Abstract
The Partido Revolutionario Insitutional (PRI) and its predecessors ruled Mexico from 1929 until 2000, building a remarkably strong system of power of which the media were an integral component, bound to the system by dependence on subsidies, clientelistic relationships, and selective repression. But this system of power was complex, and the role of the media in Mexico in this epoch was equally so. Vanessa Freije’s fine, engaging book analyzes the nature of this complex role through a series of case studies of scandals that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s in which widely known but silenced abuses, conflicts, and injustices suddenly burst into the public sphere, forcing political leaders to respond. Her focus is on Mexico City print journalists, an elite sector of the media that was able to practice “denuncia journalism,” revealing hidden information and disrupting the ability of political elites to control the public sphere. The analysis is also broader, however, looking at the role of these elite journalists in a wider context of intra-party rivalries among elites, popular mobilizations and grass-roots efforts to circulate information, and intermedia circulation, as stories of scandals spread from print media into television, radio, and popular forms like sensational tell-all memoirs and comic books circulated among the popular classes. In this way, her book is a good reminder that media systems were “hybrid” long before the development of digital media, and journalism always interacted with many other forms of information circulation.
Freije is an historian and assistant professor at the University of Washington. Her richly detailed account of the Mexican public sphere is based on close reading of media content, a variety of archives, including some belonging to the Mexican intelligence agency and some to journalists, as well as interviews with journalists and politicians.
The opening chapter of Citizens of Scandal considers early debates about poverty in Mexico and the legacy of the revolution, whose legitimacy rested on its claim to fulfill the aspirations of the popular classes. It focuses on two major scandals of the early sixties, one involving corruption in the agrarian program in the southern state of Yucatan, and the other on the government’s attempt to censor Oscar Lewis’ famous sociological account of Mexican poverty, published in Spanish as Los hijos de Sánchez. The second chapter deals with a fascinating and timely scandal that erupted in 1974 when word spread in the working class Mexico City suburb of Nezahualcóyotl that medical workers carrying out a typhoid vaccination campaign were in fact sterilizing poor schoolchildren. Other chapters deal with a corruption scandal at the state oil company Pemex, a corruption and human rights scandal that brought down the powerful Mexico City police chief, and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 which overwhelmed the PRIs ability to provide relief, revealed corruption in the regulation of construction, and exposed illegal garment sweatshops. A final chapter deals with vote fraud in the 1986 election in the northern state of Chihuahua, which foreshadowed the electoral defeats that would end the PRI’s monopoly on power as the century ended.
An important theme in the book has to do with publicity and silence, and the factors that determine what will be silenced and what exposed. As Freije points out, most of the things revealed in these scandals were widely known—poverty, corruption, and abuse by the police were “open secrets.” They became scandals, subject to widespread publicity and discussion and often forcing action, including the resignations and prosecutions of powerful figures, through specific processes that involved the interaction of Mexico City journalists with other actors. Analyzing these processes is the book’s central focus. Often the production of scandal involved “leaks” of documents and other very specific pieces of information, for example, about a series of murders tied to the Mexico City police chief in 1982, revealed to columnist Manuel Buendía by his sources within the police. These leaks were normally tied to conflicts among powerful actors within the elite. They were facilitated by the reporter’s networks of connections with those elites, and as Freije shows, those very networks were also part of the process that in other cases produced silence. Another process involved citizens going to prominent journalists to make “denuciations,” as they often trusted journalists more than authorities. In the case of the earthquake, an upsurge of grassroots organization, accompanied by the creation of small-scale community media, played a key role.
Another interesting dimension of Freije’s book is the analysis of racial, gender, and class hierarchies in the representation of scandal. The elite reporters at the center of Freije’s analysis often reproduced these hierarchies even as they challenged the power of high officials. Her analysis of the vaccine scandal is extremely interesting, showing how communication by working class residents was gendered, represented as feminine and irrational through the use of terms like “rumors” and “gossip,” although conspiracy theories and unverified information certainly circulated among elite Mexicans as well. In the scandal involving the Mexico City police chief, media highlighted his dark skin color as part of the process of denouncing his legitimacy as a holder of public power.
Freije’s book is an outstanding contribution to the literature on Mexican journalism and the communication processes involved in making scandals, and should be of considerable interest to scholars studying news in other one-party-dominant and “hybrid” regimes, more generally. Although Freije does not foreground the terms, her book has excellent material for those interested in the mediatization of politics and in political parallelism beyond the original European context in which these processes have been conceptualized.
