This article by Álvaro Delgado Gómez originally appeared in the November 23, 2025 edition of Sin Embargo.
Mexico City. “I am far-right: Life, property and liberty,” Ricardo Salinas Pliego openly states, an ideological definition he learned from his father, Hugo Salinas Price, who for years created and financed numerous fascist-style initiatives, such as magazines, organizations, a political party and even a shock group of a secret organization against the left that, simultaneously, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States and for the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the sinister political police of the PRI regime.
Businessman Salinas Price, currently 93 years old, is a self-confessed tax evader—that’s why he created Elektra—and strikebreaker, but also a rabid anti-communist who boasts of having financed the University Movement of Renewal Orientation (MURO), one of the shock groups of the secret organization of Los Tecos and El Yunque, as he confesses in his memoir My Years with Elektra, in which he boasts of all the far-right initiatives, some Nazi, that he created and sponsored against the left in Mexico.
Salinas Price, born in the United States, became an activist against the left after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, and financed publications such as the Revista Nacional and organizations such as the National Independent Democratic Union (UNID) and the Mexican Nationalist Party (PNM), along with figures from the extreme Nazi-fascist right, such as Jorge Siegrist, Jorge Prieto Laurens and Agustín Navarro Vázquez, the latter a CIA agent who secretly managed MURO, created by the secret organization created at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG), of which his father, Agustín Navarro Flores, was the first rector during the Government of Lázaro Cárdenas.
“When Fidel came to power, since I was young, I became an ‘activist,’” Salinas Price recounts. “I bought a small offset printing press and started printing ‘anti-communist’ mailings to every mailing list I could get my hands on: companies, businesspeople, newspapers, writers. I remember feeling it was a betrayal of freedom that Nestlé Mexico, headed by Licenciado Represas, placed its advertisements in Siempre! magazine, which in my eyes had a decidedly communist slant. For a while, I sent a report abroad, the ‘Mexican-American Report,’ in English. Eventually, I stopped sending any materials. It was just too expensive, and I couldn’t possibly save the world. And as for enlightening Americans about relations with Mexico, I came to the conclusion that my work was not only unappreciated by everyone, but could cost me my life.”
Then, Salinas Price financed MURO at the initiative of Navarro Vázquez, a friend of the Leaño brothers, founders of Los Tecos de la UAG, and of Ramón Plata Moreno, one of the leaders of the secret organization.
Although it publicly appeared at UNAM in April 1962, MURO was conceived at least a year earlier, after the expulsion of two Economics students, Luis Felipe Coello and Guillermo Vélez Pelayo, sanctioned for assaulting attendees at the demonstration in support of the Cuban Revolution, on July 26, 1961, in University City.
MURO, a far-right shock group managed by the CIA, at an event in 1968.
Both went to Rector Ignacio Chávez to have their expulsion reconsidered, but the refusal generated a broad mobilization of practically all the structures of the right, such as Coparmex and the National Synarchist Union, as well as various publications such as Excélsior, El Heraldo, Ovaciones and the magazine Espejo, the latter directed by Navarro Vázquez, a figure who articulated the defense of Coello and Vélez.
Espejo, a collection of thought, which was its full name, was one of the publications that most reproduced materials against the expulsion of Coello and Vélez, signed by figures of clear right-wing orientation, such as Ramón Sánchez Medal, Edmundo Meouchi and Rubén Salazar Mallén.
Salinas Price witnessed the birth of MURO and the violence it unleashed: “I always supported Navarro Vázquez, a true hero of liberty, to whom the nation has not given the recognition it deserves. In several conversations, he suggested to me the idea of creating a youth shock group to counter the terror inflicted by the left among students. It would be called MURO, from its initials: University Movement of Renewal and Orientation. Most likely, several people supported him, but I never knew who else supported this group, which proved very effective in giving the left a taste of its own medicine.”
He recounts: “MURO had a house located on División del Norte Avenue, where the boys practiced martial arts. On one occasion, MURO decided to hold a demonstration at UNAM itself. To the astonishment of the left, the effigy of Fidel Castro was burned. It was funny; both my brother-in-law and I were there. He was photographed in the newspapers the next day, next to the burning effigy.”
Navarro Vázquez’s relationship with Salinas Price did not end in the sixties: When Carlos Salinas de Gortari granted TV Azteca to the family in the nineties, he and Fernando Baños Urquijo, former president of MURO, worked with Ricardo to define the television station’s editorial line.
Salinas Price also founded a political organization, along with Navarro Vázquez and other figures of a clearly far-right line, such as Carlos Campos, Jorge Siegrist and Jorge Prieto Laurens: The National Independent Democratic Union (UNID).
“I financed—or rather, paid for—all the expenses for the upkeep of that organization, which never actually became an organization because it didn’t generate the slightest interest. It was run by Carlos Campos, a good friend of Licenciado Navarro. In 1964, I met a very interesting character there, Licenciado Jorge Siegrits.”
The businessman also created the Mexican Nationalist Party, with Siegrits as organizer and Salinas Price as president, in which Prieto Laurens, also of proven pro-Nazi tendency, participated.
“There I learned that in politics, at least in Mexico, nothing is done without large amounts of money,” Salinas Price writes in his book, in which he also recounts the failure of that party, created during the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz.
“There was an interview with the Secretary of the Interior, Luis Echeverría Álvarez, and a subsidy for the party was mentioned, though I don’t know who proposed it. At that point, I spoke up, and before Mr. Echeverría’s incredulous gaze, I announced that the party wouldn’t require a subsidy, that it would be self-sufficient. Immediately, news reports began appearing in the newspapers that the party presidency was in dispute, whether it was Salinas or Alejandro Corral. This Corral then joined the establishment and lent himself to simulating an internal split. In light of this ‘problem,’ the Ministry of the Interior revoked the party’s registration. I threw in the towel. Through tears, I announced to my party collaborators that I was withdrawing, that it was impossible for me to continue incurring expenses or getting involved in disputes, which I saw would be my downfall, and that I was resigning. That was the end of the party.”
After his party failure, Salinas Price created and financed the Revista Nacional, headed by Siegrits, whose articles —even he complained— “took on a more and more pro-Nazi character, which I did not like,” and ended up closing it: “As a magazine it was a financial failure, and soon it disappeared.”
In his book, the businessman complains of his failure: “My adventures with the Mexican Nationalist Party and Revista National had cost me a lot, the equivalent of a large house in Acapulco with everything, including a yacht.”
MURO & The CIA
Salinas Price doesn’t say so in his book, but his adventures were associated with the CIA, because his friend Navarro Vázquez was a prominent agent of the agency, just when he was the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE), a private organization that he himself founded in 1953, and which came to gather 300 members, including Salinas Price, whose steering committee included representatives of the upper banking and industrial bourgeoisie of Mexico linked to foreign capital.
Navarro Vázquez was a prominent CIA agent and as such was part of a secret operation of the United States Government to, through the IISE, promote and consolidate anti-communist thought and action in the business sector, which he knew very well, and in the university environment which he also dominated.
Declassified documents from the United States Government, obtained by this author, establish that the CIA financed, trained and took control of MURO to be used as a group for espionage, propaganda and shock at UNAM, the main educational institution of the country, but also to influence at least the universities of Puebla, Guadalajara, Michoacán and Veracruz.
This CIA operation was called LIHUFF and began in mid-1960, shortly before the public appearance of MURO, and was led by two individuals: Alfonso Rudolph Wichtrich, a Mexican of American origin who was vice president of the Mexico-United States Chamber of Commerce, and Navarro Vázquez as the number two, referred to in the documents respectively by the cryptonyms LIHUFF-1 and LIHUFF-2.
In the book Right, Power, Corruption and Deception, by Alejandro Páez Varela and this reporter, published by Grijalbo in 2024, it is detailed that the LIHUFF operation, as the IIES is called in the documents, stemmed from the relationship that Navarro Vázquez had with the United States embassy and specifically with the Undersecretary for Ibero-American Affairs, Henry Hollan, according to CIA documentary information, declassified from 2017 onwards.
Extensive documentation from the United States government, disseminated through the Mary Ferrell Foundation, allows us to conclude that MURO was not only a violent far-right shock group that responded to the directives of the secret organization Tecos-Yunque and a sector of the business community that financed it, as Salinas Price confessed, but that its actions depended directly on the CIA and, even more, had the support of the DFS, the political police of the PRI regime.
The documents state that the CIA’s objective with Operation LIHUFF was to combat the left with the far right, through various publications in which Navarro Vázquez had influence, such as the magazine Espejo, and MURO, which he himself controlled, to influence the decisions of the Mexican government and his party, the PRI, through his actions in the university sphere.
The CIA’s specific purpose with this operation was precise: “It seeks to have LIHUFF exert influence and restrain Mexico from succumbing to the pressures and demands of the radical left.”
Although Operation LIHUFF began in the mid-1960s, as documented, the CIA knew Navarro Vázquez as a staunch anti-communist since he founded the IIES in 1953 with the support of prominent businessmen and bankers who repudiated state intervention in the economy and the “communist threat”.
A CIA report dated June 7, 1964, signed by the head of the “Station” in Mexico, Winston Scott, details the background, funding and objectives of “Project LIHUFF”, with the agency headed by Navarro Vázquez.
“(The IIES) was founded in 1953 by a group of Mexican businessmen to promote the principles of free enterprise. Since then, it has established numerous contacts and relationships of influence, and has been involved in various anti-communist and other activities. It organized meetings and various types of congresses where it focused on the dangers of communism; it published books, pamphlets, and brochures on communism, as well as the dangers of economic socialism. It organized a student group (MURO), established and maintained contacts in the university, economic, and business fields in Latin America; it significantly boosted the coverage in the press of topics related to private enterprise and the communist threat, and it amassed an archive of basic data on events and individuals linked to communism and socialism that would be difficult for any other private group in Mexico to match.”
In that same document, when referring to the “background” of LIHUFF, it points out that this project “and its sponsors are considered, in the Mexican scenario, as far-right conservatives, however, in the PBPRIME forum (United States cryptometer) they would be considered more as centrists.”
The LIHUFF Project by Rudolph Wichtrich and Navarro Vázquez was highly valued by the CIA in the United States, “Headquarters”, in the context of the anti-communism of the early sixties, in the midst of the Cold War, and especially to exert influence on the government of López Mateos:
“The importance of a group like this, noisy and combative, existing in Mexico is not valued in absolute terms, but in relative terms. As Headquarters is aware, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in power is essentially a delicate reflector of the many political currents and pressures that exist in Mexico. During elections, as well as in appointments and decisions, the PRI weighs its political actions very carefully. When radical leftists are hesitant and active, then decisions tend to be weighted in their favor and oriented according to their viewpoints. In other words, to have some counterweight, even between extremes, the right must be as noisy and active as the left. This is essentially where the Station sees the value of the LIHUFF mechanism. It does not intend for Mexico to embrace LIHUFF’s philosophy or objectives in whole, or even in large part: It seeks for LIHUFF to exert an influence and restrain Mexico from succumbing to the pressures and demands of the radical left. If it weren’t for a few like LIHUFF-2 (Navarro Vázquez’s IISE) and Miguel Alemán Valdés are mobilized through organizations of this type; the political center of gravity would shift unchecked toward the radical left, beyond what the policies of ODYOKE (the United States government) could oversee. This is the only specific value that the Station has seen, and continues to see, in LIHUFF’s activity.”
The cited document does not offer details about the organizations and actions of Alemán Valdés, Mexico’s first civilian and openly pro-business president, as it does in several documents about Operation LIHUFF.
For example, in another report dated October 15, 1964, the CIA celebrates the effectiveness of Operation LIHUFF:
“There is a certain amount of evidence, gleaned from the reactions of the radical left, that shows Lihuff is a cause for concern. For them, as indicated in the recent assessment, Lihuff is engaged in combating left-wing extremists from the far-right wing and against communists using his own highly vocal brand of activism, in order to counterbalance the influence of the radical left, as the PRI’s calculations take it into account. Clearly, the radical left does not like this idea.”
The CIA was happy with Operation LIHUFF in Mexico, especially with Navarro Vázquez, LIHUFF-2, even though he was very informal in delivering the reports they requested for the control of resources:
“LIHUFF-2 is successful, prominent, capable, and close to too many other prominent people and events on his own to have his activities be attributed to a single individual or activity. He responds to Station requests regarding resource use and even seeks advice on other LIHUFF activities not funded by the Station. What he does not respond to promptly is the detailed written report. Part of the problem in this respect is undoubtedly that he is involved in so many activities that it is difficult for him to find the time. For the Station’s objectives in this particular program, control is not ideal, but it is certainly sufficient to get things done in the desired areas, as there is little doubt about his motivation and abilities.”
Unión Nacional Sinarquista, fascist Catholic organization which has re-appeared in recent years as part of the anti-government marches organized by right wing businessman Claudio X. González.
CIA: “Unify the Right”
Navarro Vázquez was so active that, in the same CIA document from December 1963, a negotiation he conducted to unify the Mexican right wing, including the PAN and the Mexican Nationalist Party, chaired by businessman Salinas Price, is detailed.
“LIHUFF-2 became involved in the organization and activities of the right-wing Mexican Nationalist Party (PNM), which attempted to ‘unify the right’ with conservative political groups in Mexico. The National Synarchist Union (UNS), the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM), and NM held lengthy discussions and developed a joint program, but they were unable to convince the legally constituted, right-wing Catholic National Action Party (PAN) to join them, so their unification efforts are considered to have come to nothing.”
In this document, the CIA “Station” in Mexico disassociated itself from motivating the unification of the right: “The Station was not involved either directly or indirectly in LIHUFF’s activities in the PNM.”
Navarro Vázquez’s intense activism dated back to the 1950s through his contacts in the United States. The June 1964 document details that Operation LIHUFF—one of several in Mexico—began because of his relationship with the embassy and with Henry Holland, the Under Secretary of State who died in 1962, identified as Identity-3.
“In mid-1960, after contact between LIHUFF-2 (Navarro Vázquez) and HBEICH (as the United States embassy is known), Chief HBEICH requested that the Station consider supporting LIHUFF’s activities. A review by headquarters indicated that BUBARAK (the CIA) had sent some support to LIHUFF through Identity 3 (Henry Holland), but since Identity 3 had recently passed away, the Station was instructed by headquarters to resume funding.”
The CIA funded Espejo magazine, but its $500 monthly budget was later transferred entirely to MURO, after American businessmen took over providing Navarro Vázquez with $1,200 a month for that publication. The salary of Alfonso Rudolph Wichtrich, LIHUFF-1, of $500 a month is also detailed.
“The Station’s funding was initially allocated to Identity-4 (Espejo magazine), LIHUFF’s most important regular publication. A project was submitted by the Station to Reference C (unidentified), but Reference D (also unidentified) indicated that the project was rejected in its current form, that support for Identity 4 ( Espejo ) should be suspended, and that the Station’s funds should instead be applied to the Identity-4 (MURO) activity in the form of one-off grants. This was done with LIHUFF-1’s business partners, PBPRIME (the U.S. government), who assumed the cost of Identity ( Espejo ), approximately $1,200 per month. Currently, therefore, the Station’s expenses are limited to LIHUFF-1’s (Rudolph Wichtrich’s) salary of $500 per month and $500 per month for…” Identity-2 (MURO). In this context, LIHUFF’s activity costs $12,000 annually. The Station, however, retains access to the full spectrum of the mechanism and LIHUFF’s potential.”
The CIA office in Mexico itself knew that more resources were flowing into Operation LIHUFF, but it was unaware of the total amount of money being allocated to it.
“The Station does not know the exact percentage of income that KUBARK (CIA) provides to the LIHUFF complex; however, it is known that PBPRIME (United States) businessmen are supporting Identity-4 (Espejo) with $1,200 per month. Circulars and other activities sustained by LIHUFF must conservatively represent another $1,200 per month. The $500 per month provided to LIHUFF by the Station, while maintaining access and undoubtedly providing useful assistance to LIHUFF in the student field, cannot be considered as unconditional control of this situation. For the most part, the Station’s funds give LIHUFF-1/LIHUFF-2 access to LIHUFF matters, and with these funds, LIHUFF-1, based on its personal relationship, provides the element of control.”
The book Derecha, published by Grijalbo, provides much more information about MURO and the CIA, but also about the relationship that the DFS had with both, when it was directed by Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios and later Miguel Nazar Haro, agents of that agency and emblems of torture, disappearance and murder of left-wing opponents.
Members of the secret organization that controlled MURO, such as Fernando Baños Urquijo and Luis Felipe Coello, were also friends of Gutiérrez Barrios and Nazar Haro.
Gutiérrez Barrios and Nazar’s affiliation with the CIA is no coincidence: Declassified US government documents reveal that former presidents Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría were also agents, identified by the acronym LITEMPO, a secret network of spies working for that country.
Álvaro Delgado Gómez is an author and journalist, who began his career in 1986 as a reporter and has worked for El Financiero*,* El Nacional*,* El Universal*, and* Proceso*.*
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