LETTER TO MY FRIEND AND COMPASSIONATE SPIRITS

To: my friends and compassionate spirits:


In May of 1988 I showed up desperate at the lobby of Westcenter in Tucson, Arizona, suffering an emotional, mental and spiritual hemorrhage, and feeling that I had no more strength to carry my heavy cross because my back was full of bleeding wounds which were shucking my life, my dreams, my future little by little. Minutes latter I was facing Dr. Ralley across his desk in an impressive office. He looked at me with the face of a worried father and asked me; “why are you here?” Then I just did let my words flow out from the bottom of my hart; “because I want stop drinking and I can’t do it by myself; I need help. Because if I don’t stop I know I am going to die” He smiled and told me; welcome to life.

We all in our lives at some point have moments when we feel the need to reach out, looking for a friendly hand not looking for help, advice or support. No, just that connection with someone and that is the feeling I have at this moment. A long time ago I decided to embark myself in some strange but interesting adventure and now I want to share with my friends. Many years ago, a great thinker wrote that we should not abandon this world without having accomplished three things which would make our lives transcendent: to have engendered a child, to have planted a tree, and to have written a book. Also R.W. Emerson affirmed that part of the definition of success is when we depart to the next life, to feel we are leaving to the world healthy children, a garden patch and to redeem social condition.

God gave me three wonderful daughters. If I could have had the chance to order them through a catalog, he could not have sent them more to the image of what I always envisioned, to make them my treasure and my pride. I already have a garden patch where I have planted not just one, but many trees that have given me fruits, sometimes bitter, but most of the time very sweet ones. Even though I feel I am still sort of a young man, I decided to write my memoirs thinking that by communicating my story, I can help to leave a redeeming social condition. I am not affirming this in arrogance—I don’t have the right to be arrogant, but I also know that I have lived the kind of life that others have described as very intense, different and interesting.

I decided to tell my story because I consider it special and different. It is a story full of big successes and big failures, but most of all it is a story of a man looking for what Victor Frank called “meaning in life.” My story began is the 60s when being just a child with a big baggage of emotional problems, I was sent to a different and unknown world. I was literally detached from my natural environment of a cattle ranch in my home state of Sonora—where I grew as a child and adolescent—to take me to the corridors of the Monterrey Institute of Technology to start my college education. When I arrived to that exclusive University, I did not know who the President of Mexico was, but I could rope a wild steer riding the craziest horse in the whole world. I did not know that the UN existed, but I could break a bronco like the best cowboy in the whole country. My upbringing was so wild, that my friends gave the nickname Chero (wild cowboy).

This is the story of a tall, good looking, and athletic boy who was born among one of the elite families of Mexico but use to melt down of shyness and insecurity, when the aggressive girls from Monterrey started flirting with him--and that was very often—until one evening I discovered the remedy for all those ills, a bottle of Bohemia, the classic beer in that town. After having downed the first shoot, like magic, all those fears and insecurities disappeared. That same evening I conscientiously decided and told myself, that was the way I wanted to feel for the rest of my life. That was the moment when the alcoholism which would strike me for the next 20 years was born. This is the story of a wild boy, who in those years in that elite college, would not distinguish himself because he was such a good student or for his good behavior, but rather for his scandals, affairs, drunkenness and fist fights which would made him famous in the whole city and I would say, through out the country.

That is my story. It is the story of very ugly encounters between a wild son and his very strict father educated in Europe who looked like someone coming out of the holy inquisition, a boy trapped between that severe father who was a real intellectual and a grandfather who was a wild cattle rancher and the largest landlord of the north of Mexico, who use to fight Apache Indians, and used to celebrate all of his escapades. Then he would not be there for him, because the old man had a stroke when the boy was only 14. This is my narration of how after one of those explosive encounters with my father, I just packed a bag and decided to leave and go to Mexico City looking for new horizons, and with a dying desire to show him that in spite of what he thought about me, I could succeed in my life and reach my vision and dreams. But, I also left carrying a bag full of fears, insecurities and complexes which I had no idea; Especially with something lethal, a very painful destructive feeling of guilt which would be my travel companion for almost the rest of my life, and its antidote; a bottle of vodka.

This is the story of a very fast and explosive life. I narrate in it how when I arrived to Mexico City with my baggage of illusions and fears, in just 7 short years I had became President of the largest regional bank of the northwest of the country, the youngest head of a bank in the history of that industry in Mexico, and the poster boy for the Bankers of Mexico. Then, I tell about my role and participation in the construction of the most exciting financial and business group of the 70s and 80s. How, when I was barely 30 years old I was already one of the most prestigious and powerful men in the country, but also how I felt that I was an impostor who did not deserve that kind of position. I also narrate the way in which that feeling drove me looking for a refuge in alcohol and in the arms of many women the same way I had always lived my life, with that kind of out of control compulsion.

Then my first fall of the Calvary I started when I was only 33 years old when I left the bank in the middle of a big controversy and a mortal crash with the man who had been one of my idols in my adult life, my cousin, Arcadio Valenzuela. How my separation of the bank was initiated by fatal potion of my dreams of freedom, dignity and independence—the most important values of my life—and a mixture of rebellion and opposition to the kind of business and situations that my cousin Arcadio was setting up. I thought these were not ethical, exposing not only himself, but the whole group and also the kind of crush that can be initiated when two men armed with bad tempers and the wrong kind of egos, meet each other in different fields of the battle. Also, the contamination of my scenes because of my dependency on alcohol and the sexual adventures, that I was having throughout Mexico, and the USA. Finally, the way I unconsciously sabotaged my own successes because of the feeling that I did not deserve them.

My exile to the USA came under a big depression and the most negative feelings that any human being could keep in the bottom of his heart after loosing what I thought was my whole life, the presidency of the financial group. Then, my conscious decision because I had lost so much, to give myself to that kind of life of carnal placers. I was going to give myself without restrictions or controls to that other field which I used to love so much: alcohol and women. How my reputation of wise kid followed me and in spite of my excesses, I could build one of the larger investment companies in the southwest of the USA. My fatal surrender step by step to alcoholism, my real hard addiction to sex, and finally to the poisonous mixtures of alcohol and prescription drugs like Valium, Halcyon during the evenings, and amphetamines in the morning, which cost me everything, my family, my fortune, my reputation, friends and almost cost me my life.

The way I surrender and my rendition caused by an event where I really lost that, my life; the painful fight against all of the demons after me in my rehabilitation program. To understand and accept that I was not a bad man trying to be good, but I was a sick man trying to get well. The thorny trip that I had to make to my interior because like the Philosopher said: “If you dare to make it, you better go well armed.” To finally find and understand my real problems and their root; the surrender of my life to that larger power than myself and allowed him to take control of it, the face to face battle with my evil enemy and my decision to give my life to my rehabilitation, my encounter with the new world of reality with no alcohol or drugs for the first time perhaps in my whole life, to see clearly and sober, the pain, the suffering, the destruction and devastation that I had caused.

Too finally bloody and exhausted, I understand the wise words of the philosopher: “Until your eyes run out of tears because you dropped them enough to wash the feet of the master; then you would be ready to be in his presence who will ask you: ¿Have you been able to kill your ego and ambition? ¿Have you understood that when evil and perverse prevail in the world, I have to show up in such bloody way? And the way you respond is going to print the destiny and future of your life. Took you a long time to wash and clean up your ego in order to get a real receptive mind and wake up your soul. It was all covered and rusty. But, from now on you will never go back to that kind of confusion because anybody who has real devotion and faith, takes control of his senses and will rise to that site of profound peace and tranquility.”

Only then was that I could understand the words of President Nixon when he was about to leave the White Hose after his impeachment in 1974. “Only when you go down to the deepest of the valley, you can appreciate the beauty of the summit and understand how height you were flying when you crushed.”

To start the reconstruction of my life but not with the kind of illusions that I had when I graduated from college, no now with a load of handicaps which would be with me for the rest of my existence. The bloody and solitary battle that I had to fight and still fight against that ego inside of me asking me for more of the same; To learn again to live with no alcohol and drugs in a new and unknown world; to start rebuilding my professional life in the field I had abandoned years ago; the world of the international finance which took me to the most exotic cities and countries all over the world, to meet incredible people and live the most interesting experiences of my life in places like New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Geneva, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and more, always looking for ways to open a path for Mexico to the international capital markets.

Then at some point almost the wrecked of my dreams and illusions when I had to face a very hostile, rancorous and hateful world which was not open to give me another opportunity so easily; to realize that what the bible says and they recite almost every day: “Because you see the straw in someone else’s eye, you don’t see the stick in yours;” was one of the most cruel realities that I had to face; to understand that for many people even my friends and relatives, I had a label for the rest of my life, listing all my sins committed under the influence of the demons who control my life for so many years; To understand and realize that everybody reads but they don’t practice that biblical precept; “ With the same stick you measure your neighbor, you will be measured;” Then my encounter with the new world of intellectuality and spirituality, and my decision to spend the rest of my life there, in the world of ideas.

To feel that life and fortune were again smiling on me and I was maybe for the first time in many years, happy again and feeling that I was back in my turf; How I became a kind of the Mexican Mike Milken and after the devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1994, was when we could do more good and help many companies all over Latin America through sophisticated financial formulas to restructure debts using new instruments like swaps and all kind of derivatives, which allows me to do a lot of business, rebuild a much largest fortune and fix my financial problems in just a few years; how that big success gave back my self esteem and a sense of purpose that I had lost in the middle of my inferno and years of craziness. Also, with all of those scars in my back, how I took that new success with the right kind of humility and thank God for it, and now I do feel that I deserve every inch of it. How the meaning of my success was so different from the big one in Mexico.

Finally at my 50 birthday arrived to that lifelong dream of having the freedom to think and feel; I don’t have to. I don’t have to be there, I don’t have to do this, and I don’t have to go there or stay here. The freedom and liberty to do, at some extend, whatever I please at any place in the world in order to live the kind of life of every new day, a new adventure a new challenge, and a new place or thing to conquer, and a step closer to find that special woman who I know, will go with me to the adventure of the second part of my life .

My encounter with the economic and political liberalism (in its original concept) which in spite of my social, educational, intellectual background coming from one of the elite and high class families from Mexico in our still feudal system, I really did not know it; How my restless and rebel spirit was yelling to me that what I had seen in Mexico, was not the way to justice and prosperity for the Mexicans; that what I had seen was not the real path for the Mexico of our children and future generations, that should be something else and I had to find it. How looking in an old bookstore I found covered with dust the great book of Mises; Human Action, and when I opened it, I discovered a new world of enlightenment, excitement and wisdom for which now I fight but in a different battlefield, the battlefield of ideas and ideals. Not using my fists like in my college years, but now armed with much more powerful weapons: the weapons of truth, logic and reason. My reencounter with my daughters; Peace in my heart.

This is also an economic history and its interpretation of the era of Mexico I have lived in. Beginning with the lies of the Stabilizer Development during the 50s and 60s, cruising through the delivery of the country to socialism, populisms by Echeverria and Lopez Portillo and the devastation those two men caused; the timid intents of a good man; Miguel de la Madrid to start some changes but with very bad results which forced the take over of the country by a new wave of young politicians who would start the modern Mexican revolution. How I came to realize the way our education system had been preparing the right kind of people which would permit the perpetuation of the system which has been sucking the blood or the people for centuries. How I discovered in shock the roll the church has been playing in the repression of our people.

My predictions for the openness of the country and the fall of the PRI which shocked my friend Bob Malone when I made them in 1983; The aggressive liberal take over by Salinas de Gortari and his group of new politicians all educated in the USA, the privatization of our economy but Mexican style, the sabotage of his reforms using the assassination of my friend Colosio as symbol of their relentless and unwillingly to give up the power. The evil way the hardliners set up the country and the new President for the mortal devaluation of December 1994 which almost took Mexico to hell; My first encounter with Vicente Fox years ago; My prediction of his victory to get the presidency in the year 2000; and more importantly; the Mexico that I visualize for our children and futures generations and how we can build it.

The continuation of my path lead by the motto which always directed my journey; “Walker there is not a path, will make it while we walk.” This is not a confession, or a mea culpa, it is not a message, an act of redemption and especially it is not a justification or explanation for what is already done; I can’t go back to the past to fix anything, the past should stay in the basket of the ashes; let the death bury the death; the air will blow away and very far the dry leaves. This is only the narration of my life and I repeat it has been a life lived in the fast lane; a life lived in advance and with great intensity. I have no editor, editorial or publicist; I just have a story, a story which should teach us that suffering has a purpose and that is the purification, to burn everything which is not useful and impure. That suffering is the best way to get strong and a compassionate soul. This is just a story, but it is my story.



Ricardo Valenzuela


“Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take the rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt