When truth becomes irrelevant: Joaquín Rodríguez
We no longer lie to hide a mistake: truth simply stopped mattering. From mistaken identity in Nuevo León to deepfakes targeting the president, the lie that best fits our prejudice wins
There was a time when truth was the final destination of every political debate. We could argue over the paths to reach it, but we shared a common north star: what is, is, and what isn’t, simply isn’t. Today, that north star seems to have been dismantled. We no longer live in an age where people lie to cover up a mistake; we are in an era where truth, quite simply, has stopped mattering. It has become irrelevant.
The post-truth ecosystem has no fixed ideology and recognizes no party colors; it is a toxic dynamic where the end justifies the means and the rush to destroy the adversary buries the most elementary rigor.
A pragmatic example of this phenomenon took place in Nuevo León with the accusations against Jorge Rodríguez Cantú, brother of Mariana Rodríguez. The allegations named him as a partner in medical companies holding contracts worth millions. Yet the “great discovery” crumbled against official records: it was a crude case of mistaken identity between two men sharing a name. While the influencer’s brother is a young professional barely past 30, the actual owner listed on the contracts is a physician born in the 1950s. Proving that the man truly involved is nearly 70 did not stop the narrative; in propaganda, immediate defamation matters more than biological and legal truth.
But this game runs both ways. The opposition (PAN, PRI, PRD) routinely resorts to the same contempt for facts in its drive to erode the government. A clear example has been the constant circulation of manipulated videos and AI-generated audio (deepfakes) altering the words of key figures such as President Claudia Sheinbaum. Opposition accounts and politicians have spread digitally edited clips in which ruling-party leaders supposedly “confess” they will confiscate bank accounts or insult their own voters. Even though fact-checking outlets immediately prove they are fabrications, the opposition prefers to keep the digital panic alive. The impact of a fake video shared thousands of times on WhatsApp outweighs any technical debunking.
“When everything is a matter of narrative, the cold, nuanced fact always loses to fiction perfectly packaged for outrage.”
The real danger of truth becoming secondary does not stay confined to the political elite; it poisons public perception in moments of crisis. On February 22, after a federal operation in Jalisco unleashed narco-blockades and arson across the Guadalajara metropolitan area, social media flooded with a widespread and cruel rumor: “The municipal police abandoned us; they never took to the streets.” The narrative of abandonment spread with force, entirely ignoring the reality on the ground. Under the Code Red protocol, local and state officers did go out to patrol and confront the situation. The cost of that response tragically disproves the myth of inaction: in the line of duty, direct clashes claimed lives, including the death of an officer of the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office. The citizen rumor, fed by fear, ended up erasing the sacrifice of those who risked—and lost—their lives on the asphalt.
In the end, the diagnosis is the same across the entire social and political spectrum. Whether through accusations built on mistaken identity, the spread of deepfakes to sow terror, or the embrace of conspiracy theories amid chaos, the underlying dynamic is identical: people prefer to believe the lie that best fits their own prejudices.
To walk through a country where propaganda and rumor outweigh facts is to navigate without a compass in the fog. The true danger of our era is not a lack of information, but that we have decided truth is a dispensable detail. Because sooner or later, physical reality—the kind that answers to no narratives, no Twitter trends, no campaign speeches—collects its bill in the most painful way possible.