Two Passings Open Door For Change

A lot has been made of Mexico’s political changes as it breaks from the cocoon that 68 years of one-party rule had spun. Less obvious, but just as profound, has been a monumental transformation of the Mexican media, once ossified but now rejuvenated by the country’s new civic effervescence.

The passings of two highly influential men in Mexico’s media serve to underscore the dramatic changes underway. Both men, the closest of friends, exit the scene indivisibly linked with the country’s dying one-party state.

On April 16, Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, who built Televisa and ran it like a ‘30s Hollywood studio boss, died of skin cancer at the age of 66. In a few weeks, Jacobo Zabludovsky, arguably Mexico’s best-known and, many would say, most-compromised journalist, reportedly will retire as anchor of Televisa’s “24 Horas,” the country’s leading prime-time news show. (His departure has been reported in leading Mexico City newspapers and not denied by Televisa or Zabludovsky.)

The two leave the national scene as Mexico’s media have become irrevocably rambunctious. Down the AM dial these days, radio talk shows can be heard discussing such heretofore taboo subjects as sexuality, a woman’s place in the world and the ideas of opposition parties and government critics. Several new newspapers and magazines are trying to establish a more independent journalistic standard. In their pages, cartoonists and columnists frequently take on even the president of Mexico.

The changes have come slower to television. In 1993, the government sold two stations to a consortium known as Television Azteca. That broke the four-decade monopoly that Televisa, the largest entertainment conglomerate in Latin America, had over Mexican television. In the last year, the new competition has shaken the company which, like the Mexican state and Azcarraga himself, never before had its hegemony challenged.

Azcarraga was one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Mexico during the last quarter century. With a pronounced dimple and a shock of white hair, he was known as “The Tiger.” He was a man with little formal education but a steel-hard business sense; he loved tacos, tequila and the Virgin of Guadalupe. He also founded two museums and possessed an art collection that reportedly contains works by important artists including Pablo Picasso.

While most Mexican entrepreneurs Sam Quinones, a journalist, was recently selected as an Alicia Patterson fellow for 1998.

trembled at the idea of doing business abroad, Azcarraga turned a national television company into a world media giant, a source of pride for millions of his countrymen. He made the important decisions at Televisa, and a lot of the not-so-important ones. Hence, he left a multinational so lumbering and dependent on his personal force and charisma that it is ill-prepared for the intensified global media competition ahead.

Mexico’s one-party state allowed Azcarraga to build the television monopoly from which he made his billions. He repaid his debt by becoming a pillar of support for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He was once quoted as saying, “I’m a priista” and, later, that he was “a soldier of the president.”

At a PRI fund-raising dinner that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari held with the country’s top executives, he reportedly responded to Salinas’ request for $25 million from each attendee by standing up and saying his relationship with the government had been so profitable that he would be donating $75 million.

His most significant creation was the modern telenovela, or soap opera, Mexico’s preeminent cultural product. Televisa novelas are now shown everywhere from Bosnia to Bophuthatswana. Last year, the company claimed they were Mexico’s leading export.

Over the years, Azcarraga--once called the country’s second minister of education by essayist Carlos Monsivais--made sure that the genre legitimized the Mexican regime which, despite florid revolutionary rhetoric, has always been conservative to its core. Accordingly, politics were not discussed in telenovelas. Nor was money or work or salaries or poverty or corruption or sex. The feminist revolution barely grazed Televisa’s novelas. The stories were uniformly fantasy, of virtuous and poor young women suffering endlessly until fate intervened and allowed them to marry rich Prince Charmings, and become happy ever after.

It was, he said in a rare and revealing interview in 1993, television for Mexico’s impoverished masses to “distract them from their sad reality and difficult future.”

Azcarraga’s death was foreshadowed more than a year earlier when the genre he gave the world began changing. In 1996, Television Azteca aired “Nada Personal” (“Nothing Personal”), a novela that, for the first time, dealt with political corruption and assassination. The show forced open the doors of the telenovela to the larger realities of Mexican society, something Azcarraga would never have permitted without a shove. While most of the daring telenovelas are still Azteca products, even in Televisa’s novelas women now smoke, people work and, at times, swear. There even are occasional sex scenes and heroines with college educations.

Mexicans seem to want more now than what was force-fed them. This is especially true in TV news, which is why Zabludovsky’s days appear numbered.

In a country with very low reading levels, more than 75% of Mexicans get their news directly from “24 Horas” and Zabludovsky, whom many Mexicans have come to know simply as “Jacobo.” Over the years, his voice has become indivisible in Mexicans’ memories with virtually all the major world and national events.

Today, he and Televisa are tethered to their image as government proxies. The company’s news ratings have sagged notably in recent months, with Azteca cashing in on its competitor’s poor credibility. Azcarraga’s son, Emilio Azcarraga Jean, who now runs the network, has been asked frequently since his father’s death whether he planned any changes in news programming, a euphemism for whether Zabludovsky would be leaving.

Zabludovsky, 69, who is dull as an anchor and rarely asks penetrating questions, owes his longevity to Televisa’s now-terminated monopoly, his long friendship with the late Azcarraga and his mastery of the subtleties of pro-government propaganda, which is quickly going out of style.

But for years, Zabludovsky was the voice of Televisa and thus, indirectly, the government. He led the network’s harassment of opposition parties, focusing especially on the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and its leader, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, during his two presidential campaigns. In 1988, members of the nascent democratic opposition waged a campaign to boycott Televisa and Zabludovsky in response to the network’s and his antagonistic coverage.

Perhaps Zabludovsky’s worst moment, however, came in 1994, during coverage of the assassination, in Tijuana, of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI’s presidential candidate. Each of the other eight presidential candidates was allowed to express his condolences over the air via telephone as the network aired his file photo. When Cardenas’ turn came to speak, instead of a file photo, “24 Horas” ran footage of the assassination and Colosio’s bloody body. This not-so-subliminal connection of Cardenas with violence was one that the government, and thus Televisa and Zabludovsky, frequently tried to make.

Interesting enough, a good indicator of where Mexico as a country is heading can be discerned in the fates of these three historical figures. Azcarraga is dead. Zabludovsky is retiring. Meanwhile, Cardenas, just sworn in as the first opposition-party mayor of Mexico City, avidly eyes another run for the presidency in 2000.