The regime permits freedom and dissent up to the point at which tolerance causes it less trouble than repression, and that point is different for different freedoms. Moreover, different officials see different dividing points.
Daniel Levy & Gabriel Szekely, 1983272
After the middle of the century, the newspaper industry boomed, driven by cheaper printing technology, government-subsidized newsprint, greater affluence, and a thriving ad industry tied to mass-produced consumer goods. In 1970, 7.7 million newspapers were printed daily in Mexico, or one paper for every 4.2 Mexicans over age ten. In the Federal District, 4.5 million newspapers were printed daily, almost one paper for each of the District’s 4.9 million residents over age ten. In contrast, to cite the extreme, in Morelos, only one newspaper was printed daily for every forty-five residents over age ten.273
Despite the large number of papers published, as historian Enrique Krauze noted, “It was a given that the press did not honestly, thoughtfully, or independently report on political events or politicians.” Even though the government lacked the formal legal power to censor print media, it had numerous more subtle means of control.274
From 1960 to 1970, the government placed 20 to 30 percent of all advertisements. By simply withholding its ads, the government could exert pressure on publishers. Papers providing favorable coverage would receive sufficient ad revenue to wipe out debts resulting from unpaid contributions to the government-run social security system. Often government ads made the financial survival of a publication possible. After Carlos Fuentes published a detailed account of the government murder of peasant leader Ruben Jaramillo in Siempre!, the government ceased buying ads in that magazine.275
Many papers depended on financing from the government-owned development bank Nacional Financiera and on credit to buy newsprint from the government newsprint monopoly PIPSA. PIPSA would supply newsprint on credit to papers that did not rock the boat. Slight government displeasure could be shown by PIPSA demanding immediate payment for past due accounts. On rare occasions, PIPSA denied a publication newsprint, as happened when the left-wing magazine Politica planned to publish an issue attacking President Kennedy just before his visit to Mexico.276
Another form of control was the iguala, a payment of up to $2,000 a mouth to reporters in exchange for favorable treatment of the agency or politician making the payment. It was hard for journalists to turn down such payments since publishers paid them virtually nothing on the assumption they would receive igualas. Politicians wanting to fine-tune the favorable coverage could purchase a gacetilla, which appeared, not as a political ad, but as an ordinary newspaper story. However its content was written by the subject of the gacetilla, who, if the payment was sufficient, could even get the gacetilla on the front page. The price of a front-page gacetilla in Excelsior, one of the more respected newspapers, was $8,000. In other cases, the government directly subsidized publications. In 1943, Guy W. Ray, the first secretary at the U. S. embassy, commented on the magazine Asi: “Asi is generally supposed in newspaper circles to be subsidized by the President principally for the purpose of making public attacks on persons who have become prominent or who are out of line with his policies.”277
There was little economic incentive for publishers to criticize the government and run the risk of losing gacetillas, government ads, and credit to purchase newsprint. Instead of challenging the system, the media generally resorted to self-censorship.278
The degree of U. S. influence on the press was a source of concern among the intelligentsia. Three of the major magazines covering politics, Life en espanol, Vision, and the Spanish-language edition of Reader’s Digest, were produced by U. S. firms. In 1964, their combined circulation was
546,000, more than 200,000 above the combined circulation of the top ten Mexican magazines. The Associated Press and United Press International were practically the only sources of international news.279 Political scientist Jose Gonzalez Pedrero commented on the impact U. S. media had on Mexican children:
The children of our country probably know more about the virtues of the marines, the works
Of Walt Disney, Jefferson’s advanced ideas, and the acts of Superman than of the history of
Mexico, the life of Benito Juarez, the political significance of Emiliano Zapata, or the needs of
Our country.280
Due to their high costs, books only circulated among a relatively elite audience. Press runs for many social science works were often only 3,000. There was little government control over book content, and those who could afford them were free to buy books by authors ranging from Karl Marx to Milton Freedman.281
In the 1940s, the government-owned Fondo de Cultura Economica became the most prestigious publishing house in Latin America. It published works of exiled Spanish intellectuals and made available the most important works in contemporary economic theory. In the series “Letras Mexi-canas,” it published Fuentes’s La region mas transparente as well as El llano en llamas and Pedro Paramo by acclaimed novelist Juan Rulfo. By 1979, the Fondo had published 2,992 titles and had come to occupy a niche similar to that occupied by university presses in the United States.282
Even though the mass media was almost uniformly uncritical, decades before vote totals began to show the PRI was losing its grip, academics were undermining its foundations. In 1943, economist Jesus Silva Herzog wrote an article entitled “The Mexican Revolution in Crisis.” In it, he criticized the failure of the government’s economic model to improve the lives of broad sectors of the population. He recommended a continuation of the agrarian reform, denounced corrupt labor officials, and advocated an increased emphasis on education.283
In 1947, historian and economist Daniel Cosio Villegas provided another critique, which directly targeted the political establishment. In an article entitled “Mexico’s Crisis,” he stated, “The men of the Revolution can be judged now with certainty—they were magnificent destroyers, but nothing they created to replace what had been destroyed has proven indisputably better.” He noted that the political system was rife with corruption, that crimes were committed with impunity, and that the population was so accustomed to the press mouthing the government line that readers instinctively assumed to be true the opposite of what the press claimed. Finally, he concluded, “The men of the Revolution have exhausted their moral and political authority.”284
During the 1950s, the journal Problemas Agricolas e Industriales de Mexico published broad-ranging debates about the direction of Mexican economic development. This journal featured extensive reports on a variety of economic issues and served as a forum for U. S. scholar Frank Tannenbaum, who felt Mexico should base its development on agriculture and mining, a view that was largely abandoned in official circles after the Cardenas administration. He deplored the creation of a few capital-intensive industries that increased the gross national product and made owners rich but created jobs for only a few. Tannenbaum felt that rather than trying to imitate the U. S. industrial model, Mexico should follow a path more like those of Denmark and Switzerland.285
In 1965, sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova published Democracy in Mexico (cited twelve times in this work), the most devastating critique yet of the direction the Revolution had taken. In his work, he applied sociological methodology to official statistics and concluded that after the Second World War Mexico had generated substantial economic growth but had not lessened dependency, underdevelopment, or inequality.286
In general, scholars were free to publish their works, given that limited distribution minimized their impact. Occasionally they would cross the poorly defined line between what was tolerable and what was beyond the pale (as defined by the political establishment). In 1965, Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, the director of the Fondo de Cultura Economica, crossed this line by publishing the Children of Sanchez, a book by U. S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which graphically described the life of a family in Tepito, a Mexico City slum. By publishing this book in Mexico, Orfila Reynal laid bare the degree to which economic development had failed the poor. President Diaz Ordaz asked Orfila Reynal to resign for having published what the president regarded as an insult to Mexico. The director refused to resign, stating he had done nothing wrong and that if Diaz Ordaz wanted to get rid of him, he would have to fire him. Diaz Ordaz promptly did so.
Orfila Reynal then used his severance pay and the financial support of other Mexican writers to found the publishing house Siglo XXI, which became what historian Enrique Krauze described as “the indisputable vanguard of publishing in Mexico and Latin America.” Many of the works Siglo XXI published were Marxist in outlook and were much more critical of the system than was the Children of Sanchez. Not only did Siglo XXI publish numerous critiques of the government but the publisher Joaquin Mortiz reprinted the Children of Sanchez, which became a best-seller.287
World History
