mordida runs deep and wide in mexico...
Actually Slim will need to break some laws under close public scrutiny in order to get these congressional reps to vote like he would want. There's no incumbency in Mexico's Congress and they're all about to retire, too. And at a time when Televisa (which has most of the t.v. market) is about to start offering its own phone service (through its 50% owned subsidiary Cablevision), Slim can't afford to give the media anything suggesting impropriety because they would HARP on it. And then there's cyberspace and the WTO and the foreign investment community.
Mexico has 3 (not 2) viable political parties and they point out corruption much more often than our complacent 2 party system does up here. And there are apparently far more major newspapers servicing Mexico per capita than the USA has. And they're vigorous in some ways. Even the corrupt ones in Mexico's congressional and media circles want to scare Slim enough to get him to really do enough favors for them. At some point Slim may decide the telco sector isn't nearly as lucrative as it once was, and he may decide to let competition emerge to punish the labor union that has at times frustrated him.