, where they get like 2% of the vote.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: This goes on for 71 years.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: But then what happens is the PRI is struggling for a variety of reasons, partly due to a lot of propaganda losses and the dirty wars, and also due to the fact that, like I said, they kind of had just completely given up the idea of being the party of Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zabata and being just totally open about what they were, which was not a thing that a lot of the Mexican people wanted.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1988, Carlos Salinas, who is a president representing a pretty unpopular political project, ends up being seriously challenged by the son of a man named Lazaro Cardenas.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And Lazaro Cardenas is the most popular president in Mexican history, and it's because he did land reform, he nationalized the oil, and he generally resisted foreign influence.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so when the son of this guy comes out and challenges Carlos Salinas, you now have an election that has drawn some pretty stark lines between what the future of Mexico should look like.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a battle between the pro-labor left and then the architect of NAFTA itself.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like like Salinas is the guy that will end up pushing through NAFTA.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because, spoiler alert, we live in hell, and of course, Salinas wins.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, but he he doesn't win fairly.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to make that clear.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he wins in one of the most infamous democratic elections in modern history, where his opponent, Cardenius, who has, by the way, broken apart from the PRI, so not only is he battling Solidus, but he is battling this party that has been in power for 71 years.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And early returns show him in the lead.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then literally in the middle of the count, the interior of the ministry announces that the system crashed, and then the system stays down for several hours.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And believe it or not, when it comes back online, Salinas is in the lead.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, that this is a very infamous modern democratic election to the point where the even PRI insiders, even at the time, many of them were acknowledging that it was fraudulent.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody in the country is buying it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I was kind of comparing Mexican and US media a little while ago.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it would be the the reaction to it would be comparable to if I mean like the Hillary and Bernie, you know, uh election shenanigans, but like times 10 in in a way where you had the New York Times in the Washington Post all basically acknowledging, like in very clear terms, Hillary stole this.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't matter because the PRI owns Congress, they deny everything and they push it through.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Cardenas, to his credit, being uh better than Bernie, who I just mentioned, never accepts the election result as legitimate, and he has a few more unsuccessful runs in the future.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: In 1997, after several attempts at power, he will win the election for the highest office in Mexico City, which I was kind of trying to think of an analog for that too.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it would be sort of like if somebody was both the New York City mayor and the California governor.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: It is a powerful position, but it's also obviously got its limits and it's nowhere near as powerful as the president.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of reasons why this election had to be stolen in order to prevent an entire crash of the Mexican ruling class and system as is.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there were a bunch of dirty war archives that were not public that Cardenas might have made public if given the opportunity.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were all of these patronage networks who were tied to the Salinas family, the military, like I said, the US-Mexico strategic relationship, they were already crafting NAFTA at this point, and they certainly couldn't let Cardenas screw that up.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I mean, we have ties to the IMF and IMF and World Bank loans, and you know, who knows how they would have responded if Cardenas would have won to.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: They could have very well taken their loans.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: They could have kicked them out of the IMF, you know, at which point, like deeply affects your ability to trade with a lot of other countries and to deal in the world economic system.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then so once Salinus wins, he begins the most aggressive economic transformation in history.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: He privatizes hundreds of state companies, he deregulates entire sectors, he restructures agriculture, opens Mexico to foreign capital in a way it's never been before.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all of the bullshit they always do when the Western Empire takes over a smaller, usually brown or black country, you know, where uh all of the sudden all of these things that were public projects are now owned by these weird US conglomerates and investment firms that are there to uh do as poor of a job as possible for as much money as possible, and with the blessing of the government.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: He breaks the power of unions, sells off banks, telecoms, and all of that sort of infrastructure.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then he openly courts U.S.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: investors and policymakers.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: And for a handful of Mexican families, this becomes an absolute boon, as I'm sure you could imagine.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is an era when a handful of Mexican families actually become billionaires, and it's also the era when millions of rural Mexicans lose their economic stability entirely.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I would like to think I've I think I've already made this clear, but if I haven't, this is less a US takeover, and it's more a collaboration between the Mexican and American ruling class, many of whom share the same values and social networks at this point.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's that's the beauty of what going to the same Ivy League universities and being in these same rooms will do for you.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Carlos Salinas is the president, and then his brother Raul, the five-year-old, that was also there when that maid died in the beginning story.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: His brother is kind of his left-hand man.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: If Carlos runs the legitimate government, he runs the shadow government.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it would be not a perfect comparison, but you can almost compare it to like, you know, Foster and Alan Dulles.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Raul really at this point, like, he he's running a lot more of the more openly corrupt stuff, building trafficking network for things like food and infrastructure and agriculture.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, just placing himself in the arteries of PRI power and be being the fixer who can make all of this stuff flow where it's supposed to go, knows the right people, knows the networks.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: He learns who gets contracts, who gets punished, who gets protected, how to move money, how to keep secrets, and how to make problems disappear.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: But he is also the connection between the old patronage networks and these new more polished technocrats.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: So he's also an easy lightning rod to pin a lot of the deep systemic corruption on when it goes wrong.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it it's great to be that guy financially at least, or as far as power goes, until all of the sudden you've got everybody ducking for cover and trying to keep their hands clean, and it you can be he's almost he's almost the Keith Rainier of NAFTA, I will say.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like there are definitely some similarities there, even as far as being somebody who's uh definitely not a good guy who definitely got his hands dirty, but also I I think the word Patsy would probably apply because he's too messy for NAFTA, which goes into effect on January 1st, 1994.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, all sorts of financial deals become too openly corrupt and messy.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: Raul, he's doing stuff like he's stabbing the wrong people in the back.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's just doing doing real gangster shit, like you know, agreeing to certain fees for things and then just changing them without any sort of bureaucratic backbone in order to legitimize it.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then so at this point, you have kind of an explosion coming from the south of Mexico, and this is another thing I would I would really love to do a whole series on the Zapatista Army of National Liberation at some point, because this kicks off the same day that NAFTA comes into effect.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to do a lot of research on this.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like one could spend a ton of time and probably do several hours on it in order to get a full grasp on what happened, because there's a lot of weirdness surrounding it.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's led by this masked man named Marcus, who is not indigenous, he's leading a bunch of indigenous southern Mexicans because the thing is, too, the further south you get in Mexico, the more it becomes actually like indigenous and a lot less urban.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: And like a lot of them couldn't read, for instance, even like I'd be like very, very illiterate areas and stuff.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you have this guy who was uh his identity was actually not known for a long time.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: He would just call himself Marcus, he wore a mask, and he was very literate, very Ivy League trained, and he led a rebellion in the south of Mexico that was very destabilizing, and it was a direct response to NAFTA and a huge international flashpoint.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this movement became popular in a lot of Mexico, and this is another moment where this split between Carlos and Raul and their way of doing things starts to create contradictions that can't be resolved.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because Carlos wants a negotiated peace.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's kind of like, let's give them some of what they want, let's pay them off.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're all making a ton of fucking money here.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: We control the levers of power, we control these systems, these aren't going anywhere.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: If we can shut this rebellion down a little bit in order to just keep everything on track, let's do it.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Raul sees it very differently.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Raul wants a military crackdown.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact is the Mexican army could crush the Zapatista Liberation Army, no question.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like if that and they've done things like this before in the Dirty Wars, too.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: So like it's definitely a intentional strategic choice not to, and one that Raul doesn't really understand or agree with.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the Zapatistas play this pretty well too, because the Zapatistas do everything they can to keep this from becoming a violent clash.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like they, you know, they take over areas, they kill as few people as possible, they uh, in fact, even seem to really control exactly how many stockpiles of weapons they have, so that when they they will try to do things like the the Mexican government at certain points will try to raid some of their stockpiles in order to be like, look, they're trying to they have all these weapons and they're going to try to violently take over Mexico, and they just can't do it because they can't find that many weapons.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, though, Marcus's identity ends up coming out through one of these raids, actually.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: They find his name.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: And in in his name, not that it really matters at all, is Rafael Sebastian Guien Vicente, which I'm sure I am butchering in some way or another.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: No relation to Mark Vicente, who is the Nexium member who made the film What the Bleep Do We Know prior to becoming a member of Nexium, and then also would make the two-season documentary The Vow for HBO.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we'll we'll definitely be doing an episode at Mark Vicente because that man is a fucking sus lord.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: But just just confirming that our Marcos of the Zapatista army has no relation.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: Vicente is actually a pretty popular name in a lot of areas.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: But so they figure out his identity.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Marcos takes off and escapes, and I don't know, just kind of hides out, never really faces any legal consequences.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: At one point, he claims that his old identity has died and gives himself a new identity, and just a lot of a lot of weird shit that, like I said, I'd be very interested in doing something one day on this specific aspect of Mexican politics because it is odd.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: But does Appatistas then become like a weird kind of civil reformer mainstay?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: Think like the ACLU or the NAACP, like they kind of integrate themselves into the system.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had in 1980.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: We had that election that was clearly stolen, that everybody knows it was stolen, and it hurt the PRI's reputation a lot.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is what was the fact that Mexico is just being sold into poverty.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: But now we're at the 1994 election, and Salinas picks this guy, Luis Donaldo Colosio, who is supposed to be just kind of the safe pick, think like Obama or something, you know, just a guy that's gonna basically keep everything on track, but is going to gesture maybe rhetorically towards change.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: But something goes wrong and everything spirals out.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he ends up giving a speech that shocks Mexico's ruling class, talking about poverty, corruption, and the failures of the PRI, which is a huge, a huge no-no.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that this they're the political party, and obviously, when you are the only political party that has been in power for almost a hundred years, uh your future president speaking strongly about your failures is going to ruffle a lot of feathers.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: So 17 days later, he's dead.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he is killed by a lone gunman who physically couldn't have taken the two shots.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: There like the uh the the way the bullet trajectories work out, you would had to have been both in front and in back of him.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there's just it's you know, it's JFK magic bullet shit.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it the the actual physical reality of this load gunman is impossible.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: And but he he is taken in by the Mexican police and tortured into a confession.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the investigation is compromised right away, and actually, like for the record, last November, a second gunman with cartel and PRI links was arrested.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, we're talking uh 30 years later, weirdly enough.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: So Colosio dies, and then he is replaced by Ernesto Zadio.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Ernesto Zadio is a real last minute.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, okay, if you wanted to compare it to US politics, it would be kind of the same way that when Joe Biden became completely untenable as a presidential candidate that Kamala Harris got thrown in at the last minute.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, he's totally uncharismatic, nobody wants him, he has no real power base, but he is seemingly loyal to the right people.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Zadillo becomes the next president of Mexico, and within weeks the peso collapses.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: This immediately creates a rift between Zadillo and Salinas, the previous president, because well, okay, and this is another weird thing about the way the Mexican political system worked too, with the old president picking the new one and and all of that, is that like they carry on these weird, deeply complex social relationships.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the relationship between Salinas and Zadillo seems very good when Zadillo takes power, but once the Mexican peso collapses, Zadillo is understandably pissed because he feels, and I mean, and and I I shouldn't even say feels, the man is absolutely right, that a bunch of financial shenanigans were done in order to kick the can forward so that Celinus could be out of office before the peso collapse.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this causes, I mean, this is an absolutely atomic disaster in many ways, because the way so much of the investment infrastructure worked between Mexico and the US is that investors would borrow money in dollars and then have to repay them in pesos.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if the peso collapses, now all of the sudden you are much more deeply in debt than you would have been before.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then at this point, we have another assassination.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have the assassination of Ruiz Masot, I believe that's how you pronounce it, is M-A-A-S-E-A-U.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this just kicks everything into absolute insanity because he is murdered coming outside of a hotel by a lone gunman.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy is he's a rising political star.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: He is Carlos and Raul's Solitas' brother-in-law, and immediately it becomes apparent that people in the PRI are involved.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, PRI deputy Fernando Rodriguez Gonzalez confesses to paying the shooter$500,000 for the hit.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because the shooter, the shooter fingers Fernando Rodriguez Gonzalez.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Gonzalez admits it.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Then Gonzalez implicates a second official named Munoz Roca.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Munoz Roca flees, calls a television station, and on air says he'll testify if he's given protection.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this man, a sitting legislator, is never seen or heard from again.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the victim's brother is the main investigator.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Mario Ruiz Messio.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he basically, I don't know, he runs the investigation for a while, and then he does this big public resignation where he says that PRI officials are complicit in their blocking the investigation and that he is unable to finish the investigation and leaves in this very dramatic way.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: He also writes a book that translates in English to I accuse that is all about this.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then it all gets even stranger because Mario, the brother who was the investigator who dramatically quit saying that the PRI was complicit and hiding stuff, appears to have been involved in his own brother's assassination.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he at the very least is involved in massive corruption and money laundering.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, he's arrested at JFK with large sums of cash.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: He will end up committing suicide or being suicided in 1999.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then on top of all of that, a New York Times article comes out where a reporter claims to have seen a tape of Jorge, the the the shooter, the original lone gunman shooter, fingering Raul and Carlos Salinas and saying that they are behind the assassination, which keep in mind the victim was their brother-in-law.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: This tape has never been publicly seen, and the deputy attorney claims he's not aware it existed.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: But this is enough for Zadillo to now take action, who I imagine is still angry about being stuck with the crashed Mexican peso.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: And also, who knows what the fuck happened with this assassination?
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's possible that Carlos and Raul were involved.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, it's just this whole thing becomes so incredibly tangled that it's it's really hard to say, and I'd say just about anything you read on it will come to a different conclusion.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's I know I keep saying it this episode, it's yet another thing I believe you could do an entire series on if a person were so inclined.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: But regardless of what actually happened, now that the finger has been pointed at Raul on a tape that was reported on by the New York Times, but never publicly seen and not acknowledged by Mexican law enforcement, this gives Zadillo enough ammunition to decide to arrest Raul.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Carlos Salinus is still connected into all of these power structures.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like you stop becoming president and all of a sudden you're no longer a part of the oligarchy.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so when this move gets made, it's a really big move, and Carlos rounds up some of his own men to try to stop Raul's arrest.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point, you have two different factions of the Mexican government, one basically racing to arrest Raul, and the other one racing to stop it.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Zadillo, Lilliolis, and the police and military get there first, and they manage to arrest Raul.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: And at the point where Raul is in prison with no hope of escape, Carlos packs up and flees because obviously he was the other one who was pointed to in this assassination plot.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Carlos spends the next several years basically being a political nomad, you know, uh weirdly because of because of I think everything he had done for NAFTA and because of all of the weirdness surrounding this murder plot, was he was persona non grata in Mexico, but he was still well respected in a lot of other areas, and I mean basically just was giving speeches at conferences for money and doing whatever else and still just kind of moving around and living very ra lavishly.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in the next election in the year 2000, a political party called the PAN wins, and the president of Mexico becomes a man named Vicente Fox.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the PAN would be like if, and these are all these are all broad generalizations, so I none of these map perfectly, but just you know, trying to get a quick handle on this is this is not the main story we're telling.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is all just context for everything going forward.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: The PAN would be kind of like if the Libertarian Party won in the US, they are very pro-capitalist, they are arguably to the right of the PRI, which is disappointing because their left-wing equivalent also did pretty well in this election, but unfortunately, the ones who were going to basically carry on the PRI legacy, except for maybe with their foot on the gas even harder, end up winning.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2005, the government under the PAN releases Raul Salinas and clears him of murder.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: They have him do some time served for some of the corruption charges that he also had that went along with it, but more or less they let him out.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's a free man.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: Carlos Salinas is now allowed back in Mexico, and growing up in all of this was Carlos Salinas' son Emiliano Salinas, who would go on to head the Mexican note of Nexium.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: And when people talk about Nexium, they talk about a cult, branding scandal, a sex ring, a charismatic sociopath from upstate New York.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the children's book version, the flattened version, the version that keeps the real story safely out of reach.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because Nexium wasn't a cult, it was an infrastructure, a junction point where several powerful worlds converged.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: The human potential movement, the behavioral science experiments of the Cold War, the private wealth networks of North American elites, human trafficking, highly researched behavior modification technology created and practiced on large test groups, including small children, blackmail, and the quiet, deniable spaces where states and billionaires moved people, money, and influence.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who we are told gathered around Keith Rainier weren't disciples.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were nodes, each one bringing a different network, a different access point, a different utility.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Some brought money, some brought legitimacy, some brought political protection or intelligence connections.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some brought the language of self-improvement that made everything look clean.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those nodes was Emiliano Solinus.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: Not because he believed in Rainiri's philosophy.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, one of my goals in this series is to show that the philosophy that existed in Nexium had very little to do with the slow-witted, dumpy looking mansplainer.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: Most stories will try to convince you as a master manipulator.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: These incredibly powerful oligarchs, government operatives, and members of old money aristocracy from around the world did not need enlightenment.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: They needed a story to tell others.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because they came from places where power was always hidden behind moral language, where they controlled the networks and rant lines, from institutions that collapsed almost overnight, where narratives were engineered, where behavior was something you managed, optimized, and corrected, where the line between public virtue and private coercion was always porous.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: Emiliano and many of his American, Mexican, Canadian, and Yugoslavian counterparts grew up in the ruins of dynasties that taught them one lesson above all others.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: That the real story is never the one on the surface.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: That the real transactions happen in the shadows.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: That the real power is always off stage.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when Nexium was developed, with its seminars and its jargon and its promises of transformation, it wasn't a cult to them.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was a familiar architecture.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: A new version of an old system.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: A place where elites gather to exchange influence, resources, and access under the cover of self-help.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the story we're going to tell.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: The version that traces the lineage from the Stanford Research Institute to Esselin to the human potential movement to the private intelligence world to the global elite networks that shaped Nexium and found it useful.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is a story about systems, not monsters.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe systems and monsters.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Many stories about Nexium will tell you it is a story about lies.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: They are right, but it's not a story about a man lying to a gullible group of wealthy people.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: The lies go much deeper than that, and you, not them, are the mark being lied to.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a story about belief.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a story about utility.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: About what Nexium was for.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: And about the people, like Emiliano, who didn't join a cult, but took control of an organism that had existed quietly as some ever-gestating creature in the darkest part of the public psyche for a very long time, with tentacles that occasionally present themselves and sometimes get chopped off.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the core of it, where the black, pusillanimous heart beats, is never reached.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this prologue.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the new season of the Dust Light Arcan.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you guys so much once again.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate you showing up as always.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I could ask you if you haven't done it yet, five stars a written review, you know, on whatever podcast platform you listen to, whether it's Apple or Spotify or anything else, is incredibly helpful.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: I am so excited to tell you guys this new story.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: It has been just melting my brain just for the last few months where I have just been absolutely champing the bit to get this out here.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've also got some other big stuff coming up too, so stay tuned for that.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've got some more collaborations with some people you may know.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've got uh got a lot of good things cooking, so keep an eye out for those as well.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: And see you next week.