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 in the New York Stock Exchange and elicited rumors of his possible retirement from the world of business.
But by 2015, Slim had recovered from these difficulties—and from some of his most controversial relationships. He is no longer suspected of being a front man for ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, currently considered one of his adversaries in Mexico, along with Televisa, the most important Spanish-speaking television network in the world. Now, Slim’s name is associated more closely with those of other former presidents around the world, such as the democrat Bill Clinton, the socialist Felipe González and even Fidel Castro. During Mexico’s electoral crisis in 2006, according to associates of ex-president Felipe Calderón, Slim quietly intervened to support left-wing presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his mission to annul the questioned elections.
In terms of philanthropy, Slim says he does not like playing Santa Claus, and although he has donated money to altruistic causes through his foundations, his efforts may appear pretty miserly compared to other members of the global ultrarich elite. Instead, his presence as a benefactor has focused on strategically exerting power in politics and further afield.
Drawing from interviews with his friends and enemies, as well as extensive research into historical and confidential archives obtained from intelligence agencies, and from Slim’s own testimony through a series of interviews conceded especially for this book, this biography builds a profile of the richest Mexican in the world, going beyond the cold, hard numbers and clichéd business success stories. With the advantages and disadvantages this entails, he is seen from the distance of a journalistic catwalk, such as the one in Washington, DC, in 2010, where a Getty agency photograph shows Slim striding across a hall, dressed in a tuxedo and wearing the lanyard of a White House special guest, with a painting of ex-president Grover Cleveland in the background.
This book is not financial reportage or an economic view on his empire; rather, it is a portrait of Slim’s social influence and the way in which he builds political relationships, and how his actions or omissions affect public life in Mexico and the eighteen countries of Latin America where he has investments. At the same time, I hope it is a journey through key moments in Mexican history, such as the years after the Revolution, the Tlatelolco student massacre in ’68, the dirty war, the financial crises of the ’80s, the wave of privatization under Salinas, the government turnover of the year 2000, the post-electoral conflict of 2006, the so-called War on Drugs and the return of the PRI to power with the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
Journalism in Latin America tends to come from the top and address those at the bottom. It represents a way in which power tells its truth to the people, not necessarily one in which the people tell the truth to power. In 2007, when I first started to do journalistic research on Slim, the idea was to provide a portrait of my country from a different angle. At the time I had just covered the teachers’ uprising in Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states, and the stories I wrote about elsewhere in the country were always linked to marginalized communities. How, then, to report on power? What would I find if I started to look into the richest man in the world with the same passion with which I followed a popular uprising or visited a hunger-stricken community? What would that point of view reveal about Mexico?
When I started writing this book, my political mindset was very agitated. In addition to the Oaxacan revolt, where I witnessed the extrajudicial execution of several protesters, I had been involved in the Other Campaign, launched by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the initiative led by Subcomandante Marcos under the guidelines of an anticapitalist manifesto known as the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which I signed as an adherent. But writing a book like this one with that particular political mindset would prove impossible. As a journalist, I needed other traits, which I had to learn over the years the way we learn the most important things in life: by doing them. Aiming to improve the way in which we view the lives of the powerful and famous within their own environments, I followed and wrote extensive profiles on Mexican actor Gabriel García Bernal, Puerto Rican reggaeton duo Calle 13, Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez and writer Juan Villoro. In addition, I codirected a documentary about Mauricio Fernández Garza, one of the most extravagant businessmen in Mexico, and another entitled El poder de la silla (The Power of the Saddle), about the ex-governor of the northern state of Nuevo León. Although these figures differ greatly from Slim, each one of these portraits trained me to develop the patience required for Slim’s project, and to look deeply into the contradictions that we all tend to live by.
In 2008, a year after Forbes’ announcement that a Mexican had topped their list of the ultrarich, I learned that Slim’s brother, Julián, had been subdirector of the Federal Security Directorate during its most infamous era, and that he had been a PGR (Office of the Attorney General) commander during the 1980s. For several weeks I thought Slim’s brother was an apocryphal character, that his life represented an unfortunate coincidence for the owner of Telmex. However, as I researched more I confirmed that the brothers were extremely close, as I detail in one of the chapters of this book. This was the first surprising fact that I encountered in my research, and in a way it was what stoked my interest in exploring the figure of Carlos Slim. It was not easy to officially prove the trajectory of Julián Slim as first commander of the PGR. His former colleagues were reluctant to talk about him due to his brother’s notoriety. I had to turn to the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information and make several appeals against the federal authorities who refused to provide me with their files, but in the end I succeeded. Someone who also helped me fundamentally in this kind of work was María de los Ángeles Magdaleno C., who carried out historical research in different sections of the National Archives, the historical archive of Mexico City, and the archives at El Colegio Nacional and the national newspaper archive.
Although my main project for eight years was to research and write about Slim, I was committed to many other stories: that’s why I also researched and wrote about the fire that killed forty-nine children in a nursery in Sonora and the intricate web of corruption behind it; about the political manipulation behind the War on Drugs launched by president Calderón; and about the social collapse caused by the drug cartel Los Zetas in the northern states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila.
Over the years
