December 1997. In a closed room, far from the spotlight and long before Mexico believed it was entering a new democratic era, two women watched as fire swallowed photographs pierced by a live tarantula. They were not planning a campaign or discussing public policy. According to the most disturbing versions that haunted Marta Sagun for years, they were doing something else.
A first lady, not a government partner, but a parallel power, a power that did not want to be close to the president, wanted to interfere with his will. Today that woman lives far from the center of the stage, sheltered in the apparent calm of the San Cristóbal ranch, as if time had cleaned what she left behind.
But this isn’t the story of how he ended up growing old alongside Vicente Fox. This is the story of how he got there [through music]. How a woman born on April 10, 1953 in Zamora, Michoacán, went from selling cheese and managing a pharmacy to becoming the most feared figure of the six- year term, which promised to end 71 years of the old regime.
As journalistic investigations show, he turned Los Pinos into an area of personal influence. how a network of privileges, contracts and scandals grew around his children, which affected Pemex, Oceanografía and the very idea of democratic change. And like a family marked by abandonment, they ended up seeking in public money, political protection and the presidential surname the cure for much older wounds.
Today you’re going to discover four things. First, where did Marta Saagún’s obsession with commanding, controlling, and never returning to the shadows really come from? Second, what was being whispered about cleansings, Santería, Toloache , and a strange dependency that began to surround Vicente Fox? Third, how Manuel, Jorge and Fernando Briviesca went from wounded sons to protagonists of one of the murkiest stories of power in Mexico.
And fourth, why did journalists, files and complaints end up painting the portrait of a dynasty that confused the State with family inheritance? But to understand the scandal, we must first go back to the origin, because this story did not begin in the presidency. It began with a woman who swore she would never be anyone again before Marta Saagún learned to walk the halls of power as if they had always belonged to her.
Before the pine trees, before the microphones, before the carefully polished image of a providential woman who spoke of charity, family, and change, there was another life, one much smaller, much rougher, much more like a cage than a destiny. And that, precisely that’s where it all began. April 10, 1953. Zamora, Michoacán. Mexico was still a country where the right last name opened doors and the wrong last name condemned you to look from the outside.
Marta Saagún was born in that world . He was n’t born into luxury, he wasn’t born with aristocratic surnames, he wasn’t born in the heart of power. He was born into a gray normality, into a modest middle class , in an environment where life seemed already written in advance. Grow up, get married, obey, resign yourself. For many women of her generation, that was the whole script.
But Marth never seemed willing to accept a decorative role. He worked selling cheese. After that, he managed a pharmacy. Small jobs, small routines, small horizons, and perhaps for any other woman that would have been enough. A stable job, a respectable name, a life without surprises, but there are people who cannot bear the idea of going through the world without leaving a mark, without commanding, without twisting reality in their favor.
And according to the biographical accounts that for years tried to decipher her, Marta belonged to that class of people. I didn’t want to accompany a life, I wanted to direct it; I didn’t want to adapt to order, I wanted to impose it. In 1971 she married Manuel Briviesca Godoy, a veterinarian. On paper, it seemed like the beginning of a conventional life: marriage, home, children.
Stability in practice ended up being a story marked by wear and tear, friction, and an increasingly visible incompatibility. Home was not a refuge, it was confinement. The descriptions of that period repeat the same feeling: arguments, harshness, resentment. A woman who felt trapped in a role that was too tight for her and a marriage that, far from giving her identity made her feel even more invisible.
And that matters more than it seems, because people don’t always reach their calling. Sometimes they come out of hunger, hunger for recognition, hunger for control, hunger to never again feel humiliated by a life they consider inferior to what they believe they deserve. In Marta, that hunger grew like a fever as her marriage deteriorated and domestic life suffocated her.
An intimate, silent, fierce conviction also grew. She wasn’t born to be left behind by anyone. That’s why politics wasn’t just an opportunity, it was an escape, a door, an antidote to irrelevance. His entry into the PAN and his approach to the political world should not be read as a simple change of activity, but as the moment when an old ambition finally found a vehicle.
Marta did not want to go back to being the woman of the town, the resigned wife, the pharmacy manager, the secondary figure in a story written by others. She wanted a place from which no one could displace her. He wanted weight, he wanted influence. She wanted to be in charge, and then Vicente Fox appeared, not yet as president, not yet as a symbol of a historic transition, but as something perhaps more important to her.
A ladder, a real possibility of escaping the shadows forever, but also a threat, because if there was one thing he understood very early on, it was that borrowed power is never safe. It depends on affection, desire, convenience, calculation. And a woman who had spent half her life running from insignificance could not afford to fall back into it.
That was the emptiness that pushed her. Not only ambition, but terror. The fear of returning to the old life, the fear of being nobody again, the fear of looking back and discovering that it had all been just a parenthesis. And when power ceases to be a goal and becomes an emotional need, simply knocking on the door is no longer enough.
The obsession begins with locking it behind you and keeping the key forever. Power is almost never seen when it is born. It doesn’t make noise when it comes in. He does not announce his arrival with trumpets or speeches. Enter in silence. He sits at the table, observes, learns the other person’s fears, and then, when he finds the exact crack, he starts working from there.
In the case of Marta Saagú, the divide was not an election, nor a law, nor a vote in Congress. It was something much more intimate and more disturbing. It was the need to ensure that Vicente Fox could not stray from his side, either emotionally or politically, just as power was beginning to truly approach.
For years, rumors circulated in the corridors of Mexican politics that seemed too dark to be true and too persistent to be ignored. They were n’t just talking about ambition, they were talking about clean , rituals, Santería, witchcraft, spiritual consultants coming and going from Marta’s environment, as if it weren’t a presidential residence, but a private sanctuary where fear, the desire for control and the obsession with never losing what had been conquered were mixed together.
Those who investigated that world described a strange atmosphere, not that of a normal presidential couple. that of a circle where superstition and politics began to touch each other in a dangerously convenient way. One of the most explosive versions claimed that it had all started long before Los Pinos, when Marta still needed to secure her place next to Fox and keep away anyone who could challenge her for that position.
There appears that scene that seemed to come from a nightmare. December 1997, a closed room, thick smoke, photographs of personal enemies and rivals burning under an improvised flame. Over some of those images, a live tarantula was nailed as part of the ritual . The names that floated around that story were not minor.
Lilian de la Concha, Fox’s ex-wife, and operators close to his circle, appeared as figures to be neutralized. It wasn’t a campaign, it was, according to those accounts, a war of possession. And when power finally arrived, the shadows did not disappear; on the contrary, they became institutionalized. The testimonies and books that for years followed Marta’s trail spoke of spiritual advisors, tarot readers, santeros and ritual operators entering the world of power with a chilling naturalness.
Gina Morris was mentioned as a constant influence. There was talk of an alleged Cuban santero who operated under a borrowed religious identity . It was even said that some of these consultations did not take place in discreet houses or far from the radar, but within the presidential environment, as if the country’s presidency had opened a secret door to a parallel liturgy that no one voted for, but everyone ended up suffering.
The most disturbing version of all was also the most symbolic, that of a control that was no longer satisfied with advice, prayers or amulets. that of an alleged mixture prepared with bodily elements of Marta and Tolo H. A plant associated for centuries with practices of subjugation and mental alteration.
According to these accounts, the substance was allegedly administered in Fox’s drinks under the innocuous name of vitamins. Think for a moment about the monstrosity of that image. A president who promised the country democracy, change and transparency, while around him grew the suspicion that his will was being surrounded by something that could not be seen in speeches, but could be seen in gestures, in his gaze, in his docility, in that increasingly repeated feeling that Marta did not accompany power, she exercised it. Many
observed that Fox began to look different, more subdued, more dependent, more willing to cede ground that no president would cede if he kept the center of power intact. And the more Marta’s figure grew, the more the idea spread that there was not just an influential wife there, but a dominant presence, a feared woman, a will that imposed itself not by formal position, but by closeness, pressure and a mystery that no one could completely dispel.
There was even talk of discreet trips, powerful intermediaries, and an escalation in these rituals when the presidency was no longer a dream, but a reality. that it had to be protected at any cost. And that is the most important point, because this whole universe of versions, testimonies and suspicions did not matter so much for its exoticism, but for its function.
There was only one function. To ensure obedience, to block rivals, to turn affection into dependence and closeness to the president into a sealed territory. But the secret didn’t end in mystery. While Marta was supposedly reinforcing her control over the center of power, in another corner of her life, the true cost of all that was already growing.
a bill with a surname, with old wounds and with children who had spent years learning that in that house love never arrived clean. The children of a powerful family are always born into power. Sometimes they are born much earlier, in the hollow, in the crack, in that silent zone where a mother is already thinking about escaping, while the children still believe that home is forever.
And in the case of Marta Sahagun, that’s the part that hurts the most, because before her children were singled out for scandals, excesses and privileges, they were three boys growing up in a house where money could appear, but tenderness didn’t always arrive on time. Manuel, Jorge and Fernando Briviesca did not grow up in a fairy tale of discipline, affection and clear limits.
They grew up amidst a worn-out marriage, arguments that accumulated like dampness on the walls, a mother who looked less and less into her house and more and more towards the horizon of a different life. As the relationship with Manuel Briviesca Godoy became increasingly strained with friction, resentment and weariness, the children were caught in the middle of a silent war that was never fully declared, but which contaminated everything.
Children always understand more than adults think. the silences, the absences, the door that closes louder than normal, the lost gaze of a mother who is no longer fully present, even though she is still sitting at the table. And that’s exactly what started to happen. Marta didn’t want that life, she didn’t want to be confined, she didn’t want the domestic role, she did n’t want to resign herself to a small existence in where destiny would end in the kitchen, in the neighborhood, in
a routine without glory. The problem is that when a person turns their escape into an obsession, someone almost always pays the price. In this story, her children paid the price. Over time, the compensation became money, permission, and constant concessions. What wasn’t discussed in conversation was reflected in things.
What wasn’t built locally was covered up with facilities. And that’s a very elegant form of abandonment, cleaner on the outside, harder to detect, but just as destructive, because a child can grow up surrounded by comforts and still feel alone. You can have a last name, school, clothes, opportunities, and still live with the feeling that nobody really sees you.
According to the stories that haunted the Bribiesca family for years, that’s exactly what happened. There was no firm emotional structure, no containment, no center. Jorge’s case was the most painful, because he was, according to those who knew that house well, the most sensitive, the most fragile, the one who most needed affection and also the one who most felt as if the world was splitting in two.
As Marta got closer to Vicente Fox and began to build the life she believed she deserved, Jorge was left behind with a burden that was not his to bear. Between 1999 and 2001, while she traveled through events, campaigns, commitments and political meetings that pushed her towards the anteroom of Los Pinos, he stayed behind taking care of his dying grandmother.
Imagine that scene. An entire country talking about change, about transition, about the future, and in a dimly lit room, a son slowly feeds the woman who is fading away while his mother drifts further and further away towards another life. That leaves a mark, a mark that cannot be erased by any illustrious surname or any photograph alongside those in power.
Manuel the eldest took another path, one more brutal, more like rage than visible pain. The versions that circulated about him spoke of alcohol from a very young age, of a harsh personality, of an increasingly less contained aggression. Jorge, on the other hand, sank in another direction. Drugs. dependency, admissions to rehabilitation.
The name Oceánica floated around that story for years like proof that the wound was no longer just moral, but physical, chemical, irreversible at times. And the most tragic thing is that by then the lesson had already been learned. In that family, affection was unstable, but privilege could open doors.
Discipline was lacking, but access was coming. The effort might have been mediocre, but the surname carried weight. The three children grew up with the idea that proximity [to music] to power corrected what life had denied them on the inside. They never fully developed into men of their own , but rather as emotional heirs to a void that they later tried to fill with excess, money, and a sense of impunity.
Therein lies the broken heart of this part of the story. Before becoming symbols of abuse, they were children displaced by the ambition of a mother who confused advancement with redemption. And when a family learns too early that love isn’t enough, it starts looking for substitutes. Some find refuge in silence, others in addictions, and others, when power finally comes knocking at their door, believe they have found in public money the perfect revenge against everything they lacked as children. When power stops
serving a country and starts serving a family, corruption changes form. He no longer hides, he no longer asks for permission, he no longer acts out of fear. He sits in the right office, picks up the right phone, and speaks with the ease of someone who knows that no one will dare to say no. That’s what began to happen around Marta Saagún when Los Pinos stopped being the president’s house and began to appear, for too many witnesses, as the operations room of a surname that felt above the rest of the country. The Bribiesca family did not
get into the scandal by accident. They arrived because they learned very early on that in Mexico power did not always need a uniform or an official position. Sometimes it was enough to have access, sometimes it was enough to be the son of the right woman. While Vicente Fox spoke of change, democratic transition, and a new country, behind the scenes of his six -year term, another, much dirtier narrative began to grow: that of a family that, according to complaints, legislative investigations, and reports from that time,
turned its proximity to the presidency into a machine of favors, contracts, and institutional pressure. The heart of that looting had a name . Oceanography, Pemex, Amado Yáñez, Raúl Muñoz Leos. names that for years were repeated like pieces of the same mechanism. The underlying accusation was devastating: that Marta’s children, acting from the shadows but shielded by power, were pressuring to move contracts, displace competitors, and pave the way for multi-million dollar businesses.
We ‘re not talking about petty rumors or office favors. We are talking about a structure that was flagged for having obtained undue benefits. for billions of pesos. The figure that most impacted public memory was brutal. 6 billion 6 billion pesos floating over the name of a family that had come to power promising moral cleansing.
And while Pemex showed the size of the business, the IPAP case revealed the method. It wasn’t just about influencing; it was about learning to devour public resources with technical language, with shell companies, with figureheads, with operations so cold that they seemed designed to make the theft sound administrative. State properties acquired below their real value, land and assets bought under conditions that for many researchers were not a market opportunity, but a demonstration of how power could twist even auctions. Saint
Catherine, the Calvary. Property names that on paper looked like files but in reality were open wounds in the national heritage. But perhaps the most obscene thing of all did not happen in the oil contracts or in the real estate maneuvers. It happened in the field of charity. Because while the country saw Marta Saagún wrapped up in speeches about social aid, sensitivity and commitment to the most vulnerable, the shadow of Vamos México began to fill with questions, questions about the destination of the
money, about the operating expenses, about the scandalous distance between the millions that came in and the proportion actually destined for the poor. That’s where the mask began to crack more severely, because one thing is to enrich oneself from a position of power, and quite another is to do so while invoking compassion as a shield.
And then appeared the phrase that sums it all up, the phrase that didn’t sound like a defense, it sounded like a moral confession. We have to make a living from something . That’s what Manuel Briviesca said when the accusations could no longer be contained with elegant silences.
We have to make a living somehow. There is no better radiography of a dynasty deformed by privilege. There is no better summary of what happens when someone grows up believing that the state [of music] is also a family inheritance. The saddest thing is that by then money was no longer just money, it was a substitute, it was revenge, was the way that some wounded children found to finally play something that resembled the power that their mother had chosen before them.
And Martha, far from stopping the machinery, seemed to cover it with her influence, with her presence, with that invisible shield that turned every complaint into a wall. The problem is that no stolen fortune lasts forever. And when a family needs to crush the truth to protect its millions, what comes next is no longer wealth, it’s fear.
Stolen money doesn’t survive on its own. It needs guardians, it needs docile judges, bought silences, intimidated journalists and an entire structure willing to pretend it doesn’t see. Because a family can become wealthy in the shadow of power for a time. But to sustain that wealth, he needs something even more valuable than contracts and influence.
He needs impunity. And that’s where Marta Saagú’s story stopped being just an influence-peddling scandal and became something more serious, an open battle against the truth. When the first serious allegations about the Briviesca children began to circulate, Los Pinos did not respond with transparency or convincing explanations.
He responded in the way that circles of power who feel they own the state respond. Closing ranks, tightening throats, moving pieces. The motto was no longer to defend oneself with actions, but to resist until fear did the dirty work. Because at that point, admitting even a single flaw in Marta’s image was tantamount to calling into question the entire moral choreography of Vicente Fox’s six-year term.
The woman who presented herself as the face of family, charity, and stability could not suddenly appear as the center of a network where privilege, shady dealings (in the music industry), and an ambition that seemed to know no bounds were all mixed together. It was at that moment that the name of Olga Bornat became unbearable for the presidential circle.
The Argentine journalist was not content with simply repeating rumors. He published, he ordered, he pointed out, he put pieces together. His books opened a wound that could no longer be closed with magazine smiles or public acts of charity. There appeared the children’s businesses , private tensions, excesses, obsessions, the use of power as a shield and even the most uncomfortable aspects of Marta’s private life.
For any mature democracy, that would have required a political response. But in the Mexico of change, the answer was different. Lawsuits, judicial pressure, legal harassment. The old reflection of wounded power. Marta took the conflict to court under the banner of moral damages.
He claimed to be defending his honor, he claimed to be defending his privacy, but deep down the message was something else. Anyone who dared to touch the presidential family would pay a price. And the most grotesque thing was that Manuel Briviesca, implicated in much more serious accusations, also decided to take legal action, not to dismantle the heart of the financial scandal, but to protest descriptions of his physical appearance and nicknames that ridiculed him in certain circles.
That detail, which might seem minor, revealed a deep moral deformation. The problem wasn’t corruption, that reaction seemed to say. The problem was that someone told it disrespectfully. But the network of impunity was not limited to punishing journalists. He also began to expel those within the government itself who resisted participating in the theater.
And that’s where a key figure appears, Alfonso Durazo. His resignation was neither a discreet exit nor just another bureaucratic difference. It was a warning, a written cry, a document that revealed something that many [musicians] suspected and few dared to formulate clearly. that Marta Sahagun was content to be a decorative figure of power.
He wanted to influence, decide, project himself, prepare the ground to go further. Durazo spoke of dynastic temptations, and he did n’t use that expression by chance. She used it because what she was seeing no longer resembled an active first lady; it resembled a family assessing how much more it could absorb from the state apparatus.
Critical voices continued to accumulate. Analysts, former officials, and observers began to describe Marta as a symbol of the moral corruption of the six- year term. not only for contracts or for children, but also for something deeper, because the alternation that promised to clean up public life was reproducing with a different face the same old vices: favoritism, opacity, punishment of the inconvenient press, protection of those close to them, manipulation of institutions.
The country had voted for a historic break and ended up watching from the screen as the new elite learned the methods of the old one too quickly . And as happens in almost all stories of impunity, the moment came when the shield stopped being a defense and became a confession. Because when a power needs demands, pressures, expulsions, and silences to sustain its version, what it is unwittingly saying is that the truth is unbearable to it.
Marta still retained influence; the children still moved with arrogance. Fox was still trying to preserve the illusion of control, but the rot was no longer hidden in the basements. He had risen to the surface. And when the truth begins to emerge, Diana, still surrounded by threats, the end soon crosses the border.
Power has a dangerous habit. He makes those who come near him believe that the whole world ends at the walls that protect them, that there is no judge beyond his reach, that there is no border that cannot be bought, that there is no file capable of following them when the palace doors close. Marta Sahagun and the Briviesca family also came to believe it.
For years they lived as if the correct surname was enough to erase contracts, complaints, audits, inconvenient journalists and even public contempt. But the problem with dynasties built on favors is that one day they lose the building that sustained them, and when that happens, everything that seemed like protection begins to look like panic.
November 30, 2006, Vicente Fox and Marta Saagú left Los Pinos. The gesture, seen from afar, seemed like the natural end of a six- year term. One president was leaving, another would arrive. This is how democracy works on paper. But beneath that republican ceremony lay a country different from the one they had promised.
The change had ended up smelling of privilege, of family businesses, of pacts of silence. And Marta’s children, accustomed to moving through the world as if proximity to power were a form of perpetual immunity . They began to discover something they had never learned in Mexico. Outside the maternal circle, the surname no longer carried the same weight.
For a while, they still tried to maintain the fiction. Texas, properties, comfortable life, discreet movements, enough money to keep pretending that nothing had completely broken. But local impunity doesn’t always work against another system. And that’s where Manuel Briviesca first felt that the protection of Los Pinos did not cross the border intact.
The investigations that for years seemed to be getting lost in the political noise began to take shape in colder, tougher files, harder to bend with a phone call. It was no longer the rumor in a column, no longer the denunciation of an opponent, it was the dry language of justice. In December 2008 came the blow that did the most damage to the family myth.
An arrest warrant in the United States. Electronic fraud, conspiracy, complicity, cover-up. Words that suddenly sounded like a brutal translation of everything that had been masked in Mexico for years. Manuel, who had so often lived within the arrogance of someone who feels untouchable, responded as heirs of privilege almost always do when the real world finally catches up with them.
Denying it, saying the signature wasn’t his, claiming it was all a mistake, as if the habit of evading consequences could continue to work forever. But something had already broken. The sentence came in December 2012. 3 years of probation, fine, surveillance. None of that seemed sufficient in the face of the moral magnitude of the disaster, but it was enough to mark it.
It was enough to put a scar on the surname that could no longer be erased with speeches about persecution or misunderstandings. For the first time, one of Marta Saagun’s sons did not appear as an operator, heir, or beneficiary of the system, but as a man reached by a sanction outside the Mexican refuge that had protected him for too long.
And then came the saddest image of all, the return. not the glorious return of those who retire to the countryside after serving the country, but the opaque return of those who come back because they no longer have anywhere to hide their shame. Guanajuato stopped looking like a sanctuary; it became a refuge.
The Briviesca, who once walked with the insolence of princes of the six-year term of change, began to carry something else. Investigations, discrediting, lawsuits, money drained by lawyers. the echo of a surname that no longer opened doors with admiration, but with suspicion.
That was what remained when the spell of power was broken. Not a victorious dynasty, not a family unjustly persecuted. Something far more devastating remained. A mother who wanted to secure the future of her family from the top of the state and ended up seeing that same surname become a file, a fugitive, and a stain. Because power can manufacture silence for years.
What it cannot manufacture forever is oblivion. Today, Marta Saagún no longer walks through the halls of Los Pinos, nor does she enter official rooms surrounded by cameras, officials, and that atmosphere of obedience that for years made people believe that her power was untouchable. Today she lives on the San Cristóbal ranch in Guanajuato, alongside Vicente Fox, clinging to an image of serenity, retirement, and social work, as if time had managed to turn into a mere memory everything that once shook the country.
From a distance, the scene appears peaceful. a former first lady in her final stage, an aging presidential couple, a foundation that still tries to speak the language of aid, charity and good intentions. But there are stories that don’t age, stories that remain floating over a house, over a surname, over an entire family, like smoke that never finishes rising.
Because numbers don’t age, files don’t age, and neither do questions. 6 billion pesos linked to contracts and favors surrounding Oceanografía. State properties placed under suspicion in operations linked to the Briviesca circle. Millions and millions sitting idle in the accounts of a foundation that claimed to lend a hand to the poor, while only a tiny fraction actually ended up playing music for those who needed help the most.
And in the midst of all that, a surname that was once presented as a symbol of democratic change ended up becoming for too many Mexicans a word associated with privilege, protection and abuse. But even that’s not the most devastating part. The most devastating thing is not in the numbers, even though the numbers are obscene.
It’s not in the contracts, even though the contracts stink. It’s not even in the accusations, in the books, in the audits, or in the files that followed his children for years. It’s somewhere else. It lies in the intimate balance of this story, in what remained of that family when the noise of power began to fade, in what happens when a woman believes that controlling power is equivalent to protecting her own and ends up leaving them with, as their only true inheritance, a mixture of emptiness, dependence, resentment, and downfall.
Marta Saagun wanted to escape mediocrity at any cost. He never wanted to return to insignificance. She wanted the whole country to know her name and for no one to be able to displace her from the place she had conquered. And to sustain that rise, according to the versions that haunted her for years, she resorted to everything: influence, pressure, control, political shielding, manipulation of the environment, rumors of rituals, wars against journalists, institutional silence, family protection.
He bet everything on a single idea: that if he could dominate the center of power, he could also order the rest of his world; that if he could secure his place at the top, the future of his children would also be assured . And that’s where he made the cruelest mistake. Because power can buy time, it can buy loyalties, it can buy fear.
What music can’t buy is peace. It cannot heal a broken childhood. You cannot turn privilege into integrity. cannot transform a wounded family into a healthy family just by surrounding it with money, influence, and open doors. In the end, the price wasn’t paid only by the country, also paid it for his own house.
That is the true legacy of this story. Not the glamour of a first lady, not the photograph next to the president, not the speeches, not the foundation. No, the ranch. The true legacy was a poisoned inheritance, a family that reached the top and ended up marked by suspicion, by discredit and by a question that still makes Mexico uncomfortable.
What happens [in music] when a woman doesn’t want to accompany power, but to possess it? And how many lives can it drag along with it when it finally discovers that even that isn’t enough? M.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
