All of Mexico mourns him in Coco: Ernesto de la Cruz, the most beloved singer in its history, dead on stage beneath a bell and raised onto the altars of memory. His face is in the plazas, his songs in every guitar, his motto —"seize your moment"— on the lips of anyone who dreams of fame. But that whole legend rests on a crime: Ernesto poisoned his partner and true songwriter, Héctor, stole the songs that would make him immortal, and sustained the lie for an entire lifetime. For rational choice theory, Ernesto is not an incomprehensible monster: he is something far more unsettling, a man who decided. Who laid out what he could gain and what he risked, and acted when it paid off.
// The theoryCrime as a decision, not a disease
Rational choice is the oldest and most influential idea in criminology. Its roots lie in the Enlightenment —Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham saw human beings as creatures who seek pleasure and avoid pain— and it is reborn in 1968 when the economist Gary Becker treats crime like any other activity with costs and returns. Derek Cornish and Ronald Clarke, in The Reasoning Criminal (1986), refined it: there is no "the" criminal decision in the abstract, but concrete choices for each offense, each with its own logic of opportunity, effort, and risk. The equation is brutally simple: when the reward outweighs the sum of effort and risk, crime becomes an attractive option. The criminal here is neither a sick man nor a biological anomaly: he is a decision-maker, someone as rational —and as recognizable— as any of us before an opportunity.
Ernesto fits that mold with chilling precision. Héctor, his friend and companion on the road, wanted to go back home to his family and take his songs with him. For Ernesto, that return was the difference between anonymity and immortality: without Héctor's compositions there was no idol, no fame, no legend. The reward was immense —adoration, wealth, an eternal name—. The effort, minimal: a toast, a poison, a body that history would record as a wretch who "choked on a chorizo." And the risk, seemingly nil: no one suspected, no one would investigate the death of a poor, wandering musician. The scales left no room for doubt. Ernesto did the math and acted.
Usurpation as a sustained strategy
The homicide was only the first decision; Ernesto's criminal genius lies in what came afterward. Rational choice does not describe a single instant, but a sequence of decisions renewed over time. Every song Ernesto signed as his own, every interview in which he claimed another man's work, every decade in which he kept Héctor's name hidden was a new rational choice: a repeated calculation in which the reward —remaining the idol— still outweighed the risk of the truth. Creative identity theft is not a crime committed once, but one that must be sustained. And Ernesto sustained it with the coldness of someone keeping a ledger: as long as no one could prove where the songs came from, the fraud kept paying. That is why his case illustrates Cornish and Clarke so well: the rational offender is not the one who decides once, but the one who keeps choosing crime every morning because the books still balance.
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// The subjectReputation as part of the calculation
There is a second crime in Ernesto, subtler but just as calculated: the management of his legend. Keeping a murder hidden is as rational as committing it, and perhaps harder. Ernesto understood this: his motto, "seize your moment," was not just a phrase of encouragement, but the moral alibi of an entire life of appropriation. He turned his image into a brand —film, music, monuments— precisely because a reputation so colossal becomes armor. Who would believe that the man in every bronze statue was a thief and a murderer? The greater the legend, the lower the perceived risk that anyone would question it. In the theory's terms, Ernesto deliberately invested in reducing his own risk: every public gesture, every memorable line, every act of charity lowered the probability of being found out. Fame was not only the reward of the crime; it was also its best hiding place. And when, already in the Land of the Dead, the young Miguel threatens to expose the truth, Ernesto calculates again with the same cold blood as ever: he tries to kill him too. The logic has not changed in decades —eliminating the threat still pays off—.
Ernesto de la Cruz
// The crackWhat the calculation does not explain
Rational choice illuminates Ernesto's case as few theories could, but it also runs up against its limits. The first was formulated by Herbert Simon with bounded rationality: no one decides with complete information or with fully cold blood. The theory explains instrumental crime wonderfully —fraud, murder for gain, planned usurpation— but falls short before the outburst. And in Ernesto there is an outburst: the attempt to kill Miguel is as much panic as calculation, and the ferocity with which he defends his lie betrays something no equation captures. There the second crack appears, the deepest one: rational choice underestimates the ego. Ernesto did not kill only for wealth; he killed to be adored, out of a vanity so boundless that no cost-benefit sheet fully captures it. Narcissism —that need to be the greatest at any price— is an engine the theory, centered on material utility, tends to leave out. Ernesto's "benefit" was not just money: it was the gaze of the world, and that is not weighed on a clean set of scales.
And here it must be said plainly: to explain is not to excuse. Understanding Ernesto's logic —grasping that there was a calculation behind the poison— does not turn him into an innocent cog in an equation. On the contrary: rational choice insists that there was a decision, and where there is a decision there is responsibility. Ernesto was not dragged along by blind forces; he chose the poison, he chose the lie, he chose, decades later, to try to kill again. Reconstructing his calculation does not share the blame with the victim: it concentrates it on the culprit. The memory that matters in Coco is not that of the bronze idol, but that of Héctor —the erased songwriter, the father who only wanted to go home, the name an entire family nearly forgot—. The film is, in the end, a restitution: giving the victim back the name the criminal stole from him.
Changing the equation before the crime
If crime is a decision, one can influence it. It is the theory's most applicable lesson: Clarke's situational prevention consists of changing the setting so the books stop balancing —raise the effort, raise the risk, lower the reward—. What would have disarmed Ernesto? Not a harsher sentence, but a greater risk of being found out: authorship records, witnesses, a musical community that documented who wrote what. The criminological evidence is stubborn on this (the reviews by Daniel Nagin): the certainty of being caught deters more than the severity of the punishment. Ernesto's crime prospered for decades because the perceived risk was almost nil; the day the truth becomes probable, his whole empire crumbles in an afternoon. The lesson is not to wait for the villain who is already a legend, but to design a world where stealing another person's work —and life— never pays off.
Three key takeaways
- Ernesto de la Cruz embodies rational choice (Cornish and Clarke, on Beccaria and Becker): crime as instrumental calculation. He poisoned Héctor and stole his songs because the reward —fame, wealth, immortality— far outweighed the effort and the risk.
- The fraud was not an instant, but a strategy sustained for decades. Keeping the crime hidden and shielding himself behind a colossal reputation was as rational as committing it: managing the legend was part of the calculation.
- To explain is not to excuse. The theory captures crime for gain well, but underestimates the ego and narcissism that also drove Ernesto, and does not capture the outburst. Where there is a decision there is responsibility; the memory belongs to Héctor, the erased victim.
Sources · further reading
- Cornish, D. B. & Clarke, R. V. (1986). The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending. Springer-Verlag.
- Becker, G. S. (1968). «Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach». Journal of Political Economy, 76(2).
- Beccaria, C. (1764). De los delitos y las penas.
- Nagin, D. S. (2013). «Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century». Crime and Justice, 42.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Ernesto de la Cruz?
Ernesto de la Cruz es un villano de Coco, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He poisoned his best friend, stole a lifetime of songs, and on that corpse built the most revered career in Mexico.
¿Por qué Ernesto de la Cruz se convierte en villano?
Ernesto de la Cruz, from Coco, and rational choice theory: how crime can be a cold decision —killing your partner, stealing his songs— when the reward seems worth more than the risk.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Ernesto de la Cruz?
El caso de Ernesto de la Cruz se analiza desde la Elección racional. Rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke, in the wake of Beccaria and Becker) understands crime as a decision: a calculation of reward, effort, and risk. Ernesto de la Cruz, from Coco, is its almost perfect illustration. He murdered his partner and songwriter Héctor, appropriated his work, and sustained the fraud throughout a lifetime turned into legend. The homicide and the identity theft were not impulse but instrumental strategy: he weighed fame and wealth against the risk of being found out, and acted when the scales tipped in his favor. His case shows the theory's power for calculated crime and its limits: it does not capture well the ego and vanity that also drove him.
