Corruption Makes for a TV Hit in Mexico

A top Mexican police official, Cmdr. Fernando Gomez, lighted a cigarette and gazed at the body crumpled in the bullet-riddled van.

It was his best friend, anti-corruption crusader Raul de los Reyes, gunned down as he was about to be named the nation’s attorney general. The commander contemplated the killing sadly--almost as if he himself hadn’t just overseen the whole operation.

“It’s nothing personal, brother,” Gomez said. “Nothing personal.”

So began “Nada Personal” (“Nothing Personal”), a taboo-shattering television program that has had Mexicans talking for months.

In a sharp departure from the syrupy romances that dominate evening TV, the melodrama mirrors Mexico’s real-life soap opera of recent years--a run of sensational scandals that has included the assassinations of two political leaders.

“Society has had three years of not talking about anything else [but the political scandals]. People are totally convinced that they have been governed by gangsters,” said Carlos Monsivais, a cultural critic.

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Once upon a time, Mexico’s evening soap operas--telenovelas--were Cinderella stories.

Pumping out poor-girl-marries-rich-man tales, the Mexican TV giant Televisa became the world’s biggest Spanish-language entertainment group. The company, led by a staunch supporter of Mexico’s ruling party, long enjoyed a virtual monopoly on what people here watched on television.

But in the last few years, a new network--TV Azteca--has begun to compete by featuring hard-boiled crime shows.

Last spring, the network launched “Nada Personal,” its first telenovela, produced by an unlikely trio: two journalists and a man who once ran the radio station of the left-wing rebels of El Salvador.

“For us, television isn’t a hole into which you escape from reality. Rather, it’s a mirror to reflect reality,” said one of the producers, Epigmenio Ibarra, a former TV war correspondent in Central America.

Reality of the grimmest sort permeates “Nada Personal.”

Take the soap-opera slaying of Raul de los Reyes. It consciously evoked the real-life 1994 assassinations of a Mexican presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, and a ruling party leader, Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

Polls indicate that many Mexicans believe senior officials had a hand in those killings.

In the soap opera, these suspicions come to life in the form of corrupt politicians, police and prosecutors involved in the murder. Their elaborate conspiracy makes Watergate look like an Easter egg hunt.

Gomez’s officers, for example, routinely torture people and plant evidence. The government prosecutor, sexpot Elsa Grajales, persecutes witnesses to the government’s crimes.

The mastermind is the shadowy Mr. X, a politician who runs a huge cocaine-trafficking ring. Balding, with protruding ears, he bears a striking resemblance to former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

The show’s bleak vision reflects the plunging credibility of Mexican institutions and political leaders.

Once praised for delivering stability and rising standards of living, Mexico’s authoritarian political system has been buffeted by economic crises and unprecedented allegations of corruption--many involving the Salinas family.

“The assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio changed the whole idea of the power elite in Mexico,” Monsivais said. “There’s no illusions at all about the power elite, and that helps the soap opera a lot.”

Not that everyone in the telenovela is evil.

In a nod to Mexico’s increasingly bold press, one of the heroes of “Nada Personal” is a handsome, crusading journalist named Luis Mario Gomez. He regularly lambastes the government on an idealistic network--called TV Azteca.

“Nada Personal” proved so successful initially that Televisa scrambled its evening programming to compete.

The national ratings company, IBOPE, discloses audience share only to the networks. But TV Azteca says “Nada Personal” is one of its most popular programs--even though it still lags behind some Televisa soaps.

In the United States, “Nada Personal” is carried by Telemundo.

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Some critics complain that “Nada Personal” has lost some of its punch lately. The show, they say, has watered down the political element it initially promoted in favor of a more traditional love triangle.

Maybe the producers got cold feet, speculated television critic Florence Toussaint.

“It was a very political theme. Maybe they were afraid to go deeper,” she said.

The show’s writer and producer said they have not been under government pressure to change the show. An aide to President Ernesto Zedillo denied that anyone in his inner circle even watches it.

Ironically, “Nada Personal” has aired even as TV Azteca has been caught up in the kind of corruption scandal portrayed by the show’s characters.

In July, federal prosecutors interrogated the young magnate who bought TV Azteca from the government, Ricardo Salinas Pliego. The problem: $30 million that he borrowed in 1993 from the brother of then-President Salinas to purchase the network. (The TV executive is not related to the former president.)

The TV Azteca owner has insisted it was “perfectly natural” to take the loan. And the government says Salinas Pliego did not get special consideration in the bidding.

To many Mexicans, however, the news was another sign that political leaders secretly pull many of the strings in Mexican society to benefit themselves and their friends.

Salinas Pliego seems unfazed.

He has sued journalists who have repeatedly reported on his ties to the former president’s family. And in a script that could have come from the sunniest telenovela, his network has adopted a new advertising slogan: “TV Azteca, a Successful Privatization.”