All the Presidente's Men

The central correspondent, María del Rosario Galván, though nearing 50, is a beautiful, wily and ambitious consort of powerful men. She considers "politics to be the public expression of private passions. . . . But passions are very arbitrary forms of conduct, and politics is a discipline." At first, the object of María's scheming is Nicolás Valdivia, 15 years her junior, a darkly handsome and ambitious Mexican graduate of Paris's Ecole Nationale d'Administration. "Start opening those doors, my child, one by one," she instructs him. "Beyond the last threshold is my bedroom. The last key unlocks my body. Nicolás Valdivia: I will be yours when you are the President of Mexico."

She knows how to help him get there. In this Mexico, "he who doesn't deceive, doesn't achieve." Politics is the art of the lie: "The successful cultivation of lies is a fulltime job. Which is precisely what the political life allows for."

Maria's real ambitions, shared by most of the book's characters, are aimed at the presidential election of 2024. Maria, it turns out, is actually scheming on behalf of her longtime lover, the veteran politician Bernal Herrera. She and Herrera have many rivals, most of them far more reprehensible than they. Herrera claims that he wants to "create a country with laws that we are prepared to enforce and obey." But this is no country for naive idealists. The book offers a gallery of political characters who range from unequivocally venal to ruthless connoisseurs of necessary evils. "Certain areas of Mexican reality are so dark that only people with dirty hands can effectively control them," says the presidential adviser aptly known as Seneca. "Only those who were corrupt were free," he adds. "We created a culture of illegality."

As depicted by Fuentes, Mexican politics is in many ways the expression of a Mexican essentialism: "The president must prove that there's only one voice in Mexico -- his own. That was the meaning of the Aztec emperor's name, Tlatoani, god of the Great Voice." But that doesn't mean politics to the north is any cleaner: "Gringos know how to multiply Mexican vice by the thousand and hide it by the million."

Perhaps the novel's most formidable figure is a ghostly former president known as the Old Man Under the Arches, obviously inspired by Carlos Salinas. Installed in a café by the Veracruz central plaza, he offers oracle-like political wisdom and warnings to his scheming visitors. The most instructive involve a former presidential candidate believed to have been murdered, Tomás Moctezuma Moro. "He was going to put an end to corruption," Salinas remembers. "He said it was the lowest form of stealing from the poor. . . . 'Slow down, Tomás,' I told him." Corruption "lubricates" the Mexican nation; such a man was bound to cause alarm. The Old Man's confession regarding Moctezuma Moro's fate -- which echoes what the Mexican vox populi has long whispered about Salinas-Colosio -- is perhaps the novel's most powerful moment.

Fuentes -- who wrote an introduction to Salinas's memoirs -- belongs to a generation of eminent Latin American writers who like to take strong political positions and to be close to power and to the powerful. In Fuentes's case, this involvement seems to have provided a great deal of inside knowledge about how political power is actually wielded in Latin America. In The Eagle's Throne, he portrays and dissects the tragicomedy of Mexican political culture with an air of extraordinary authority and remorseless humor. As someone who, here in Mexico City, has become a daily observer of this very muddy Mexican election campaign, I can attest that the novel certainly seems prescient: "We resign ourselves to throwing meat to the lions every six years," says Congresswoman Tardegarda. "But the system doesn't change."

Other sources of this book's considerable pleasures are Fuentes's characteristic dazzling, razor-sharp, intellectual flights. In his vast and multi-faceted oeuvre, this may be a minor work, but it provides a feast of political insight, aphorisms and maxims, in the spirit of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's The Art of War :

"Before becoming president, a man has to suffer and learn. If not, he'll suffer and learn during his presidency, at the country's expense."

"Politics is the art of swallowing frogs without flinching."

"Something indispensable in politics: the ability to manage groups of insecure men."

For anyone aspiring to be a Mexican politician, this should be an indispensable manual. For those seeking to apply such knowledge -- if only as a vicarious pleasure -- to their own circumstances, well, it can only make you wiser. ·

Francisco Goldman's latest novel is "The Divine Husband." "The Art of Political Murder," a nonfiction account of the Bishop Gerardi murder case, will be published in March.