Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico

In 2017, more Mexican journalists were killed than in any country other than Iraq and the active war zone of Syria. Reporters without Borders's 2018 rankings for press freedom placed Mexico 147th out of 180 countries—the lowest ranking of any country in Latin America other than Cuba. As the introduction to Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico argues, “Journalism is more dangerous, and consequently more constrained, now than at any other point in modern Mexican history” (p. 2).This is a disturbing conclusion to reach, given the rather triumphant narratives that emerged about Mexican journalism in the years of more democratic optimism after the end of the long period of Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominance. The standard narrative is that under the PRI, both journalism and civil society more generally experienced severe constraints. Journalists were bought off and intimidated, and media sources were compromised by reliance on government advertising and a newsprint monopoly. But individuals pushed back—like Julio Scherer García, for example, who was expunged from Excélsior by the Luis Echeverría administration in 1976 but who went on to found the newsmagazine Proceso—and they were gradually able to open space for critical publications as part of the broader democratization of Mexican society and institutions in the 1980s and 1990s.This valuable collection wants to challenge this narrative without denying its partial truth. As is perhaps inevitable in a volume of 14 chapters by separate authors, there are a range of views represented, and the arguments sometimes seem like puzzle pieces assembled from slightly different puzzles. The chapters vary considerably in approach and research depth. Some are written by historians, some by political scientists, and others by journalists. But the volume does something important in trying to connect the historical discussion of the era of PRI dominance to the uncertain and troubling present.The chapters are not of one voice in their treatment of propaganda. Rafael Barajas has a somewhat cartoonish view of how psychological warfare functions—though given that the author is in fact a cartoonist, this may be forgiven. Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía's chapter is an exploration of a remarkable 41-page secret police document, apparently from 1965, that talks in general terms about the government's media strategy. Through manipulation of the media, they wrote, “a democracy such as Mexico's can achieve levels of popular control equivalent of those that a dictatorship . . . might only achieve through violence and terror” (p. 186). Rodríguez Munguía writes that “the PRI elevated the crude and even grotesque practices of military dictatorships to an art form” (p. 197).But other chapters emphasize complexities, closer to the dictablanda vision of the PRI than the “perfect dictatorship.” Andrew Paxman discusses the Puebla newspaper La Opinión, which stood up to Governor Maximino Ávila Camacho in a 1938 carnival queen contest featuring Ávila Camacho's daughter Alicia. The newspaper's reporting on the results marked the last time it challenged the governor. Benjamin Smith's essay looks at the nine-month run of Presente, a satirical magazine that burst on the scene in 1949 amid discontent with the Miguel Alemán administration before being met with payoffs and a physical assault on the press. Política, the left-wing staple of the 1960s analyzed by Renata Keller, engaged in direct criticism of the president and survived for more than seven years (probably with the help of foreign subsidies). But the publication faced paper shortages, and its editor was beaten more than once by state agents.Several of the chapters, including those of Javier Garza Ramos, Vanessa Freije, and Paul Gillingham, at least in part address the regional press, often left out of the typical Mexico City–centric story. (Michael Lettieri creatively looks at bus industry magazines.) Here too the results are contradictory. Regional papers seem to have enjoyed more latitude to adopt critical coverage of national political issues. But they still faced manipulation from governors or other interests. What to make of something like Monterrey's El Norte, for example? As Garza Ramos writes, it engaged in “watchdog journalism” in the 1980s while still worrying about being denied newsprint. Yet as the introduction points out, Monterrey business groups also had a censor embedded at El Norte into the 1960s, to stop stories about strikes and workers' rights. As Everard Meade argues in his contribution, “Fetishizing public intellectuals' or journalists' independence from the formal apparatus of the state gives an implicit pass to public intellectuals backed by private economic interests” (p. 307). Pablo Piccato agrees: to understand the media, you have to think about business and politics, not only the state. And that includes a discussion of the business and politics of narcos in recent years, covered in El Blog del Narco, whose rise and fall are analyzed by Paul Eiss.If the collection leaves a somewhat muddled overall picture, perhaps that is appropriate. Regimes of censorship and manipulation are invariably complicated, and the production of information is a difficult affair. Challenges were sometimes cleverly snuck past permeable regimes of control. Considered together, the collection broadens our understanding of the complex nature of the Mexican print media and does important work in expanding the story beyond Mexico City and the typical subset of publications that have attracted the most attention. It contains much material that will be of use to historians of Mexico's twentieth century, especially as it works to embed analysis of journalism in a discussion of broader and ever-shifting networks of power

Art · Authoritarianism · Censorship · Citizen journalism · Democracy · Democratization · Economic history · Freedom of the press · Garcia · Humanities · Journalism · Literature · Media studies · Monopoly · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Political Dynamics in Latin America

• La biografía empresarial en México

  Open Access•Andrew Paxman•Secuencia•2017

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