The tears of Salinas Pliego

On the night of July 2, 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador invited a small group of friends to his home in Tlalpan to celebrate the confirmation of his victory. One of them was the magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who almost doubled his wealth during the six-year term, but also became Mexico’s largest tax debtor.

“López deceived me,” Salinas Pliego still hurts, who believed that by proposing to López Obrador to create the Business Advisory Council he would have privileges forever, including not paying the multimillion-dollar tax debts that he has carried since the Government of Felipe Calderón.

Salinas Pliego was wrong from beginning to end. So much so that, after seven years of laughing out loud at his “friend” López Obrador’s house for his victory, tears rolled down his cheeks in the bitter celebrations for his 70th birthday, not because of his age but because of having to pay.

In just six years, the tycoon went from the top to the precipice: His fortune evolved from $7.1 billion in 2018 to $13.4 billion in 2024, just throughout López Obrador’s six-year term, but in Claudia Sheinbaum’s first year—and not because of her, but because of his own decisions—his wealth collapsed to $4.9 billion. dollars, a drastic drop in 63.4 percent, according to figures from the specialized publication Forbes.

If the reduction of his family assets is already a blow to Salinas Pliego, due only to his own decisions, the worst is yet to come for him and for his media, financial and commercial emporium Grupo Salinas: The payment of a debt exceeding 74 billion pesos that, in June, was recorded by the Tax Administration System (SAT), without considering the 580 million dollars that he also owes in the United States.

So far, no strategy has worked for Salinas Pliego: Not his friendship with López Obrador, through which he sought remission or at least a reduction as he wanted; nor that the Judiciary, which protected him for so long, agreed with him before being replaced by the new one who was elected by popular vote and without any possibility of total capture.

I myself demanded from President López Obrador the reduction of eight billion pesos that he offered to Salinas Pliego, as he himself confessed, and it was based on the report that I published in SinEmbargo, on March 17 of last year, that the Government specified that the magnate’s debt amounted to 63 billion pesos, which grows every day.

Already with Sheinbaum as the President of Mexico, Salinas Pliego also went from negotiation to threat: On October 14, 2024, he sent her a private letter to offer to “pay exclusively what is correct,” but very soon, in December of that year, he categorized his Government as part of the “shitty lefties,” as he went to Argentina, at the Political Conference of Conservative Action, during which he was photographed with Santiago Abascal, the fascist leader of Spain’s Vox, and with his friend Javier Milei.

Now Salinas Pliego heads a political project, the “Anti-Crime and Anti-Corruption Movement”, which he announced in September surrounded by pure employees, as he likes, which he later ratified in a ridiculous little cry for Independence, together with his wife. And then, in the first part of the celebrations for his 70th birthday, he declared war on his enemies who want to collect what he owes.

At his Jalmolonga ranch, in Malinalco, State of Mexico, he gathered a group of employees and proselytes, on Saturday the 18th, to promise that he is going to “break the shit” of “the shitty lefties.” His speech was so emotional that he even cried, according to the videos.

In the other celebration with his employees for his birthday, the massive one at the Mexico City Arena, on Saturday the 25th, Salinas Pliego returned to the negotiating side and, according to him, “tired of so much litigation,” he affirms that he already wants to pay: “Now I am willing to make this effort to turn the page.”

And yes: The President’s response to Salinas Pliego is simple: “Do you want to pay? Pay.”

Salinas Pliego is cornered. There’s no way he won’t pay what he owes. And once he does, let Salinas Pliego put together his far-right political project, to which he has the right. In one of those it is better than that of Eduardo Verástegui or that of Claudio X. González.

Is the sad story of Salinas Pliego over? No: To be continued…