Carlos Slim. Diego Osorno

the same time, the public charity Gilberto was being registered, headed up by first lady Cecilia Occelli de Salinas, with the purpose of helping the thousands of people affected by hurricane Gilberto, which devastated entire cities and villages. Soumaya Domit, Slim’s wife, also sat on the board of directors.

      During the years in which Slim opened his wallet for the PRI, he rose to the Forbes club as if by private elevator. Before Salinas de Gortari’s term of office ended, according to the newspaper records of the time, Slim donated at least $25 million to the official party for Ernesto Zedillo’s electoral campaign, who would go on to become the next president of Mexico. In February 1993, Salinas de Gortari hosted a dinner party at which he asked Slim and other multimillionaires for that sum to ensure the triumph of the PRI in the following elections, and to allow it to retain tight control over the country the way the party had done ever since its creation in 1929—with each incumbent president naming his successor. After the Mexican Revolution overthrew Porfirio Díaz’s thirty-year dictatorship, the Institutional Revolutionary Party had in effect established its own dictatorship, despite running formal elections each year.

      The newspaper El Economista was tipped off about the meeting, and published the news under the headline: “PRI sets quotas for big businessmen.” Days later, the former president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Antonio Ortiz Mena—in whose mansion Salinas de Gortari’s meeting with the multimillionaires was hosted—offered a press conference in which he explained that the PRI had been linked to government since its inception, but that now that circumstance was coming to an end, which was why the political institution needed an independent economic life.

      It was no coincidence that such an important event was hosted at the home of Ortiz Mena, who had been the regime’s minister of finance for twelve consecutive years. He represented the PRI’s old administrative technocracy, which was breathing its last. Other multimillionaires present at the meeting were Carlos Hank Rhon, Claudio X. González, Emilio Azcárraga, Alberto Bailléres, Roberto Hernández, Adrián Sada and Lorenzo Zambrano. Slim was the only one of them who had long been a part of the PRI’s Commission for Financing and Equity Consolidation.

      A year after that dinner party, with the elections underway, Slim was approached by a small group of reporters in the Constellations room of Hotel Nikko, during an event in support of Luis Donaldo Colosio’s recently launched campaign for the presidency of the republic. With the shadow of Telmex’s sale still lingering, the subjects of the financing of the PRI and the Zapatista uprising were the main points on the national agenda.

      “How much will you donate to the PRI?” one of the journalists asked Slim.

      “It’s not interview time.”

      “Later, if you prefer.”

      “No, I’d rather send you a document where I summarize my position regarding the country.”

      “Tell me about Telmex. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas says that if you win the elections, the company will again be put to public tender.”

      “But I only own 2 percent of the shares of the company: 75 percent of the shares belong to small owners. I can prove it.”

      “Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas says the tender was conducted incorrectly. What’s your opinion?”

      “That that’s a whole load of hogwash, along with all the other nonsense that man spouts. He’s being ignorant, quite frankly, and what’s more, not admitting it. I can send you documents for everything.”

      “Sir, instead, please tell me about it.”

      “No, no. Interviews don’t allow people to work in peace.”

      “What’s your opinion about the conflict in Chiapas?”

      “I’ll send you my document in due course.”

      Over twenty years after that tumultuous 1994, I asked Slim if in 2015 he still considered himself a PRI supporter.

      “No, I was never a member of any party,” he replied.

      “But you were: you appear formally as a member of the PRI’s Commission for Financing and Equity Consolidation.”

      “Yes, I was invited. It was a way in which… Look, there were two things: they wanted to separate, because the Ministry of Finance provided the funds for all the parties, all of them, except the PAN, which was using different model. So I imagine it was an attempt to do things differently.”

      “Were you a member of the PRI’s Commission for Financing?”

      “Yes, but we never held a meeting, to my knowledge.”

      “Have you never considered yourself a PRI supporter?”

      “Not me. I voted for the PRI for president and PAN for members of congress and senators. Always. From when I was twenty-one. That’s the way I’ve voted.”

      “Is the PRI of today the same as it used to be?”

      “We’d need to speak in more detail about that, but the PRI changed every six years. That’s like asking: is the current prime minister of China the same as the former prime minister. What China is doing now is the way the PRI used to do things.”

       III

       10

       Heart

      Ten years before becoming the wealthiest man on earth, Carlos Slim was at death’s door with a heart condition. In the fall of 1997, the tycoon looked so thin and weak that his close friends worried they might never see him again in his office doing calculations on three calculators at a time. And those close to him couldn’t get used to the idea of not seeing him review financial reports from all over the world with the impassive gaze of a shark hunting its prey. He traveled in secret to Houston, Texas, accompanied by his wife, to have one of the valves in his heart replaced. It was considered a low-risk operation.

      He went to the Texas Heart Institute, an Adventist medical center directed by Denton Cooley, who was famous for having carried out the first artificial heart transplant. The surgical team leader was Michael Duncan, and the doctor in charge of operating, Paolo Angelini, was an Italian cardiologist who had studied in Mexico, spoke passable Spanish and to whom Slim took a liking. When they were finishing the open-heart surgery, the seam on the new valve broke. Slim suffered a hemorrhage that the specialists battled to stop, transfusing thirty-one bags of blood. During the twenty-four hours that followed, Slim breathed with the help of a ventilator. His immune system was vulnerable and he caught pneumonia. Within a couple of weeks, the businessman lost over forty pounds.