MEXICO CITY (dpa) – A change of government is bringing about a mini-revolution in Mexico’s press.
A workers’ council recently deposed the chief executive of Excelsior, a daily with a long tradition of supporting the PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) that is seeing its uninterrupted rule coming to an end following the presidential elections in July.
Regino Diaz Redondo slipped out through the back door to his luxury limousine after a turbulent meeting removed him from office in a near-unanimous vote.
Diaz Redondo had wanted to sell 49 per cent of the newspaper, which is organized as a cooperative, to a private investor in the hope of rescuing the Excelsior, which is in dire financial straits.
Mexico is itself in the throes of a revolution. Vincente Fox of the conservative PAN (Party of National Action) won the presidential election on July 2, becoming the first opposition politician to do so in the country’s history, and took office December 1.
That brought more than 70 years of rule by the PRI to an end, and the impact on Excelsior is plain, for under Redondo it was an obedient mouthpiece of the PRI government.
Founded in 1917 as the Mexican Revolution was drawing to a close, Excelsior was long the flagship of Mexican journalism, but when it dared in 1976 to criticise the government openly, Luis Echeverria, president at the time, forced chief executive Julio Scherer to resign.
Diaz Redondo took over as Echeverria’s man, keeping the newspaper on a strict PRI party line, but this merely led to a decline in readership at a time when alternatives were becoming available.
Scherer, for example, moved on to found the weekly Proceso. In addition dailies like Uno mas Uno and La Jornada were sticking their necks out to challenge the government of the “perfect dictatorship”, as the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa termed the PRI.
On November 20, 1993, a new newspaper for the capital came out.
Reforma, originally a subsidiary of El Norte, a financially sound newspaper from Monterrey in the north of the country, made a name for itself for its political independence and journalistic professionalism.
Excelsior soon began to seem like a relic of days gone by.
This new diversity in the Mexican media, fostered in part by the lifting of the state monopoly on the sale of paper at the end of the 1980s, was part of a political liberalization that finally led to free elections and the opposition victory.
But, where other media organizations, such as for example the powerful television broadcaster Televisa, cut their links with the PRI in recent years, Excelsior stuck to the party line and campaigned against Fox during the elections.
Having kicked out their chief executive, the journalists at the daily now have to worry about their jobs. It has been reported that the newspaper cannot survive more than another 10 days without financial backing.
Excelsior is not alone in this. There are several newspapers among the more than 20 serving the capital that have few readers and have survived to date only with the aid of the government’s generosity.
This cannot last. Fox has announced that he intends not only to respect press freedom but also to end the subsidies.
The days of the “embutes” and “chayotes”, the envelopes filled with money that government officials used to dish out to tame journalists, will finally become a thing of the past.
