Carlos Manzo was blowing out twenty-one candles when, in a bar in Uruapan, five human heads were placed. It was 2006.
El del Sombrero was twenty-five years old when, in Apatzingán, a truck was found with six decapitated men.
The Uruguayan counted twenty-nine when, in Zacán, four heads were found in front of a church in plastic bags.
In Michoacán, a territory where survival requires becoming invisible, Carlos Manzo has chosen to be seen. He wore a hat and a backpack with an embroidered rooster as his emblem: minimal insignia of provocative identification.
A Sahuayan hat gave identity to the man and surname to the movement: Hat Movement.
Before the Hat there was the Cap
Great-grandson of farmers and grandson of domestic workers, the one with the hat soon experienced loneliness. He was a child when his brother died on the street and before he turned thirty he lost his father. Juan Manzo Ceja, art promoter and opponent of the Michoacan ’92 fraud, died Nov. 2. A day later Carlos would die.
After working in his father’s gallery, he studied political science at ITESO, participated in three administrative societies that would later be accused of thriving irregularly during Peñismo, and joined the Revolutionary Youth Front of the dying tricolor.
What changed his course appears to have been a brief stint as an IMSS auditor in Michoacán. Everything indicates that it was that trip that brought him closer to the first community supports: public pharmacies, free medicines, health commissions.
Carlos Manzo’s initial efforts attempted to heal a wounded territory.
I get tired, Beef (2018)
From then on, Carlos’ walk was exhausting. It is enough to retrace the memory of his activism to feel the fatigue of his days and his desire to build a movement that demonstrated – as the saying goes – that the famous Roman city was not built in a single day.
His photo album is a discreet chronicle of his community enterprise: the free tow trucks, the medicines distributed, the solidarity campaigns, the health services, the backpacks, the food, the toys. It is not difficult to understand the affection that people showed him.
Having reached the age of Christ, Manzo began his public journey. In the year of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s arrival as president, Manzo sought to become the first independent candidate for deputy in the history of Uruapan. He collected signatures, printed his hat emblem on the ballot paper, and was defeated.
The winner was Ignacio Campos. It’s worth remembering that name, because it will reappear.
In the years between that defeat and subsequent elections, Carlos Manzo devoted himself to social management: free intercession for vulnerable communities. The Hat One worked tirelessly, without a position, without a budget and without an office. His territory was the street, and his headquarters, the Table: a plastic table located in the center of a park.
Two accounts can be found of these well-intentioned actions.
The Cherry Hat (2021)
When the long-awaited 2021 arrived, Carlos presented himself as a candidate for federal deputy for Morena. In those distant days, ideological affinities were still the balance of the party.
For this reason, despite Silvano Aureoles – now a fugitive – trying to derail his campaign through a discrediting strategy that defined him as crazy, drug dealer, marijuana user, grasshopper and homosexual, Carlos won: El del Sombrero arrived in San Lázaro.
During his administration he was a deputy obsessed with the territory: with the money from his purse he bought trucks and dedicated himself to patrolling his community.
For this reason, only one legislative initiative is known: toughening the penalties for those who detonate a weapon pointed in the air without justification. A commitment that goes back a long time, to his days as an outdoor manager, when he promoted campaigns to discourage holiday shootings and prevent a stray bullet from taking a life.
—Because bullets don’t go to heaven, people do.
Politics Without a Party: An Anomaly (2024)
The next episode was completely anomalous.
Just over two years after protesting as a deputy, Manzo registered with the Michoacán Electoral Institute as an independent candidate for mayor of Uruapan under the protection of his own organization: La Sombreriza Michoacana.
Months later, and after Morena’s threat to expel him for his attempt to advance independently, he applied for a deputy’s license. That warning lacked rigor: Manzo had never sworn allegiance to the ranks of workerism.
Since then, the Hat Movement distanced itself from power structures and began to support independent candidates. Better alone than in bad company.
So as not to delay the narrative too much, I’ll move on: in the June 2024 elections, lacking party strength and structure, Manzo won with 66% of the vote. The one with the Hat had defeated the dominant party machine. Furthermore, he had defeated the incumbent mayor seeking re-election, Ignacio Campos. I warned that the name would return.
With Morena having won thirty-one of the thirty-two states and with the Morena-PT-PVEM coalition having secured a comfortable majority in the local Michoacán Congress, the Cappello Movement appeared as a clear anomaly.
—But what do you think you’re doing? Can’t you see that we are in the midst of the National Regeneration Movement?
Manzo was one of 11 independent candidates who won the municipal presidency across the country in that election. And his Movement, like an alternating current that overflows the intended channel, drags with it three other independents towards victory on different positions.
Relying on the discourse on the insecurity that afflicted the municipality and the wear and tear of the previous administration – that of the much cited Ignacio Campos, whose wife denounced Manzo for gender political violence aimed at preventing him from participating in the race –, Carlos arrived at the last position that would see him govern.
Thus, in September last year, after Morena withdrew from a challenge with which he wanted to repeat the municipal elections, Manzo protested as the first independent mayor of Uruapan, Michoacán.
An opening that would begin the closing: that same day he received two death threats, although not the first.
Governor or the Mexican Bukele
Manzo’s relationship with Morena was far from smooth. It was a forced coexistence.
With Ramírez Bedolla – the same governor who years later would be expelled from his funeral wake for good popular memory – the agreement was never easy. What was initially announced as institutional coordination soon became filled with disagreements. Manzo even accused him of being corrupt and extortionist and held him responsible for anything that could happen to him.
His difference with Claudia Sheinbaum was also open. While the president insisted on the rule of law and minimum guarantees for the accused, Manzo declared that criminals must be brought down without a second thought.
Carlos Manzo’s days of peaceful resistance were over.
With everything – or precisely for this reason – Carlos Manzo was a natural candidate for the office of governor of his state in 2027. His break with the Morenist hegemony, the popular roots of the Sombrero Movement and the symbolic strength he had accumulated over years of territorial presence, projected him towards the great race.
The Movement will continue…
The rest is known history. During the eighteenth Candle Festival, accompanied by his wife and two of his three children, the hat fell. A boy nicknamed El Cuate – linked to organized crime – defeated the man who, in his days of peaceful resistance, repeated that young people should be given books and have their goat’s horns removed.
He buried the man with the Hat, the one who said he feared only one thing: dying in front of his grandmother.
The man with the Hat will be succeeded by his wife.
The Movement will continue…
