A no-nonsense voice for Latin America

HER chauffeur barely has pulled into the parking garage, but Carmen Aristegui is already out the door of her silver Audi and bounding through the office-tower lobby as if powered by jet propulsion. She flashes a smile at the night security guards, whisks into an elevator and heads for the eighth-floor suite of CNN en Espanol.

A clock shows it’s less than 20 minutes till airtime for “Aristegui,” the half-hour, prime-time news talk show that since its July 4 debut has made its host one of the best-known Spanish-speaking journalists in the hemisphere. But Aristegui is all good-humored ease as she flops in a chair and submits to her makeup assistant’s ministrations. Then, faster than you can say “Anderson Cooper,” she races onto the studio set, introduces her guest -- Mexican presidential candidate Felipe Calderon of the ruling National Action Party -- and makes him squirm as she politely but firmly presses for his views on abortion and euthanasia.

It’s all in an evening’s work for Aristegui (pronounced ah-rees-STEH-gwee), a veteran radio and television news anchor-analyst who during her 15-year career has gained a large, respectful following in her native Mexico. Now her bosses at CNN are betting that this genial but no-nonsense journalist can dramatically expand her fan base on both sides of the border.

CNN hopes that “Aristegui” can help create a community of Spanish-language news junkies across a vast area stretching from East L.A. to Tierra del Fuego. Broadcast live from CNN en Espanol’s Mexico City bureau at 10 p.m. CST, the show reaches 12.4 million household subscribers in Mexico, Central and South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, plus another 3 million in the United States. Though “Aristegui” focuses heavily on Mexican political and social affairs, it aims for a pan-Latin American perspective on issues such as immigration, human rights and global trade. E-mail about the show flies in from Mexico, Argentina, Chile and most points in between.

“We believe that Mexico is a location that has a lot of information that can be interesting in Latin America, especially in the United States for the great quantity, the millions of Mexicans that are in the United States,” Aristegui says.

“This doesn’t excuse us from dealing with hurricanes, or dealing with terrorist attacks, or discussing the occupation in Iraq, the subjects that seem to us that are of the world -- from the perspective in Mexico.”

CNN brass believe that in Aristegui they have found not only a seasoned journalist with the chops to break major stories and attract top newsmakers as guests, but a personality attractive enough to help spread the network brand name. Among her recent coups was scoring a one-on-one interview with Mexican President Vicente Fox on his private jet while returning from the Mar del Plata economic summit earlier this month.

“In thinking about a Larry King for Latin America, or Larry King for Mexico, her name had come up again and again over the years,” says Christopher Crommett, senior vice president of CNN en Espanol, speaking by phone from company headquarters in Atlanta. It’s the first regularly scheduled program that CNN en Espanol has produced and hosted from a location entirely outside Atlanta, Crommett says, and “in terms of buzz, nothing we’ve done in Mexico has remotely come close to the buzz around this.”

CNN’s new show arrives as competition is heating up in the Spanish-language news market. When the parent Cable News Network launched CNN en Espanol in March 1997, it signaled the growing size and importance of Spanish-language media, both within and outside the United States. CNN now operates bureaus in Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Havana and maintains a network of correspondents throughout the Americas. Its rivals in the region include Fox, BBC, Mexico’s Televisa network and Venezuela’s new state-funded Telesur network.

Crommett says it’s difficult to obtain viewership figures for “Aristegui” because Latin American ratings services aren’t equipped to make detailed performance measurements of niche news channels. Other Spanish-language news networks agree that it’s hard to measure ratings consistently across such a broad geographic area. “I can tell you that the ratings numbers we’ve looked at show a very healthy increase in the tune-in since the program started,” Crommett says.

A trim, compact woman who favors black and charcoal pantsuits, black calf-high boots and the barest hints of jewelry or cosmetics, Aristegui has little in common with her artfully preened and prepped U.S. counterparts, male or female. The studio set is an equally modest affair: two or three chairs, an abstract red-and-white background and a couple of flat screens fronting the show’s logo.

But Aristegui clearly is in her element in front of the camera. Direct and insistent, though seldom confrontational or combative, she engages her interviewees with incisive questioning and a level, green-eyed stare.

“I don’t believe in objectivity,” she says. “Subjectivity is implicit in the selection of the theme, in the emphasis that you give to the information, in why you chose this theme and not another. What you can aspire to is to have a political neutrality, to have an exposition that is the most well balanced possible.”

Though she doesn’t consider herself a celebrity, Aristegui certainly needed no introduction to Mexican audiences. She made her name here on a string of top-ranked programs such as W Radio’s “Hoy por Hoy” and “Circulo Rojo” on the national Televisa network. When she signed with CNN en Espanol, the network encouraged her to keep doing her daily radio program and her periodic columns in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma, partly to maintain her high standing in the Mexican mass media. The radio show “gives her a currency and a relevance and a level of credibility on Mexican issues that transcends what we could have broadcasting from Atlanta,” Crommett says. One Mexican critic, while congratulating CNN on landing Aristegui, asked why no Mexican network had thought to give her a comparably high-profile gig. Though other news talk shows exist on Mexican television, none has the hemispheric reach or deep pockets of CNN en Espanol.

An expert on national politics, Aristegui can discourse for hours on the fine points of Mexico’s upcoming presidential contest, which shows signs of turning into a wide-open three-horse race. While some Mexican news outlets are aligned with particular political parties, Aristegui has managed with her show to attract leading figures from across the spectrum.

And although politics is the program’s raison d’etre, Aristegui has hosted segments on film and a session with a pair of stand-up comics who impersonate Fox and first lady Marta Sahagun. “She’s so well connected and so well sourced it’s not funny,” Crommett says. “I went down in June to make the announcement of this agreement with her, jointly with her, and walking around with her was like walking around with Angelina Jolie. It seemed like every step somebody would stop, want to take a picture, want to talk to her.”

Colleagues say that one of Aristegui’s assets is that she comes across on television as being exactly what she is: a smart, forthright, unpretentious woman who grew up the fifth of seven children in a middle-class Mexico City family and still roots for her old university soccer team, the Pumas. “In front of the camera and behind the camera, she’s the same,” says Ariel Crespo, the Puerto Rican-born chief of CNN en Espanol’s Mexico City bureau. Rather than seeming like a smooth insider hobnobbing with the powers that be, Aristegui comes across as an earnest watchdog for the voiceless masses.

The qualities that make ordinary Mexican viewers trust Aristegui are the same ones that make politicians of all stripes believe that, however tough the questioning, she will treat them fairly and consistently. “Carmen has a very important vision of what this country is,” says Virgilio Munoz Alberich, personal secretary to presidential candidate Felipe Calderon. “Carmen is a person that has high credibility.”

Aristegui’s personal history is more complex than her straight-up TV persona might suggest. Her father was a republican exile from the Spanish Civil War, who fled his homeland during the fascist takeover. Politics was discussed around the family dinner table, and Aristegui started out studying sociology at Mexico’s National Autonomous University before switching to journalism.

Scoping out perspectives

LIKE many journalists of her generation, Aristegui was deeply influenced by the political upheavals of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. During that period, hundreds of student demonstrators took to the streets, and the Mexican government’s brutal crackdown fueled popular demands for the country to end its one-party system of rule. The slow, arduous process of democratization that followed, Aristegui believes, has received a big boost from the expansion of federal freedom-of-information laws during the Fox presidency. But Mexico still has a long way to go to achieve the kind of government transparency and press freedom that most Americans take for granted.

Next summer’s presidential election will be another test of Mexico’s fledgling democracy. The race also figures to attract particular notice in such places as California and Texas because, for the first time in history, Mexican citizens living outside their country -- the vast majority of them in the United States -- will be able to cast election ballots. Crommett says his network plans to have Aristegui occasionally take her show on the road next year to scope out the trans-border perspective on the contest.

For a woman to be awarded such a showcase is rare in Mexican society. It’s even more unusual for a madre soltera, an unwed mother, like Aristegui, who is raising a 6-year-old son. But this too may reflect the country’s growing openness, its willingness to face changing sociocultural realities. Though few Mexican myths are more potent than that of the extended, multigenerational happy family, about one-third of all Mexican households today are headed by single parents, Aristegui says.

And though old taboos against such arrangements persist, Aristegui says she heard from many sympathetic people after she wrote about her personal situation in a women’s essay collection, “Gritos y Susurros” (Cries and Whispers), published last year. “It has given me a certain type of relation that I had not hoped for and that I had not looked for, that I didn’t imagine, with some part of the public that found this human angle,” she says. “It’s a new demographic and cultural reality. It’s nothing exceptional, nevertheless it’s something that still is not assimilated like it ought to be.”