Diego Enrique Osorno is a norteño of a casual and friendly appearance. Tall, bearded, usually clad in jeans, cowboy boots and checked shirts, the only thing missing to complete his wrangler look is a Stetson, and maybe a pistol.
A couple of years ago, during a visit I made to Monterrey, Diego showed me around. The way a Parisian might show off the Moulin Rouge and the Eiffel Tower, Diego showed me how his hometown had become a city governed by criminals. One day, he introduced me to a local soldier for Los Zetas, who spent three hours explaining the ins and outs of his organization. He told us how and why Los Zetas killed certain people and how, in their terrifying “kitchens,” they disposed of the bodies by dismembering them and incinerating them with diesel fuel in oil drums. At the time, his organization was the dominant power in much of northern Mexico, and by talking to this man it became apparent that, to him, the bosses of Los Zetas and those of rival cartels were authorities of equal importance as any state governor, police commander, or army general. Intriguingly, he made no moral distinctions between such figures. Instead, he spoke of them as sharing something in common. That something, to him, was power, pure and simple, and it was clear that from his perspective, power was a force that needed neither definition nor justification, but existed in a realm all its own, far beyond equations of good or evil.
The power dynamic between Mexico’s citizens and those who exercise control over their destinies—whether Los Zetas killers or elected officials—has become a matter of increasing importance to Diego in his ongoing quest to unravel, and to expose, some of the chronic injustices of his homeland. If Los Zetas understood power as an absolute, a thing that transcended moral considerations, it was also true that most Mexicans could point to one man, and one man alone, as their country’s king of kings. That man was not the Mexican president, who holds the office for a single six-year term, called a sexenio, but Carlos Slim. Impelled by what he has called “a sense of indignation” at the fact that the world’s richest man could have accumulated his fortune in a nation where fifty two million citizens lived in dire poverty, Diego proposed to write a political biography of the Mexican magnate. (On the lists of the world’s wealthiest people, Slim was number one when Diego began his research a decade ago; over the years since, others have replaced him. As of early 2019, Jeff Bezos was the world’s richest man, and Slim was the fifth, with an estimated worth of sixty-four billion dollars.)
In this book, which was originally published in Spanish in 2015, Diego examines this modern-day pasha, a symbol at once of twentyfirst-century capitalism and of Mexico, a giant among Lilliputians in a country with a long tradition of caciques, or strongmen. The surreal dimensions of Slim’s economic power lead Diego to openly ask—indeed, it is the guiding question of this book—whether a man as rich as Slim can also be a good person. In Carlos Slim, Diego, sets out to find the answer to this question.
What Diego proposes, of course, is a major challenge. As someone who has also written portraits of powerful men, including of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the former King Juan Carlos of Spain, I know that one of the most essential steps in the process is to establish an intuitive understanding of the characters, as well as to gain access to information that sheds new light on their lives. It is always a very difficult thing to approach powerful figures, who tend to avoid journalists and who often retain advisors whose very purpose is to either keep such people at bay or else to ensure that their bosses are portrayed in a positive light.
In a testament to his journalistic mettle, as well as his amiable personality, Diego managed to circumvent the roadblocks around Slim, and to secure several meetings with him. In their meetings, Diego was able to ask him some of the questions he had been seeking answers for, and to converse on a range of different topics. Coming on top of his research that had taken place over several years, including archival documentation and numerous interviews with Slim’s friends and foes, his encounters with the man have given his book a human touch and helped make it an invaluable contribution to modern history. In a memorable meeting they had in Slim’s personal library, for instance, Slim reveals himself to be an avid and eclectic reader, of everything from poetry by Khalil Gibran to the diaries of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia—although books about wealth, business and power dominated. As they walked around, inspecting his books, Slim confessed to Diego that business titans like Baruch, Rockefeller and Getty had been role models. He showed him a good sense of humor, telling Diego he was willing to answer all his questions, and the only thing he asked in return was that he not put “too many lies” in his book. He also gave him his copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and told him to take it, that he simply had to read it.
The library scene is just a teaser. There is, of course, much more to Carlos Slim. Diego set out to tell the life story of one of the world’s greatest capitalists at a time of great inequality in their shared birthplace of Mexico, and he has certainly done that and more in this highly original, fascinating account of the life of Carlos Slim.
Jon Lee Anderson
The biography of Carlos Slim, one of the richest people of all time, is not just the tale of the first man from a developing country to ever reach the top of the Forbes list of billionaires. It’s also the story of a businessman who, at crucial moments, supported the PRI—the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for seventy-two uninterrupted years, until 2000—and capitalized on the country’s mass privatization of national services and banks, promoted since the 1980s by the United States and other world powers through the Washington Consensus, which consolidated neoliberalism in Latin America.
Slim has been immersed in the world of business since early childhood, thanks to his father, Julián Slim Haddad, a Lebanese émigré who made his fortune as a merchant in Mexico and whose political ideas were aligned with those of Al Kataeb—the Lebanese Phalange Party, an organization created by the Gemayel family, taking inspiration from Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Spanish Phalanx.
After studying civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)—and standing as a personable student who, as well as being a math lecturer and catcher on the college baseball team, championed the use of the then-cutting-edge electronic calculator—Slim married Soumaya Domit Gemayel. She was a niece of Bachir Gemayel, the Lebanese president who ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which the Phalangists killed over 2,000 people, many of them Palestinian refugees from the war with Israel. The priest who celebrated their wedding was Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic order whose scandals surrounding child abuse and corruption led the Vatican to intervene. On his wedding day, Slim was accompanied to the altar by his mother, Linda, and his elder brother, Julián, an active commander of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the political police of the PRI regime, which, in the context of the Cold War, killed, tortured and forcibly disappeared those in opposition.
After the wedding, Slim combined letters from his own and his wife’s name to found Carso, the group whose operations have resulted in a net worth of over $80 billion, which has on occasion surpassed the fortunes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Amancio Ortega, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and other famous billionaires. His wife Soumaya did not live to see the family empire consolidated at a global level, as she died of chronic kidney disease in 1999. Two years earlier, Slim had also been at death’s door after he underwent heart surgery in Houston, Texas—an event that caused his companies’ shares to plummet