The report had all the makings of a bombshell. Between 2019 and 2020, the son of the president of Mexico, José Ramón López Beltrán, and his wife, Carolyn Adams, rented a swanky house in Houston owned by the high-ranking executive of a firm that had received contracts from the state oil company, PEMEX. The report, a joint investigation by the organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) and the US-based Mexican website Latinus, set off a national feeding frenzy.

Denunciations of collusion and kickbacks filled the airwaves, with fevered speculation that José Ramón had lived in the house for free as payback for favors received by the company Baker Hughes. Aerial views of the property and its pool filled television screens, and a model of the house was even set up on the floor of Congress. The opposition, it seemed, had finally found a scandal that would stick.

Then it all began to fall apart. The owner of the house, Keith Schilling, declared that he had rented the house through an agency and did not know the couple personally. The newspaper La Jornada dug up the rental contract with the agency, proving this to be the case. For its part, Baker Hughes clarified that Schilling had been the head of the Canadian division at the time, and had never handled Mexican affairs. And the director of PEMEX pointed out that Baker Hughes, in addition to its sixty-year history as a contractor, was actually more favored by the two previous administrations than by the current one. The damning exposé had sputtered out into little more than unsubstantiated innuendo.