Abstract
The six-year presidential term (sexenio) of Carlos Salinas de Gortari is considered a watershed, as it constituted the first fully neoliberal Mexican regime. Was it also a watershed in the history of journalism? On the one hand, the sexenio witnessed various ills that already characterized relations between the press and the state. It began with the hostile state takeover of a left-wing daily, Unomásuno; high-profile journalists resigned under governmental duress; and the media platform of greatest impact, Televisa’s nightly newscast 24 horas, played as propagandistic a role as ever. On the other hand, there were many advances. An end to free trips for those media accompanying Salinas on international tours; an end to the protected newsprint monopoly of PIPSA, which had long been used as a tool of control; and an unprecedented boom in the advertising market, which tempered the dependency of many newspapers upon state subsidies. By means of a holistic analysis (political, economic, sociological), this chapter argues that the opening experienced under Salinas was broader and longer-lasting than those seen in previous sexenios, despite the persistence of structural problems, such as an excess of daily newspapers (sustained as political tools), and the apparent ambivalence of Salinas himself.
This chapter is based in part on a forthcoming book about the history of the Mexican press since 1988, for the University of North Carolina Press. My thanks for comments on early drafts to Juan Larrosa-Fuentes and Laura Edith Bonilla de León and to the anonymous peer reviewers of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Another work that sustains (and contextualizes) the media opening under Salinas and his successor Ernesto Zedillo is Preston and Dillon (2004, Chap. 14).
- 3.
A notable essay that similarly downplays the media opening under Salinas is Sánchez Ruiz (2005, pp. 429–34, 440–47).
- 4.
- 5.
Images of Salinas as Dracula or architect of the nation’s malaise persist to this day in the cartoons of La Jornada and the press conferences of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador; for example, Rocha, ‘Una boca colmilluda’, 13 May 2019, p. 5; ‘Salinas debe ser enjuiciado: AMLO’, Forbes.com.mx, 21 Feb. 2020 (quoting López Obrador: ‘Salinas is the father of modern inequality’).
- 6.
A longer-lasting exception is magazine Siempre!, founded in 1953, as president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines sought to distinguish his style from that of corrupt predecessor Alemán, and still critical during the events of 1968 (Brewster, 2002).
- 7.
Notes: (i) The great Guadalajara dailies, El Informador and El Occidental, possibly did not need government advertising to survive, but they readily accepted it and offered acquiescent coverage (Larrosa-Fuentes, 2018, pp. 201f, 232f); (ii) Other dailies like El Noroeste of Sinaloa and El Imparcial of Hermosillo, though possibly not dependent on government ads, probably survived due to subsidies from the business elites that owned them; (iii) El Porvenir of Monterrey was successful until the 1980s, but after a loss of readers it became vulnerable to a federal ad boycott in 1990–1991; see below.
- 8.
Notes: (i) The finances of El Financiero were more precarious, especially after Reforma took much of its talent and its market as of 1993. Bankrupt and heavily indebted, it would be sold in 2012; (ii) The tabloids believed to be self-sufficient were La Prensa, Ovaciones, and (probably) the sports daily Esto (Vanden Heuvel & Dennis, 1995, p. 31; cf. Trejo Delarbre, 1990).
- 9.
See, for example: ‘Llamó al esfuerzo conjunto para superar los problemas’, La Jornada, 2 Sept. 1985, p. 1; ‘Reformar el Estado para garantizar la justicia: CSG’, La Jornada, 2 Nov. 1989, p. 1.
- 10.
Lawson notes four additional reforms that Salinas implemented between 1991 and 1993 to ‘modernise’ press-state relations: (i) setting a minimum wage for journalists; (ii) cutting traditional subsidies like tax deferrals and free utilities (electricity and water); (iii) applying value-added tax to newsprint; (iv) obliging media to pay their Social Security (IMSS) contributions in cash, rather than via advertising exchanges (2002, p. 76). Leticia Singer adds another: as of January 1993, federal press offices were forbidden by the Treasury (Hacienda) from spending on promoting the image of officials (1993, p. 26).
- 11.
- 12.
Oddly, Lawson considers the impact of the economic programme on freedom of the press as ‘unintended [sic] positive consequences’, a judgement that ignores the famously close attention that Salinas paid to media matters, as I note below.
- 13.
The first Mexico City paper to reach gender parity, as early as the 1970s, was the minor left-wing daily El Día. Viétnika Batrés estimates that when she left La Jornada in 1987 the newsroom was close to 40% female. Daniel Moreno estimates that when he joined Reforma in 1993, newsroom was fully 40% female, higher than at his previous employers, Unomásuno and El Financiero (both 20%), or than at El Economista (30%) (Sen Santos, 2013; interviews with Batrés, 23 Oct. 2020, Moreno, 24 May 2019).
- 14.
Notes: (i) Weirdly, Sánchez Ruiz includes an interesting table showing changes in private ad spend per type of media, between 1990 and 2002, without any comment; (ii) As Hughes focuses on daily papers, she ignores the frequency with which Proceso investigated and exposed Mexico’s magnates.
- 15.
I refer here to the above-cited but under-used table in Sánchez Ruiz, (2005), p. 433.
- 16.
The author belonged to this community of foreign journalists from 1991 to 2000. My thanks to former correspondents Dudley Althaus and Michael Tangeman for their help in compiling these lists.
- 17.
For example, stories written by U.S. reporters for The News about the possibly criminal dealings of Manuel Bartlett, PRI candidate for governor of Puebla, prompted further reports on the same theme in Proceso; see Proceso 840, 6 Dec. 1992.
- 18.
Reforma is said to have broken even in 13 months, with a circulation of 50,000 or so, which climbed to around 100,000 during 1995; by 1997, it ranked second in advertising lineage to El Universal and third in non-tabloid readership rankings (Hughes, 2006, p. 118; Garza interview, 15 Oct. 2019).
- 19.
Examples of such methods include federal ad boycotts against La Jornada in 1991 and 1994, fiscal audits imposed upon La Jornada in 1992, threats from the Ministry of Government (Gobernación) against the editors of Este País in January 1993, and pressure upon the Kystal Hotels chain not to advertise in Proceso in early 1994 (Lawson, 2002, p. 32; Seid, 1993; Basáñez & Ortiz Pinchetti, 2020; Proceso, 2006, p. 240).
- 20.
The usual version of this story draws on an interview Becerra gave six months after starting his exile in Madrid; Becerra’s successor, Luis Gutiérrez, claims Becerra was drunk at the time he gave it (Marín, 1989; Serna, 2015, p. 290). Becerra later admitted that he had long desired to retire to Spain and that ‘No-one literally obliged me [to leave]’ (Martínez, 2001, pp. 99, 137).
- 21.
Notes: (i) By contrast, the National Centre for Social Communication (Cencos), an NGO dedicated to human rights, documented 35 ‘violent deaths’ of journalists under Salinas, compared with ‘more than 20’ under De la Madrid (Conger, 1997, p. 99); (ii) Political killings in the provinces, which bridged the De la Madrid and Salinas sexenios, have been attributed in part to repression orchestrated by Salinas of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), founded in 1989 ( see, e.g., Monsiváis, 2003, p. 260).
- 22.
The previous sexenio, that of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) is recalled as one of an unusual degree of media freedoms (Monsiváis, 2003, pp. 128–38).
- 23.
The decline in media worker murders under Zedillo may be explicable in part due to the decline in the homicide rate in general; however, the latter decline continued under Fox, whose sexenio witnessed a great rebound in violence against the press, with 22 killings (Moncada, 2013, Chap. VII).
- 24.
I develop this argument in my forthcoming book.
- 25.
On the persistence of embute, chayote, and advertising commissions in the provinces, see Espino (2016).
- 26.
According to various commentators, Zedillo spectacularly violated freedom of the press when he ordered or greenlit the detention of Juan Francisco Ealy, owner and Publisher of El Universal, in 1996 (e.g., Orme, 1997, pp. 1–3; Hughes, 2006, pp. 143f). As I argue in my forthcoming book, Ealy’s arrest likely had more to do with financial issues and less with an assault upon freedom of speech.
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Paxman, A. (2024). The Salinas Years, 1988–1994: Watershed in the Opening of Mexico’s Print Media. In: Echeverria, M., Gonzalez, R.A. (eds) Media and Politics in Post-Authoritarian Mexico. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36441-9_4
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