Carlos Salinas de Gortari on democracy. After this, irony is dead.

This may not be news, but I've certainly not seen Carlos Salinas writing a column for El Universal before. Under the title, "The Eruption of the Citizen Alternative," Salinas - a crook, a repressor, an ultra-corrupt megalomaniac - opines, in his usual long-winded prose (his last book clocks in at almost 1000 pages) on seemingly everything under the sun, from the North Africa uprisings to Aristotelian republicanism.

Yet the height of cynicism is truly reached when he warns against "speculative capital", and lauds "participatory citizenship."

This is the man whose economic policies - micromanaged by him, top down, including the exclusion of congress from virtually any say during the NAFTA negotiations -  led to an armed rebellion by the EZLN, and whose no-holds-barred opening up of Mexico to speculative capital on terms more liberal than even Pinochet's Chile would lead to an economic disaster just weeks after leaving office.
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And now Salinas wants to lecture Mexicans on the virtues of republicanism?
After this, irony is truly dead.