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Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-9367001

1527-1900

Andrew Paxman,

Latin American and Latino Studies

The hardest part of media history is gauging impact. How did audiences or readers respond to given films, radio broadcasts, TV shows, or news reports? How did collective responses shape norms, activism, or policy? Occasionally the answer is clear: Upton Sinclair's exposé of Chicago meatpacking, The Jungle, caused documented public outrage that led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. But media historians have often cheated, focusing on textual analysis and making glib or hopeful claims about “the reader” and “the viewer,” the better studies adding a sprinkle of box office data or circulation figures.Contemporary scholars, however, have engaged with the “public sphere,” whose origins theorist Jürgen Habermas located in the debates held in eighteenth-century coffeehouses and whose domain they have expanded to embrace all public forums, from letters pages and talk show call-ins to an illiterate crowd reacting to the proclamation of a tract. Within the burgeoning subgenre of Mexican press history, Pablo Piccato and Benjamin Smith have applied such analysis to periodicals from the 1920s to 1976, persuasively arguing that newspapers mattered not only to state formation (the traditional reading of a largely submissive press) but also to public awareness of corruption and to resistance to state hegemony. Vanessa Freije now furthers this argument, surveying the early 1960s to the late 1980s in her insightful and analytically lucid Citizens of Scandal.Freije enriches her approach by mining seventeen archives, including the private collections of five influential journalists, and interviewing twenty-five veteran editors and reporters. She makes good use of readers' correspondence, most of which never made it to a letters page but which shows how critical reportage and opinion columns were received and trusted. Episodes of state corruption or incompetence, transformed into public scandals via critical and often-courageous journalism, revealed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to be much less the paternalistic provider than it claimed to be. Public perception of this did not directly bring democratization, but it did encourage the emergence of civil society, collaborative groupings outside the purview of the PRI, which would improve local living standards, foster communal self-reliance, and in the long run bolster support for opposition parties.Freije pegs her analysis to the evolution of “denuncia journalism,” a Mexican style of muckraking that targeted individual power brokers or functionaries (p. 10). With roots in the nineteenth century, the genre became commoner after a new generation of journalists was sensitized to injustice by the state's repression of the railroad strikers of 1959 and inspired to be suspicious of the PRI by the Cuban Revolution that same year. Chapter 1 considers El Diario de Yucatán and the maverick reporting of Mario Menéndez Rodríguez on corruption among officials in his state's vital henequen sector in 1963. The scandal, inflamed as agrarian organizers brought Menéndez's exposés to the attention of workers (reading them out at union meetings, presumably), led to the dismissal of officials. But pushback from the Mérida elite would force Menéndez to quit the paper: an illustration of how civic journalism would encounter structurally imposed limits.Later chapters focus on scandals under presidents José López Portillo (1976–82) and Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88): incompetence and embezzlement during the oil boom, especially by Mexican Petroleum (Pemex) director Jorge Díaz Serrano; the savagery and venality of Mexico City police chief Arturo “El Negro” Durazo; the inept official response to the 1985 earthquake, and ensuing revelations about seamstresses toiling in unsafe sweatshops; and the massive electoral fraud by the PRI in Chihuahua in 1986. In each case, the study demonstrates not only the agency of critical media like Proceso and La Jornada—and even, after the earthquake, of ordinarily staid broadsheets like Excélsior—but also a public responsiveness to such exposés. A scandal usually only becomes a scandal when it is first mediated by the press and then digested by the citizenry. And the act of mediation, Freije observes, is seldom simply one of right versus wrong. Journalists sometimes used racist, sexist, or classist tropes to juice up public outrage.Only chapter 2 fails to fit. Here the public created the scandal: a conspiracy theory, emerging in marginalized Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, that a vaccination program was a front for forced sterilization. The capital's papers acted responsibly by exposing the rumor as fake, but Freije laments such actions by press “behemoths,” in that they kept “knowledge production” from poor urban women (p. 77). This take recalls the “if it's subaltern, it must be good” bias that sometimes marred the new cultural history. The intersection of state, press, and public in the era of Luis Echeverría (1970–76) would have been better examined using a genuine scandal, such as the murder of senior industrialist Eugenio Garza Sada, which (it is commonly supposed) undermined the PRI's standing in the north.Augmenting the book's narrative interest, Freije interweaves the stories of key journalists, famous chroniclers like Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowska and less well-known but equally valiant reporters like Sara Lovera. Barring occasional jargon (though little by the standards of Duke University Press), the chapters are engagingly written. A selection of political cartoons and photographs enhances the impression of a press ever more willing to hold the powerful to account, or at least to make them squirm over their coffee and chilaquiles.