Oh what a tanga-ed web we weave…

I kinda miss the Fox administration , just for the amusement value.  While it really wasn´t all that funny that Fox’s first Secretary of Labor, Carlos Abascal (son of the Mexican Synarchista and Nazi sympathizer , had a teacher in his daughter’s school fired for daring to lecture on Carlos Fuentes’  creepy classic, Aura … though it was hilarious when the 1962 novella shot to the top of the Mexican best sellers list as a result of the controversy, and re-introduced millions of Mexicans to a book they’d forgotten about after reading it in high school.

Marta Sahugan’s overspending on towels and drapes for Los Pinos was good for a chuckle too… but nothing compared to “Tanga-gate”.

Marta, like Abascal, were products of PAN’s “piety wing”… as the old “Moral Majority” was to the U.S. Republican Party, reactionary Catholics were to PAN… with the difference that the reactionaries weren’t depending on contributions from relatively poor and working class people, but were wealthy and influential people to begin with.  Many were connected with “El Yunque”, a quasi-secret society of Francoists, many also member or supporters of Opus Dei and the Legionnaires of Christ.

One of the more public fronts for El Yunque was Provida, a “family values” lobbying group and “think tank” headed by Jorge Serrano Limón, who was also a high party official.   Federal funds were steered to Provida, supposedly to prepare educational material on sex education and women’s health (and, mostly for anti-abortion propaganda, the party fighting off attempts to decriminalize the procedure).  Being an organization run by late middle aged businessmen raised more than a few eyebrows, but when it turned out the federal funds were being diverted to “overhead”.

What made it so deliciously fun a scandal is that a good portion of the overhead was for tangas.  Obviously, these weren’t meant for any particular educational purpose unless the sight of overweight men in tangas was meant to convey some sort of lesson in the dangers of sugar daddies.

Serrano Limón was the object of any number of cartoons, and a staple of stand up comedy.  He didn’t find it so funny that he was ordered to pay back the money, and has spent God knows how much over the last 10 years on fighting the court order.  Which, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, he does indeed have to pay… along with a 13,200,000 peso fine.