MEXICO : Progress and Promise : Media : Mexico Press Is Still Far From Free : * The government has committed itself to democratic reforms. But it still tries to manage the media through payoffs, pressure and obliging self-censorship.

When President Carlos Salinas de Gortari travels throughout Mexico and abroad, he is accompanied by a corps of reporters from all the major Mexico City newspapers but one.

The daily tabloid El Financiero has been excluded from the presidential press plane for nearly two years--ever since the paper published details of Mexico’s foreign debt negotiations that the government wanted to keep quiet.

“The official explanation is that we don’t have enough circulation to justify their inviting a reporter,” said Alejandro Ramos, deputy director general of El Financiero. “Really, it is just a way to say, ‘We don’t like what you are writing.’ ”

To emphasize the point, the government also pulled all state-owned bank advertisements from the financial newspaper.

El Financiero’s problems are symbolic of the conflicting realities that characterize the Mexican press today.

On the one hand, the 10-year-old tabloid belongs to a vanguard of Mexican newspapers and magazines that is breaking away from tight government control to give the Mexican people a broader range of views and information.

But while the Salinas administration has publicly committed itself to democratic reforms and broken the state monopoly on newsprint--once a tool of media control--it continues to try to manage the news through such old-style tactics as pressure, direct payoffs and the obliging self-censorship of much of the press.

Among about a dozen periodicals published in Mexico City every day, only El Financiero and La Jornada are considered to be truly independent. Nationally, the list is equally modest: El Diario de Yucatan in Merida, El Norte in Monterrey, the weekly Zeta in Tijuana and a few others.

The national news magazine Proceso is the only major independent weekly. Two other national magazines just starting--the weekly Mira and the monthly Este Pais--also are striving for independence.

The vast majority of Mexican papers depend on government advertising for their survival and, therefore, are vulnerable to pressure. They also are much more willing partners in Mexico’s one-party political system.

The government pays the expenses of journalists who travel with the president and government ministers. In most newspapers, low-paid reporters frequently receive “the envelope,” or payments from the government ministries and agencies they cover. They also are responsible for selling advertising to those very offices, creating a further economic dependency on the people they are supposed to be reporting on objectively.

“The relationship between the state and the press hasn’t changed much over the years,” said El Financiero’s Ramos. “In the 1970s, President (Jose) Lopez Portillo said, ‘I don’t pay for them to punch me,’ and stopped government advertising in Proceso. On Journalists Day two years ago, Salinas said: ‘We accept good-faith criticism.’ In the end, it is the same thing. The president decides what is good-faith criticism and what is bad faith.”

Columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio, a Nieman Fellow studying the Mexican media at Harvard, added: “There are no structural changes in the mechanisms of corruption. The changes that have occurred are because more and more people within the press reject these mechanisms.”

Under the direction of Julio Sherer Garcia, the daily newspaper Excelsior broke ground in independent journalism with its coverage of the army’s bloody attack on a student demonstration at Tlaltelolco Plaza in 1968 and criticism of the policies of President Luis Echeverria in the early 1970s.

Echeverria became fed up with Excelsior’s coverage, however, and orchestrated a coup to oust Sherer in 1976 and install a more sympathetic editor. Sherer went on to found Proceso magazine, which today lives primarily off its subscriptions and street sales.

Sherer’s deputy at Excelsior, Manuel Becerra Acosta, started the leftist daily Uno Mas Uno in 1977. The staff split in 1984, and Uno Mas Uno dissidents formed La Jornada, which over the last seven years has become the principal forum in Mexico City for political debate and criticism of the government.

At the peak of Mexico’s oil boom in 1981, another Excelsior veteran, Rogelio Cardenas, decided that Mexico needed a financial newspaper and founded El Financiero.

“The idea was to create a newspaper that served the reader and his needs for information rather than serving a particular sector of the economy or the government like the other papers,” said Ramos.

As Mexico’s foreign debt ballooned and the economy went bust, El Financiero grew. It has since absorbed many political columnists who find the doors of Excelsior and other publications closed to them.

Like Proceso, El Financiero understood the need to be economically independent. With its upscale, business-oriented audience, the paper manages to get about 85% of its advertising from private enterprise.

But even El Financiero and La Jornada participate in the common practice of running gacetillas , or government ads dressed up as news stories. Unlike most newspapers they distinguish the paid propaganda from real news reports with italicized headlines or boxes.

Mexico’s most modern and profitable newspaper, El Norte, will not run the paid news stories and abolished the practice of reporters selling advertising. The flagship of the northern industrial city of Monterrey, El Norte runs about 300 pages daily, compared to 50 or 60 pages for El Financiero and La Jornada.

El Norte publisher Alejandro Junco de la Vega said he believes Salinas is less inclined to pressure or repress the media than his predecessors. But he also acknowledged that El Norte’s free-market editorial line is in sync with President Salinas’s neo-liberal economic policies and, as such, the newspaper and government are less likely to clash.

“In September, 1974, the newspaper was running only 12 pages because the government cut our newsprint supply,” Junco said. “We did not understand Luis Echeverria’s economic policies, his ‘Third Worldism,’ his hatred of our neighbor to the north. We either had to change our editorial policy or be left without newsprint. We elected to face the shortage.

“We did not understand Lopez Portillo’s mixed economy concept, a federal budget deficit that was 20% of gross domestic product or his nationalization of the banks. He replied by threatening physical harm against people who worked for the newspaper, harassment of our wives. The Federal Judicial Police showed up at school to question our children, who were 6 years old and 8 years old,” he said.

El Norte feuded with the administration of President Miguel de la Madrid over a government monopoly on satellite technology. “De la Madrid’s way of dealing with us was to dedicate the state-owned television channel in Monterrey to the daily assassination of our private lives, trying to arouse the workers of El Norte to strike, and accusing us of having our editorial policy run out of Washington, D.C,” Junco said.

“Salinas has had second thoughts about whether we are the enemies of government we were supposed to be. Some of the free-market thoughts we had that were anathema are now accepted. For the first time since I have been publisher of this newspaper, we are no longer getting pressure,” he said.

Being outspoken still implies risks for some journalists, particularly in the provinces. At least a dozen reporters and editors have been killed in Mexico in the last three years, said Eduardo Valle, a former official of the Democratic Journalists Union.

While there is no orchestrated government violence against journalists, Valle and others say reporters may be killed in Mexico when they run up against drug traffickers, local political bosses and police.

Although Salinas jailed the alleged mastermind of the 1984 assassination of Mexico’s most influential newspaper columnist, Manuel Buendia, reporters charge that the government has not done enough to resolve outstanding cases.

Zeta editor Jesus Blancornelas--who in 1980 fled Mexico for two years after reporting corruption in the Baja California state government--said his paper’s freedom of speech is guaranteed today not only by the fact that most of his advertising comes from companies in the United States, but also because an opposition state government provides checks and balances that don’t exist elsewhere in Mexico. The conservative National Action Party’s Ernesto Ruffo Appel won the Baja governorship in 1989.

“There has been an opening here since the last administration, the origin of which is the political change in Baja California,” Blancornelas said. “Opposition governments and strong political parties are a guarantee for us on both sides. If it happened that Ruffo began attacking us, I’m sure the Salinas government would protest. And vice versa. This gives us more freedom.”

Zeta and Proceso each claim to distribute about 90,000 newspapers. La Jornada’s circulation is around 80,000, according to its editors. El Financiero says its circulation is 100,000, which apparently would put it in the ballpark of the Mexico City dailies Excelsior and El Universal.

All of these figures are low in a country of 85 million people, but functional illiteracy is widespread, and newspapers are viewed as expendable by the poor.

This low readership may be one of the reasons the government tolerates the level of criticism it does. Most Mexicans get their news from electronic media, where criticism and debate are even more controlled. Mexicans have a healthy skepticism about the way the media report on the government, according to a Los Angeles Times poll, with 45% saying they believe that the press makes Salinas look better than he actually is.

Editors and reporters say the Mexican people--increasingly educated, activist and demanding of political change--will force the independent press to grow. Furthermore, privatization and the opening of the Mexican economy will provide additional sources of advertising that could reduce newspapers’ dependence on the government.

“Mexican society is growing,” said Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, editor of Mira magazine. “Independent of the government efforts, society is modernizing. Mexico is inserting itself into the rest of the world. This explains why the independent press has grown and will continue to grow.”

The Times Poll: Views on the Media

MEXICO

How do the Mexican media portray President Salinas?

As better than he is: 45%

As he is: 43%

As worse than he is: 3%

Don’t know: 9%

How do the Mexican media portray the opposition political parties?

As they are: 34%

As worse than they are: 22%

They ignore them: 7%

Don’t know: 14%

As better than they are: 23%

* ABOUT THIS SECTION

The principal writers for this special report on Mexico were Marjorie Miller and Juanita Darling of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau, and Richard Boudreaux of The Times’ Managua Bureau. Don Bartletti, of The Times’ San Diego Edition, took the photographs.