He grew up as a brash and quarrelsome boy and this was how his first steps in politics were: threatening and with his fists. He is remembered obeying orders and imposing his law at the University of Campeche, surrounded by a mob of young people who beat up the rector. After the feat The awards arrived. Alejandro Moreno’s political career skyrocketed based on rewarded favors to which he added his good doses of audacity and betrayal. The steps raised him to deputy, senator, governor in his homeland and national president of the PRI. Today he remains the leader of a party that is melting like a sugar cube in coffee, to which he clings because he has not yet fulfilled his dream, becoming president of the Republic, something that seems more complicated every day. But Alito, as everyone knows him, does not give up: perseverance and tireless work are some of his virtues. And it is difficult to find someone who cites any more.
A voluminous book could be written about Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas (San Francisco de Campeche, 49 years old), but it would be necessary to investigate a childhood that is half hidden in his curriculum and perhaps also in his head. They say that he never got over the humble origins of his family and that he spent his adolescence and youth trying to create a high-class character at the cost of any sacrifice, no matter how intimate. From these principles comes his desire to possess and show what he possesses, a collection of cars, motorcycles, watches and houses. “He has a personality disorder, airs of grandeur, he can’t stand anyone overshadowing him, he is out of touch with reality,” says Rosita Santana, a journalist from Campeche who has dealt with him on several occasions and needed the protection of her magazine, Processso as not to lose his job. “On one occasion he told me this phrase, verbatim: ‘They have said everything about me, that I am corrupt, that I am a mayate [gigoló]”But with me it happens like with the sun, which is beautiful, but at midday no one can stand its brightness.”
But the glow is fading and the lightning is burning everything in its path. Under his mandate, which he is now trying to extend until 2032 by twisting the legal processes, the PRI has lost everything it could lose: the territories that once belonged to the tricolor, including the State of Mexico, including his own State, Campeche, which he governed with a firm hand and bizarre measures; the latest elections, which have left his party in tatters, both in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies; millions of militants, both grassroots and renowned, have taken other paths. In these last few weeks, when the party is barely a private club, according to what some of those who are still militant say publicly, many are also threatening to leave. Like a Wall Street shark who has had everything and falls resoundingly, Alito clings to the leadership of an exhausted party to save himself. But save himself from what?
The loss of Campeche in the 2021 elections was a turning point that announced the worst times for the leader. The entry of Morena into the governorship, under the leadership of Layda Sansores, uncovered the garbage can with signs of old revenge. The judicial cases, for bribery, corruption, fraud, ghost companies, illicit sales and who knows how many other things, were cornering the national leader. Every step he has taken in politics since then is interpreted as a personal lifeline, both his alliances with political adversaries and his betrayals of these same people to be on good terms with those who govern: it is about escaping justice and he knows who can harm him. Moreno has secured a seat in the Senate in these elections, another safeguard against the cases opened in the Prosecutor’s Office. But the damage is done. Recorded conversations have come to light in the Sansores Government that may not serve as judicial evidence, but they show a character who rebels like a bull against adversity: “We are going to catch the businessmen with a reform,” “What a goal [el Gobierno] “Throw the PAN and the PRD into jail, but don’t mess with us.” Or this one: “Journalists should not be shot, they should be starved.”
When Alito came to power in Campeche in 2015, he began buying media outlets, he ended up owning up to five and still owns them, in his name or that of others, they say. But it was not enough. The public and private harassment against the few who remained independent was constant. “From here came the White House scandals, Alito’s private flights with money from his government, the disaster in the hospitals, the drug trafficking, the extortions or the killing of stray dogs,” says Miguel Villarino, one of those who endured the harassment. It cost him dearly. They tried to buy Villarino with money for giving in to his criticism, but he ended up in jail for almost two months. They tried to remove Rosita Santana from journalism. “They asked for my head three times, but I don’t want to be punished.” Process “He didn’t want to grant it,” he says by phone. Both know Moreno’s career well and some of the anecdotes told here are from his mouth. Others are not; most of those who have spoken for this article express their fear and prefer anonymity.
Moreno has been spreading enemies along his path. It is natural, says the coordinator of the PRI senators, Manuel Añorve: “When you reach the levels that he has reached, you always have critics, but he is firm and has many friends who defend him and admire him.” This newspaper has tried to speak with several of them, who are close to his administration, but they have not answered or have not wanted to participate. Añorve, yes. He has known him for a long time and now expresses his “closeness” to the leader. He affirms that Alito lives 24 hours a day immersed in politics, that he sleeps little and scrapes hours in the early morning to read, a few less to play paddle tennis, that he liked boxing when he was young and that he is a man of good food. No grudges and enormous ability to decipher who is in front of him, says the senator. No one can deny Alito’s cunning, the best quality of the fox and the one that distinguishes quite a few successful politicians.
Añorve also says that he is a “loyal friend, a clear and transparent man, direct, who does not use intermediaries to say things, with character and commitment, who knows how to listen and only uses confrontation when he has exhausted all resources of negotiation.” And he adds: “He has a great capacity for resistance, for less than what they have done to him, others would have already run away from Mexico.” Moreno himself denounced in Switzerland, at a summit of socialist leaders, to which the PRI belongs, the “persecutions” he was suffering from the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he said. “Threats and espionage.” Others would say, they say, that those are his specialties.
If Alito feels so harassed, the rumor circulating that he sleeps with the light on and a bodyguard in the room can be considered true. But it is not wise to pay attention to rumors, which in Moreno’s case are spun like cherries. A couple of sources have confirmed that he had two dwarfs at his service when he was governor, one who carried his documents and one who acted as a waiter. A third will later add that he dressed them up as elves at Christmas. And another assures that he laughed at the visits of these employees: “Look, in the style of the Middle Ages.” The latter is confirmed by a PRI member who knows him very well.
Moreno has had three marriages, but his relationship with women does not inspire enthusiasm among those who know him, to put it mildly. Little is known about the leader’s private life, as well as his childhood. But there is about his public life, since that “uncontrollable kid” who asked for a job at the university so he could study. Another nebulous chapter. Moreno has a degree in Law, according to his public resume. He is not, although he has appeared that way at times in his official documents, from the University of Campeche, where he became a politician based on aggressive disturbances, under the orders of the then governor, Antonio González Curi, his mentor, who knows him like the back of his hand, but who does not want to talk about him, they no longer have the best of relations. He is another of the enemies he left behind in his career. The degree, in reality, was obtained at René Descartes, a university center in Campeche that, they say, received a good donation in return when he graduated. The newspaper archives also know of his two birth certificates, the first one, the usual one, and a second one that allowed him to reach the regulatory age to run for governor.
To those who maintain that the leader represents the “most cavernous PRI”, that of corruption and kickbacks to journalists, humiliation and extortion to finance campaigns, others add: “He is like one of the Mexican leaders of the 19th century, a general willing to do anything to get to power and not let go” and that began when he was the leader of the revolutionary youth of the party, they say. Aurelio Nuño, who was Secretary of Education with the PRI, and who has expressed his disagreements with the current leadership, maintains that Alito “does not have and is not interested in having a vision of the country, he does not have an ideological orientation and has not sought to make a political career out of having principles, but to enrich himself”, something that is reaffirmed by those who describe him as a “self-conscious and sinister” character. No one spares in qualifiers. Even those who defend him as “a very bold, hard-working, tireless and verticalist young man,” as does a former PRI leader who does not want to be identified, state in the following line that “he follows the saying ‘if you are not with me, you are against me’. He is always focused: he has politics for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He is very pragmatic and calculating, but not very ideological.”
One thing everyone agrees on: he wants to be president of the Republic and he will do whatever it takes to achieve that, even if it is not enough. “He has not yet reached a breaking point, but he can reach it,” says a well-informed source. What that breaking point is is not known, but the leader’s latest signals indicate that he is not willing to abandon ship. He worked hard and cleverly until he forgot about that humble boy who had little to throw in the towel without having achieved his dream.
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