A Telethon for Charity Breaks Ground

Mexico held its first charity telethon ever over the weekend, and it was a success beyond anyone’s expectations.

The event was thought up by Emilio Azcarraga Jean, president of Televisa, Mexico’s largest television network, and sponsored by a number of media companies.

Televisa and its associates made a lot of the idea that it was a first for Mexico--a live, round-the-clock marathon appeal for money to build the country’s first rehabilitation center for handicapped children.

Whether it actually was the first telethon was a matter of some dispute. Televisa’s competition, Television Azteca, said it had been holding telethons since its start-up in 1993. But Azteca telethons turned out to not have much “thon” in them, lasting only three or four hours, usually early in the morning, and having little advance promotion.

The weekend telethon ran for 25 hours and raised 138 million pesos ($1.69 million), well above the 80-million peso goal.

What was truly historic about “Teleton ‘97” was not so much that it may have been the first, but that it was the first time on a national scale that business people took a leadership role in a promoting a solution to a social problem. In addition to the media firms, dozens of companies signed on as sponsors. Banamex, the country’s largest bank, kept its branches open all day Saturday to accept donations. Corona beer, Cruz Azul cement, Adams chewing gum and many other Mexican companies donated money, as did foreign firms like GM, Sears and Levi Strauss. The event was a resounding success, achieved without any government help. That’s what made it truly transcendent.

In the United States it is assumed that people in business will use their experience, connections and money to benefit society. This does not happen in Mexico to any great extent. Here, business folks stick to minding their own business.

The Mexican regime, its ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, was always especially wary of allowing the private sector to develop a collective consciousness. Business leaders were discouraged from taking public roles in charity work. The most a civic-minded businessman could aspire to was to head the local Red Cross for a year.

That has begun to change in cities where opposition parties have come to power. There, the use of business executives as full-time functionaries and as volunteers amounts to a silent revolution in Mexican local government.

Still, Mexicans take for granted that the central government is in fact Papa Gobierno, the source of solutions to virtually all social problems, society’s protector. It is a dependency that has begun to weaken but will take years to die. People still come to the government asking for jobs, housing, even for money for Christmas presents.

The notion of giving private money to a national communal effort is a hard sell, especially after years of economic crisis and governmental misuse of public funds.

This was something that the telethon organizers chose to address head-on. They spent a lot of time talking about the importance of unity, collective effort, of developing a culture of giving. “Together we can make a miracle” was the telethon motto.

“I understand that culturally we’re not prepared to give,” said radio anchorman Pedro Ferriz de Con in a commercial in advance of the telethon.

President Ernesto Zedillo (who donated 18,000 pesos, one-fifth of his monthly salary), proclaimed hopefully the day before the telethon that “Mexicans are a people who know the value of unity.”

Altogether, the strategies worked.

The telethon’s success will not by itself usher in a new era of business and community participation in solving Mexico’s social ills. Mexican “civil society”--as everything not related to the government is called here--has a long way to go before it fully emerges from its special place as governmental protectorate. But the telethon is one of many signs that the country is developing some civic muscles that have atrophied under 68 years of PRI paternalism.

“For many years we were a society that let others do for us. This is another Mexico,” said Fernando Landeros, president of Fundacion Mexico Unido, a charity that helped sponsor the event. “There is no longer just one actor, there are many: the entire society.”