On January 14, 1982, residents of Tula, Hidalgo, discovered the bodies of nine murdered men floating in a sewage drain emanating from Mexico City. All bore signs of gruesome torture.Footnote 1 Red Cross workers soon located three more bodies, leading one reporter to describe the homicides as “the crime of the century.”Footnote 2 Detectives initially asserted that the victims were drug traffickers who had been murdered by a rival gang.Footnote 3 Manuel Buendía, in his weekday political column Red Privada, described the scene as “bloodcurdling,” employing his signature hard-boiled prose.Footnote 4 Yet, the nation's most prominent journalist was referring not only to the gore, but also to his suspicions that police had committed the crime.
By March, Buendía had grown bolder in his accusations and became the first to finger Mexico City Chief of Police Arturo Durazo. Buendía published leaked information from five police and intelligence sources. His informants revealed that under Durazo's supervision a special police task force had tortured and murdered a gang of bank robbers in order to locate their stash.Footnote 5 Despite these credible allegations, Durazo continued as chief until his term concluded ten months later.Footnote 6 Buendía's exposure of the Río Tula case, as the multiple murders came to be known, signaled not only police involvement but also public officials' willingness to leak information, facilitating the publication of high-profile corruption scandals.Footnote 7 This practice both reflected and contributed to growing conflict within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that had ruled Mexico and controlled its presidency for some 50 years.
Historians have not generally viewed the Mexican press as an important site of political engagement or contestation. Instead, the literature has focused on mass media as a vehicle for spreading an emerging national culture and identity.Footnote 8 Scholarly and popular characterizations of Mexican journalists, meanwhile, emphasize reporters' self-censorship, abetted by the notorious carrots of subsidized newsprint and cash-stuffed envelopes.Footnote 9 Thus, narratives of twentieth-century Mexico often describe national print media as impotent, co-opted, or complicit in maintaining the PRI's rule.Footnote 10 New scholarship, however, has begun using the conceptual frame of the public sphere to argue that media, art, and crime tabloids forged antiauthoritarian subjectivities, and in doing so created a critical public.Footnote 11 However, no work has examined the ways in which political elites and journalists collaborated to pressure the ruling regime to democratize from within.
Using previously unexamined sources such as Buendía's personal correspondence, column drafts, and leaked documents, this article illustrates three key aspects of columnists' role in political change that have escaped historical analysis.Footnote 12 First, the leaking of information signaled a greater degree of openness and conflict within the post-1968 PRI than scholars have generally assumed.Footnote 13 Over the course of the 1970s, select columns, such as Buendía's Red Privada, became conduits through which the regime's disaffected officials publicly aired internal dissent and forced issues by exposing them in print.Footnote 14 Information politics, which subtly relied upon keeping certain secrets while revealing others, became an increasingly divisive form of political engagement. Columns revealed cleavages between the government and the ruling party and sharpened the lines of disagreement among regime officials. Second, the breadth of Buendía's targets demonstrates that the front pages of the national press could be quite confrontational.Footnote 15 Despite his ambiguous relations with the PRI's political power brokers and his dense informant networks, Buendía exposed myriad corruption cases that took aim at governors, congressional representatives, cabinet members, the Church, the police, and the conservative opposition. The PRI's increasingly vocal and progressive wing shared Buendía's desire to uproot corruption and, at times, facilitated his reportage. He allied with public officials who, because of the regime's ideological flexibility, were able to push to reform the party from within. Thus, Buendía's exposure of political wrongdoing constituted both a sign and a source of internal regime dissent.
Scholars and journalists often cite 1968 as a watershed that ushered in decades of political opening.Footnote 16 The PRI's attempts to reinvent itself in the wake of international delegitimization began with President Luis Echeverría's (1970–1976) promises of “democratic opening”—the moderate though never complete easing of press censorship, the release of political prisoners, and the reclaiming of leftist rhetoric. The public sphere continued to open under José López Portillo (1976–1982), who underwrote the creation of the investigative newspaper Unomásuno and advanced legislation permitting greater electoral competitiveness.Footnote 17 While one can certainly find more continuities than ruptures after 1968, these measures did point to one significant change: the regime began allowing political leaders and journalists alike to publicly express greater criticism. Given the rising incidence of leaks—surely one of the unintended consequences of such measures— discussions of democratic change increasingly emphasized transparency.
Finally, Buendía's column engaged multiple publics, forming part of progressive priísta attempts to make Mexican politics accessible to a wider audience.Footnote 18 He integrated popular voices into the most prominent spaces of print media, using letters from readers writing from las provincias to link local stories to national concerns. Buendía also wielded his influence to distribute favors, positioning himself as an intermediary between political elites and supplicant readers. In the process, he occupied a liminal space as both a collaborator and critic of the PRI regime.
Considerations of the Mexican press often recur to well-worn dichotomies between freedom and co-optation. Three decades after his untimely death, Buendía remains a polarizing figure in these discussions. On the one hand, some journalists and scholars point to Buendía's close relations with power holders as indicative of the corruption that pervaded twentieth-century Mexican journalism.Footnote 19 They argue that this was exemplified by Buendía's possession of a badge granted to him by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), the maligned domestic intelligence agency.Footnote 20 On the other hand, sympathetic observers maintain that Buendía's brave exposure of political wrongdoing led to his assassination in May 1984 and his enshrinement as an independent journalist.Footnote 21 This article demonstrates that columnists generated new expectations of transparency and accountability, even while benefiting from their close relationships with public officials. By departing from the focus on liberal press norms, which evaluate reporters by their autonomy from the state, this article sheds new light on the nature of one-party rule and journalists' role in Mexican politics.Footnote 22
Progressive Priístas and Restless Publics
In 1941, at age 15, Buendía moved from Zitácuaro, Michoacán, to Mexico City, where he enrolled at the Jesuit seminary Instituto Patria.Footnote 23 The son of a working-class family, he later recalled feeling like an outsider, distinguished by his dress and sensibilities from his middle-class peers.Footnote 24 He eventually abandoned plans for the priesthood, and in 1948 began reporting for La Nación, the official organ of the conservative Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). In 1953, he became a crime reporter for the popular Mexico City tabloid La Prensa, which had historically collaborated with the government.Footnote 25 Buendía's journalism offered him social mobility. By 1961, he had ascended to the newspaper's directorship and was contributing two regular columns.Footnote 26 As director, Buendía built extensive networks within the political system, and these connections facilitated his 1965 transition to the public sector, where he became press secretary for the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), the state-owned electric utility company.Footnote 27 Buendía's trajectory was not unique. For material and careerist reasons, journalists with elite connections regularly transitioned between newsrooms and government employment.
Despite his position within a powerful public institution, Buendía continued to highlight official corruption in his column, which appeared three times a week in the new daily El Día.Footnote 28 His criticism was representative of the newspaper's left-leaning coverage of labor issues and urban poverty. A privately owned newspaper founded in 1962, El Día emerged out of public divisions within the ruling party. Progressive PRI members advocated for social reform and party democratization, rejecting the anticommunism of the Adolfo López Mateos administration (1958–1964).Footnote 29 Instrumental in the creation of El Día, they imagined the newspaper would not only expand middle-class political spaces but also counterbalance more conservative print media.Footnote 30 Internal party divisions thus created the institutional context for Buendía's column.
Buendía's willingness to attack official corruption and politicize a broad readership is evident in an El Día column he published on December 19, 1966.Footnote 31 Writing about the recent murder of a Mexico City prisoner, he argued that police had colluded with drug traffickers to cover up the crime. He used the metaphor of Tío Lolo, or “playing dumb,” to imply that the subsequent police investigation was mere performance. At the same time, Buendía suggested to readers that with the help of his column they could act as detectives capable of discovering police involvement. He portrayed himself as playing dumb, which allowed him to highlight the importance of remaining skeptical when consuming official press reports. In his Tío Lolo role he wrote, “The day they published this news, I was sitting in the café with two old dogs from the crime beat. Leafing through the newspaper, I showed my ignorance with this question: Why would [the witnesses] refuse to give a statement, if the ‘person’ that they feared was not present [during the interrogation]?”Footnote 32
The didactic narrative that followed signals Buendía's early commitment to engaging a broader audience. He reproduced his conversation with the crime reporters, drawing upon the style and approach of nota roja reporting, which privileged popular testimonies over police statements.Footnote 33 In the purported conversation, Buendía planted clues regarding the corrupt officer's identity, which he left for readers to decipher. According to the crime reporters “sitting” with him, the witnesses had refused to talk because they knew that the interrogating police officer worked with the murderers. When Buendía asked for the officer's name, one of his colleagues simply pointed to the newspaper article on the table and stated, “this guy,” adding that “thousands of people know he is a drug trafficker.” By describing the reporter physically pointing to the newspaper, Buendía suggested that this information was publicly available but needed to be interpreted by informed journalists. He closed the column with an intentionally naïve question, asking why police would conduct an investigation if they were directly involved in the murder. So that the implications raised by this question were not lost, Buendía described his colleagues' response: “[The crime reporters] cracked up and when they stopped laughing, one asked me: “Do you know the Tío Lolo game?”Footnote 34 The column, like many of Buendía's contributions, was both biting and playful. Through the metaphor of playing dumb, he argued that corruption fed upon widespread complicity. Even while working as the press secretary for a public institution, Buendía leveled criticism at officials and reporters for failing to hold police accountable.
Buendía's was not the only column to make politics intelligible for readers. Indeed, regime officials themselves increasingly adopted this approach. In 1967, for example, Secretary of the Interior Luis Echeverría created the La Prensa column titled Política en las Rocas, which gave an accessible primer of contemporary politics. However, readers did not know whose views the pseudonymous column reflected. After he assumed the presidency in 1970, Echeverría continued to project his position from another La Prensa column, Granero Político.Footnote 35 Even as television grew in popularity, high-ranking officials viewed print media as essential for political communication.
By consciously seeking to activate a citizenry, Buendía formed part of the restless Mexico City publics that had demanded accountability since the early 1960s. However, his calls for political opening were more moderate than students' pitched demands for democratization. After the military occupied Mexico City's Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in 1956, student protests increasingly deployed a new language of democracy, adopted protest strategies of direct action, and proclaimed the rejection of PRI corporatism, embodied by official unions.Footnote 36 A flourishing art scene, underwritten by federal government initiatives, also expressed the rejection of authoritarian culture.Footnote 37
Buendía's working-class background distanced him from the protesters. In a 1967 column, he echoed widespread criticism of students at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).Footnote 38 UNAM was the hub of Mexican elite socialization and the site where many student confrontations with police occurred.Footnote 39 Buendía claimed that UNAM students were juniors, or spoiled rich kids, who had been accepted at the university because of their parents' influence.Footnote 40 In a column published on March 14, 1968, just before he took a three-year journalism hiatus, Buendía presaged the police violence that would escalate in July and spark a broader-based movement.Footnote 41 The column discussed recent threats by the Mexico City chief of police to shut down students' “public disturbances.” Buendía noted that many might view such statements as excessive, but stated his own belief that “the limit has been reached.” Citing robberies and takeovers of public transportation vehicles, Buendía affirmed, “If we want to live in a civilized society, there is no other recourse than the use of police force and criminal penalties.”Footnote 42 Describing the students' activity as illegal and illegitimate, he sanctioned the use of force to restore order.
On October 2, 1968, state security forces attacked and arrested thousands of students protesting in the Plaza of Tlatelolco. The massacre resulted in hundreds of deaths and brought the student movement, which had been building momentum throughout the summer, to a violent end. The event profoundly affected left-leaning Mexico City intellectuals and journalists, who harshly criticized the government's actions. Many considered it an inflection point that accelerated the PRI's declining legitimacy.Footnote 43 By contrast, Buendía took a hiatus from journalism and joined the presidential campaign of Echeverría, who many journalists believed to have ordered the violence.Footnote 44
The events of 1968 did not politicize Buendía as they did so many of his peers, and his later writings did not reference the massacre as a pivotal moment in Mexican history. Like progressive priístas, he criticized the ruling party for failing to expand popular political participation, end official union corruption, and reduce poverty. However, he did not share the movements' outright rejection of the regime as authoritarian. Even as he became more critical of successive administrations, Buendía denied any political position.Footnote 45 Indeed, the only clear ideologies he openly espoused were anti-corruption, anti-imperialism, and rejection of the extreme right. By attacking the influence of the CIA, the Church, and Opus Dei, Buendía embraced the rhetoric of PRI progressives.
Buendía's personal style allowed him to connect with his sources and a wider audience that saw power, not ideology, as the impetus behind Mexican politics. While many journalists sought to separate themselves from political power after 1968, Buendía emulated the dress of security agents, the state authorities most associated with gratuitous violence. He famously carried a gun for personal protection, sported silk suits, and wore dark glasses at all times. This style was not simply an aesthetic choice but also a political one that identified Buendía as an outsider to his colleagues in the UNAM Political and Social Sciences Department, where he began giving journalism classes in 1973. Unlike the intellectuals and students who donned jeans, t-shirts, and folkloric garb to distinguish themselves from the “bourgeoisie,” Buendía's sartorial choices associated him with power brokers.Footnote 46
Masculine sociability also facilitated Buendía's entry into the vast political networks he maintained, but did not dull his critical faculties. For example, he enjoyed his favorite hobbies of gun collecting and target shooting with some of the nation's most powerful officials.Footnote 47 These very figures later became the targets of enduring investigations, earning some of Buendía's harshest criticism.Footnote 48 He regularly received invitations to “go shooting” from the director of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the state-owned and operated oil company.Footnote 49 On one occasion, Buendía responded playfully to an invitation with a note and a nine-millimeter Beretta, which he offered to lend the director “so that ‘Team Pemex’ does not feel disadvantaged on the eve of its competition against ‘Team Red Privada,’” referring to his column.Footnote 50 In another letter, Buendía accepted the Mexico City mayor's gift of a gun, and in return sent a bottle of champagne “of the same caliber.”Footnote 51 In the context of strict gun control laws, target shooting and carrying a concealed weapon represented elite privileges.Footnote 52 Indeed, it was only through the patronage of DFS officials that Buendía procured the badge that permitted him to carry a legal firearm.Footnote 53
When Echeverría won the presidency in 1970, he attempted to pacify a discontented, urban middle class by declaring a “democratic opening.” He expanded opportunities for young people to participate politically and incorporated many former student leaders into newly created academic centers and public positions.Footnote 54 Yet violence against protesters persisted. On June 10, 1971, state-hired thugs attacked 10,000 students marching in Mexico City.Footnote 55 Echeverría blamed the Mexico City mayor and asked for his resignation. Buendía, who at the time was working under the mayor as director of press and public relations, also promptly resigned.Footnote 56 He resumed writing his column for El Día, and in 1973 became press director of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, one of the prominent institutions Echeverría had created to accommodate disaffected intellectuals and academics.
Echeverría recognized that the press could serve as an escape valve for discontent within civil society and the PRI.Footnote 57 He expressed support for Excélsior, the nation's most prestigious newspaper, and made director Julio Scherer García a close ally. Excélsior began printing critical editorial pieces on controversial topics, such as the guerrilla insurgency. While publicly maintaining his tolerance of criticism, Echeverría surreptitiously published defamatory leaflets against Scherer García.Footnote 58 By 1975, the president had grown increasingly frustrated with the newspaper's editorial staff, which had begun publishing articles describing the PRI's waning power.Footnote 59 On July 8, 1976, the president conspired with disaffected Excélsior cooperative members to orchestrate a coup within the newspaper, leading to the dismissal of Scherer García and his editorial team. US journalists denounced the intervention as an attack against free speech.Footnote 60
Shortly after the Excélsior coup, Echeverría relaunched Buendía's journalism career, a fact that suggests that Buendía does not fit comfortably into idealized notions of journalistic independence. The lame-duck president secretly acquired Mexico's largest periodical chain, El Sol de México, in a bid to retain political influence after he left office.Footnote 61 With this personal acquisition, he underscored the important role of the press in Mexican politics. Echeverría offered Buendía a position as the newspaper's star columnist, and his column subsequently appeared in the chain's 37 regional papers. Thus, Buendía's ascent to public positions and his opportunity at El Sol de México emerged from the patronage of a powerful public official.
Secrecy vs. Exposure
After taking office in December 1976, López Portillo took steps to recover dwindling middle-class support for the PRI.Footnote 62 He selected as his secretary of the interior Jesús Reyes Heroles, a well-respected liberal intellectual who embodied the PRI's reformist and left-leaning wing. Together, López Portillo and Reyes Heroles took concrete steps to demonstrate the country's democratization by proposing laws collectively referred to as the Political Reform.Footnote 63 In December 1977, Congress passed the legislative bundle, which legalized leftist opposition parties, granted amnesty to armed insurgent groups, and amended Article 6 of the Constitution to guarantee the “right to information.” Without a mechanism to ensure transparency, this amendment changed little in practice, but its passage launched public discussions about the social role of the press.Footnote 64
This period also witnessed the arrival of new voices in the public sphere. Exiled intellectuals from Argentina, Chile, and Cuba became key contributors to Mexico City publications, and many Mexican writers returned from studying abroad, bringing with them emergent interests and ideas. López Portillo also encouraged the proliferation of critical news publications—a strategy he later lamented as one of his “greatest failures.”Footnote 65 Under his administration, four new dailies opened—more than under any other twentieth-century Mexican president.Footnote 66 These developments expanded print media spaces for critical debate.
Shortly after Buendía's return to full-time journalism, columnists recognized him as the pioneer of a new style of political column that divulged high-level information, rather than common gossip.Footnote 67 This contrasted with the traditional function of columns, which, according to a PRI information operative, had historically served as “mailboxes where politicians sent each other public messages,” unintelligible to everyday readers.Footnote 68 Most political columns were notoriously difficult for ordinary readers to decode because published pieces often referenced private conversations. By the 1970s, the genre could still be considered an insider's political guide, but many columnists had begun to engage a broader readership by writing in lay terms and discussing policy issues of wider concern. No longer buried in the middle pages of a newspaper, the most prominent columns enjoyed coveted front-page placement.
As Mexico's premier columnist, Buendía began appearing for speaking engagements to discuss the political role of the press. For Buendía, journalism should perform a civic function, and this required that politicians abstain from paying reporters for what they wrote. In a 1977 presentation organized by El Sol de México, he explained, “Columns . . . cannot be subjected to any interest other than the most lofty, [that is] the social interest, which must be served thoroughly and, if necessary, safeguarded.”Footnote 69 In his mind, the public good was served when readers could access the government's inner workings. He envisioned journalism, and political columns in particular, as enfranchising and providing civic orientation for Mexicans who were disengaged politically. Thus, Buendía hoped that columns would not only inform the public but also actively engender one where it did not formerly exist. However, his grandiose assertion did not adequately acknowledge the large and increasingly vocal publics that had been active in Mexico City since the early 1960s.
Conferences and roundtables on the Mexican press during the 1970s mirrored the increased global concern with journalistic professionalization, which stressed reporters' objectivity and autonomy from the state.Footnote 70 While enrollments remained low, the decade witnessed a marked expansion of Mexican journalism schools, and an increase in the number and strength of professional organizations.Footnote 71 However, Buendía did not embrace liberal journalistic norms without question. In particular, he viewed their emphasis on balance and objectivity as stifling a journalist's voice and thus his or her effect. He argued instead that political columns revolutionized the relationship between journalists and their readers by providing “something more intimate than the impersonally written, sterilely objective, and rigorously impartial article, feature, or interview.”Footnote 72 Buendía deployed stylistic tools that suggested he was divulging secrets in confidence and thereby conferring privileged access to readers. For example, he often wrote in the second person when introducing new pieces of information, with statements like, “You can be very certain that. . .”Footnote 73 He also wove his personal experiences into his accounts, while maintaining an air of formality by referring to himself in the third person. “The columnist runs a different type of personal risk, and of course does so consciously, by affirming . . .”Footnote 74 Buendía used his voice and perspective to lend his columns credibility and widespread appeal.
Buendía's presentations initially elided a fundamental contradiction of political columns: that a journalist had to serve multiple interests in order to access information. Columnists had to maintain working relationships with their informants, and a well-crafted political column relied as heavily on dissimulation as it did on revelation. Columnists divulged leaked information quite selectively, and typically withheld the names of their informants and the details of the exchanges by which they acquired evidence. Buendía's personal archive contains presumably leaked documents that never appeared in his columns, indicating that he played an active role in choosing the information he wished to reveal.Footnote 75 Informants also concealed politically damaging stories by diverting reporters' attention with other leaks. Buendía at times worried that hiding the interests behind a column could undermine its democratizing potential. He addressed this concern in a July 1978 interview with López Portillo.Footnote 76 Referencing the common practice of paying columnists to print positive coverage or attack rivals, Buendía asked the president, “In your opinion, should public officials abstain from any action or neglect that could link them to these backroom dealings in information and commentary?”Footnote 77 Buendía's question revealed his contradictory view of political columns. He had himself acquired power in part because of the information he chose to withhold or expose. However, he also recognized that the culture of secrecy allowed political figures to influence content, often without readers' knowledge.
Acknowledging in print what had been known informally, and only among a select few, represented a betrayal of the norms that characterized state-press sociability. Buendía's interview questions recognized and bridged the two modes of communication—insider exchange versus public information—that structured Mexico City politics. The first mode consisted of the implicit assumptions and privileged knowledge shared by journalists and the political elite through gossip, rumor, and quotidian workplace conversations. The second was information available for public consumption, printed in books or the press, broadcast on radio or television, and delivered through speeches. By linking the two spheres, Buendía hoped to bring readers into greater participation in Mexican politics. However, no column resulted from Buendía's interview with López Portillo, perhaps suggesting the president's unwillingness to address these issues publicly. On August 17, 1978, Buendía left El Sol de México, frustrated by excessive interventions in his columns. Eleven days later, his column began appearing in the major daily El Universal under the title Red Privada (Private Network).Footnote 78
Columnismo: Leaking Private Disputes for Public Consumption
Shortly after Buendía's arrival at El Universal, a censorship attempt sparked public debates about the role columns played in political life. In his November 1, 1978, column, Buendía revealed an alleged kickback scheme in progress between the ministers of agrarian reform and agriculture and the director of the Bank for Rural Development.Footnote 79 To address dwindling agricultural production, the officials proposed to rent, through unions created specifically for the purpose, 60,000 John Deere tractors to small-scale farmers. Mexico had one of the world's fastest growing populations, and López Portillo was an advocate of agricultural self-sufficiency. Buendía argued that the union and the three officials stood to profit enormously under the guise of rural development, emphasizing that the secretary of agrarian reform worked for John Deere in Mexico. He explained, “The operation will benefit three North American tractor companies—one of which will likely continue to be represented in Mexico by the Secretary of the Agrarian Reform, [Antonio] Toledo Corro. And [the deal] will create an almost unprecedented opportunity for earnings by a machinery rental ‘union.’” Buendía intimated that the union would simply funnel money to the ministers. At a cost of $200 million, Buendía described the plan as “one of the most audaciously assembled operations in recent decades.”Footnote 80
In the column, Buendía transcribed two leaked documents produced by the ministries of Agrarian Reform and Agriculture that spelled out the plan in detail. Rather than simply summarizing the contents, he used transcriptions to prove his credibility. This was also intended, he wrote, “to show the President the evidence.” Although he knew that López Portillo was already aware of the deal, Buendía printed the memorandum as if the executive would be seeing it for the first time. By suggesting that the column had informed the president of the corrupt scheme, Buendía publicly pressured López Portillo to respond.Footnote 81 When El Universal's editor refused to publish the column, Buendía resigned from the newspaper. However, he soon contracted his Red Privada column to the Agencia Mexicana de Información, a privately-owned syndication service.Footnote 82 His column would be associated with Excélsior and appear in dozens of regional newspapers. This move allowed Buendía to avoid censorship more easily. If one news outlet chose to censor his column, it would still be printed in dozens of other publications. This, in turn, raised the cost to newspaper directors of withholding an article, as it would be obvious when such an act occurred and possibly shame the offending director. In contracting Buendía's column, Excélsior's government-allied director indicated that the newspaper still allowed spaces for critical coverage, even after the 1976 intervention.Footnote 83
After the El Universal director censored Red Privada, Buendía sent the offending column to his close friend and fellow columnist Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, who arranged for its publication in the next issue of the newsmagazine Proceso. Thus, the existence of multiple critical outlets facilitated Buendía's circumvention of censorship. The Proceso article appeared under the title “The Red Privada That Was Not Published,” enhancing its perceived importance and sparking debates about corruption and rural development that lasted for nearly two months.Footnote 84 One journalist described the piece as provoking “a small scandal” and an “alarmist over-reaction,” accusing Buendía of conspiring against agricultural mechanization.Footnote 85 However, many columnists argued that the article served an important function by exposing a policy decision to public debate. According to Granados Chapa, the revelations underscored that important decisions should not be “incubated behind closed doors, where, one also suspects, [decision-makers] protect and foment private interests above public ones.”Footnote 86 Well-known Excélsior columnist José Luís Mejías similarly described the tractors debacle as illustrating that “every measure, whether administrative or political, of relative importance must be exposed to and justified before public opinion.”Footnote 87 These columnists declared that Buendía was successfully undermining backroom deals by exposing them to public scrutiny. However, the columnists also sidestepped an apparent paradox of political columns: they used less-than-transparent methods to promote transparency in public affairs.
Compared to many of Buendía's other columns, the content of the tractors piece was far from scandalous. However, the much-publicized censorship amplified the article's perceived relevance and granted it staying power. Nearly a year later, for example, an Excélsior reader recalled the article in an unpublished letter to the editor. He cited the tractors column as one of many by Mejías and Buendía “that explore issues, which are often difficult to investigate in a political system where the majority of public and private issues are dealt with behind closed doors.”Footnote 88 The letter indicated that readers saw Buendía's (and others') columns as important not only because they exposed scandals, but also because they used documented leaks to do so.
Official responses to the article highlight the sense of crisis generated by leaking. For López Portillo, political columns were dangerous because they bypassed the centralized management of public relations. The president, who recorded his reaction in his diary and reproduced it years later in his memoirs, believed Buendía's article epitomized the potentially disastrous consequences of critical political columns. As he asserted, “The complete disorder of ‘columnismo’ makes me think of designating a communication coordinator because . . . I have the impression that [Reyes Heroles] is manipulating, disrupting, [and] mobilizing columnists against other politicians.”Footnote 89 Political columns provided even the president's closest advisor, Reyes Heroles, with alternate mechanisms for forcing policy issues.
López Portillo's reaction illustrates how leaks could raise suspicions, spark internal disputes, or cause mounting tensions to erupt. A few days later, the president wrote in his diary that the plan for agricultural mechanization had “become poisoned.” The columnist Buendía had “spoiled it, presenting it as an immoral operation, and that's how it's become known.”Footnote 90 López Portillo referenced the internal conflict that arose because of the leak, noting that Reyes Heroles “had to defend himself because [the ministers of Agrarian Reform and Agriculture] blamed him for mobilizing the press against them.”Footnote 91 Reyes Heroles embodied the liberal and reformist wing of the PRI. While the president hoped to harness this credibility and use it to underscore his administration's progressivism, he viewed the leak as undermining this goal.
In the late 1970s, leaks by high-ranking officials signaled a new trend toward resolving intra-party conflict by exposing it to the reading public. The availability of more newspapers and magazines willing to report on leaks, the increased government tolerance of criticism, and the sense of a regime in perpetual crisis encouraged this trend. By the close of 1978, a neologism, ‘columnismo,’ had surfaced to describe the proliferation of critical political columns. The term found its way into political speeches, López Portillo's diary, and, of course, the press itself. In December, public broadcasting network Canal Once devoted a full episode to the topic.Footnote 92 That same month, Mexico City Attorney General Agustín Alanís Fuentes declared, “Political columns provoke petty confrontations between functionaries and damage the government's image.”Footnote 93 In the press, his speech became a reference point for the crisis provoked by columnismo.
The speech expressed the opinion, articulated frequently by both journalists and public officials, that columnismo transgressed the unspoken boundaries of what could be printed. A few days later, the powerful news broadcaster Jacobo Zabludovsky weighed in with the opinion that columnismo represented a “peculiar phenomenon of our times.”Footnote 94 In his weekly column for the magazine Siempre!, he observed that the number of political columns across Mexico City's 28 periodicals had ballooned to 123. Reflecting on the impact of this proliferation, he cited the attorney general's concern that political columns increasingly divided public officials. Zabludovsky underscored that this was new, noting that he had never heard a public official discuss the press in this way.Footnote 95
Reputedly a “direct spokesperson for the presidency,” Zabludovsky agreed that the indeterminacy of a columnist's allegiances, sources, and information posed unique challenges to regime stability.Footnote 96 He elaborated, “Suddenly, one finds in such columns accounts of secret issues or private meetings, accounts whose source can only be one of those involved.”Footnote 97 While columns had long been used to channel political gossip, Zabludovsky implied that public officials rarely provided documented leaks on substantive policy issues. Leaks made it increasingly difficult for the administration to keep closed-door exchanges hidden from the reading public. Perhaps Zabludovsky overstated the unprecedented nature of columnismo, but his piece underscores the prevalent belief that columns represented a new threat to regime unity.
Granados Chapa echoed Zabludovsky, emphasizing that public officials now viewed columnists as political liabilities. If columnists had once kept secrets, he argued, they could no longer be trusted to do so. In a column in Cine Mundial, a newspaper focused on cultural news, he elaborated: “Columns now deliver such dense political information that even the proverbs have been modified accordingly. Now it is said that the politician in search of fortune (in all senses of the word) should make sure that he does not have a [spinal] column that exposes him.”Footnote 98 Here, Granados Chapa modified a popular proverb, cola que le pisen (literally, a tail that can be stepped on), which in essence warned against exposing oneself by having skeletons in the closet. In changing “cola” (tail) to “columna” (spinal column), he offered a double entendre suggesting that public officials now worried that columnists would reveal their transgressions.
While celebrating the new power enjoyed by columnists, Granados Chapa worried that columnismo failed to fully engage readers. He emphasized that informed citizenship required the merging of oral and written knowledge. In political and journalistic circles, he noted, everyone knew which columns were run like shops that peddled positive “mentions” of political leaders for the right price. He worried, however, that “the public takes longer to find out,” implying that readers did not know how to determine a column's credibility.Footnote 99 For Granados Chapa, political columns failed to achieve their democratizing potential: their use of innuendo excluded non-insiders.
Political columns often wove together anecdotes, allusions, and, at times, documents, allowing writers to include veiled references that only certain political or press insiders could recognize. This narrative strategy enabled all involved—the columnist, peers, informants, and readers—to consider themselves “in on the game.”Footnote 100 The layered style was apparent, for example, in Mejías's popular column titled Los Intocables (The Untouchables), which had been nationally syndicated since 1977.Footnote 101 In the December 12, 1978, issue of Excélsior, Mejías commented on a recent column by a “famous” but unnamed columnist, obliquely referring to Buendía's column about the tractors deal.Footnote 102 Mejías's piece demonstrates the ways in which columnists introduced new information while withholding key details that would make the piece intelligible to a wide readership.
According to Mejías, columnismo aggravated internal regime divisions and weakened the administration by exposing its vulnerabilities to the reading public. He spelled out the political consequences of the tractors leak, highlighting the stakes of Buendía's piece for readers. Through a series of long, unattributed quotes—presumably from a public official—the columnist divulged that the president worried because “attacks against the regime are being encouraged from within” and because the “‘aggressions’ against the party were aimed at the system as well.” According to one quote, the president had also remarked that it was “the first time that there have been attempts to invalidate the PRI as a political instrument of the government . . . by someone who considers himself to be more powerful than the system.” With the phrase “someone who considers himself to be more powerful than the system,” Mejías's informant indicated that the leaker had broken the unspoken rules of the political game by revealing an internal dispute. Mejías did not name his source but pointed directly to the person the informant was referring to: “This someone lacks a name, but all of the column's context screams that it is about the Secretary of the Interior.”Footnote 103 By declaring that it was Reyes Heroles who had leaked the information behind Buendía's tractors piece, Mejías revealed insider knowledge to readers. At the same time, he never explicitly identified Buendía's column—thus only those who read multiple newspapers could understand Mejías's reference.
Debates about columnismo signaled the growing perception that the press represented a new political threat. By the late 1970s, the most prominent columnists regularly acted as confidants of powerful politicians, trafficked sensitive information, and gave mediated voice to readers' complaints. Selected columns became important sites of internal party disputes, and journalists influenced the course of these conflicts. As pioneers of columnismo, Buendía, Granados Chapa, and Mejías savored the media attention that elevated columnists to politicians' levels, with the power to make or break careers. In practice, however, this rarely occurred. Hundreds of columns revealed official corruption, but very few resulted in the sanctioning of offenders. In the case of the tractors scandal, for example, the administration eventually opted to purchase only half the projected machinery, but the overall price tag remained nearly the same.Footnote 104 While giving the appearance of accountability, the government continued forward with the original plan. Yet public officials' intense concerns about columnismo indicate that public attacks on their reputations did serve as punishment. The more that political leaders decided to wage their battles in prominent columns, the greater influence journalists had on high-level political debates.
Censorship and the Failure to Contain Columnismo
One month after the tractors scandal erupted, Buendía again found himself negotiating the content of his column. This time, his alleged ally in the tractors column, Reyes Heroles, prevented a column's publication. On January 3, 1979, Buendía exposed an internal document that revealed that prices would again be raised on staple goods and gasoline.Footnote 105 This news, contradictory to what had been published in the public budget, would be devastating for middle- and working-class Mexicans, whose purchasing power had steadily declined since the 1976 peso devaluation. Buendía planted clues about the leaked document's authorship, indicating that two functionaries from the Ministry of Finance and four from the Ministry of Planning and Budget had produced the report on November 17, 1978. He also described the document as 18 pages long and containing 15 tables: “Signatures are observed on each of the pages.”Footnote 106 Through the inclusion of these minutiae, Buendía demonstrated that he had the report (or a copy of it) in his possession and also underscored the document's authenticity. At the same time, he was issuing a veiled warning, implying that he had withheld certain information but could reveal it if necessary. Buendía closed by promising that the next day's column would unveil additional details.
That afternoon, Reyes Heroles called the Excélsior director, asking him to withhold Buendía's column from publication because it threatened to reveal “a state secret.”Footnote 107 When the Red Privada column failed to appear the following day, Buendía confronted Reyes Heroles in a letter.Footnote 108 Buendía's letter demystified leaks, describing them as part of the everyday exchanges between journalists and public officials. He asserted that columnismo was a central part of political maneuvering. He began by contesting the secretary of the interior's rationale for censorship, asserting that the document had no specific addressee. “Nor [does it have] any outward appearance that marks it as reserved or confidential, even less as a high-level secret. It is at least 50 days old and many people have already handled it.” Buendía continued by defending himself against intimations of unethical behavior: “In thirty years as a journalist, I have never surreptitiously or illegitimately taken a document.” He had, he stressed, obtained the report in a “normal” fashion: “I learned of its existence; it interested me. I asked for it; and they gave it to me. Period.”Footnote 109 In asserting that public officials willingly handed him the report, Buendía emphasized that high-ranking ministers were also invested in the document's exposure. Further, he challenged Reyes Heroles's attacks by underscoring that the column resulted from undeniable divisions within the administration.
Buendía's letter to Reyes Heroles reveals the tenuous alliances between columnists and public officials. Although he had provisioned the government leak on the tractors deal, Reyes Heroles did not hesitate to prevent the publication of a subsequent column that he viewed as damaging. In the final paragraphs, Buendía referred directly to the accusations Reyes Heroles had made against him. Buendía viewed them as unwarranted and unjust, but he nonetheless closed with a note recognizing their personal relationship: “It is more important to me to say that, because of my feelings of friendship and respect toward you—of which I have given proof, I think—I was bitterly surprised by your comments to Excélsior's General Director yesterday.” Referencing their shared history of reciprocity and goodwill, Buendía reassured Reyes Heroles that he and the director had decided not to print the second portion of the document “to neutralize any charge of malice.”Footnote 110 Buendía nonetheless perceived the minister of the interior's intervention as a breach in their informal code of conduct.
López Portillo's memoirs reveal his own frustrations with the leaks of government information. One week after Buendía's column on the budget appeared, the president wrote, “We still do not control the Press; it feeds on the sale of anguish, alarm, disappointment, and disillusionment. . .. At any rate, I will meet with directors and columnists to do something about it.”Footnote 111 López Portillo noted that the decision to raise prices on staples and gasoline, already a difficult one, had been made even more complicated by Buendía's column. Recognizing that Buendía was not solely responsible, however, he continued, “The Ministry of Planning and Budget is insufficient and continues failing me.”Footnote 112 By standing behind the decision to raise prices, López Portillo suggested that the ministry's failure had been its divisiveness, which had led someone to leak the report. During this liminal period of press opening, López Portillo considered critical coverage to be a privilege, rather than a right. However, divisions within the regime itself made complete control of the press implausible.
In isolation, these interactions between journalists and politicians reveal little more than petty politics—the wrangling for influence, recognition, and power—with minimal consequence for ordinary Mexicans. Taken together, however, they illustrate the ways in which these public struggles engaged readers by making them knowing observers of the decision-making process. While some officials genuinely believed that a vibrant public sphere was important for democracy in a broad sense, many politicos involved the reading public solely in hopes that exposing policy discussions could alter their direction. The press acted as an escape valve for substantive regime divisions, and censorship attempts could not reverse this development.
In a column published on January 22, roughly three weeks after the leak regarding the price increases, Buendía scolded Reyes Heroles, without mentioning the secretary of the interior by name, for sending “an avalanche of government advisories regarding just how serious it can be when [journalists] dare to inquire beyond [official] press bulletins.”Footnote 113 Deploying his signature biblical allusions, Buendía wrote that, in light of the pope's recent visit to Mexico, it was “appropriate to ask of certain functionaries a good act of contrition and a promise to sin no more against the right to information.”Footnote 114 By printing his obliquely worded accusations against Reyes Heroles, rather than simply gossiping with other officials, Buendía publicly shamed the secretary of the interior and raised questions regarding his dedication to the information reform policy he had authored. A few months later, Reyes Heroles resigned, in part due to the conflicts stirred by his engagement with and failure to contain columnismo.
Buendía's Contemporary Readership and Historical Legacy
As he attacked the reputations of others, Buendía took pains to protect his own public image. He developed a personal system for establishing his credibility and transparency. Conscious of the intense scrutiny he was under because of his column's popularity, he repeatedly documented his return of gifts sent by politicos or other influential figures, whether they were an envelope stuffed with $1,000 from the director of promotion and public relations or a two-peso gold coin from the secretary of agriculture.Footnote 115 By documenting these refusals, Buendía built an archive to substantiate his claims of journalistic independence. He believed that printed documents carried a “truth effect” that lent them credibility superior to that of oral testimony.Footnote 116 Nor did Buendía permit attacks on his reputation to go unanswered. For example, after giving a lecture for clergy in August 1979, he was outraged to learn that organizers of the talk had published a biting cartoon that took a blow at his Red Privada column. The drawing consisted of an “open network” sketched with dollar signs, suggesting that the columnist would sell his services to the highest bidder. In a scathing letter to the director of the Episcopate Press, Buendía demanded to know, “Was this author trying to tell me that I am a dishonest journalist? Why didn't he say so to me during the talk? Is he not man enough?”Footnote 117 For Buendía, the cartoonist's failure to challenge him openly revealed cowardice and effeminacy. He insisted that his letter be shown to the cartoonist: “After fighting so much to build my public image, I cannot tolerate some fool throwing mud on me.”Footnote 118 Saving the letter for his records, the columnist curated his own macho legacy—he would fight to defend his reputation.
By the close of 1979, tensions between the press and the administration had grown to the point where Buendía felt even greater urgency to protect his credibility. In the annual presidential address on September 1 of that year López Portillo had devoted considerable time to attacking print media. Questioning his own efforts to foster an opening of the press, he now argued that freedom of expression only cultivated sensationalism. He pronounced, “Fear is sold as news, blackmail is used to extort, fame is built by defaming, credit built by discrediting . . . [The press] lies to make arguments, and it lives to slander.”Footnote 119 Prior to that speech, the president had delegated the management of journalists to his cabinet members. His 1979 address acknowledged the administration's role in what he considered to be the declining quality of the press. It also marked a shift toward a much more openly confrontational stance that foreshadowed López Portillo's withdrawal of subsidies from Proceso in 1982.
In a letter to the president's secretary of social communication, Luis Javier Solana, Buendía emphasized that the need to protect his reputation had become even more acute after López Portillo's address.Footnote 120 Buendía attached a draft of a letter to the president, which he intended to send after receiving Solana's approval.Footnote 121 In the draft, Buendía reported that he had been informed while on an official trip to Panama that he would be receiving money from the Office of the President. He continued, “I do not cast value judgments on the conduct of my colleagues; but within my own personal ethics I have adhered to the unvarying rule of never receiving money, gifts or any other type of compensation, thanks, or a bribe associated with the fulfillment of my journalistic duty.”Footnote 122 While he maintained a polite tone, he asked that his name be removed from the list of journalists to be paid.
In explaining the letter to Solana, Buendía hoped that the secretary would understand “the deeply hurt feelings of a journalist who, like myself, never has asked for, and never will accept bribes of any kind.”Footnote 123 He noted that “the need for clarification was urgent, before the president discovers my name listed when he reviews the charges for the trip,” and requested a prompt reply “before I begin to become nervous.”Footnote 124 Buendía feared that his image would be damaged if the president believed he had accepted a bribe. He suggested that such a discovery would immediately be made public, or used in some other way to restrict coverage, perhaps through blackmail. At the same time, by first sending the letter for Solana's approval, Buendía showed that he respected the rules of the game by making sure that the secretary of social communication would not be caught off guard should the president question him. Despite Buendía's concerns, his own records confirm that by the early 1980s he was able to enjoy great freedom in writing his columns.Footnote 125
As Buendía became a household name, he received increasing amounts of correspondence from across Mexico. He saved these letters, documenting his role as an intermediary and patron for supplicant readers. While readers sometimes wrote in response to a specific column, they often related their frustrated attempts to resolve problems through official and legal channels. They frequently complained that the political system failed to represent their interests, and they viewed writing to Buendía as an opportunity to make their grievances public.Footnote 126 These letters suggest the broad and faithful reception that Red Privada enjoyed and allow us to speculate about changes in political consciousness that prominent columns may have fostered.
Readers' correspondence also indicates that Buendía reached an audience broader than the elites that scholars often assume represented the majority of Mexican newspaper readers.Footnote 127 For example, in January 1978, a Mexico state resident sent Buendía a two-page handwritten note that detailed his demoralizing experience with the health care system.Footnote 128 As a former street vendor in the informal economy, he was not entitled to medical coverage. However, he had sustained infections that required emergency amputations of both feet, leaving him unable to work. He also faced a 6,000-peso medical bill, which, he wrote, “would be impossible to pay . . . given my situation as a poor man.” He noted that he had recurred to multiple public health authorities, but “after two months filling out paperwork, nothing changed.” In desperation, he even solicited help from the nation's first lady, hoping that his story would inspire her sympathy. He closed his letter, “I entreat you, Mr. Buendía, to inform me of which department I need to go in order to get help.”Footnote 129 The author believed Buendía held specialized knowledge and influence that could assist him in his case.
Buendía used his reciprocal relationships with power holders to position himself as an intermediary between readers and the government. To this end, he cultivated multiple informants for later use. He also held a “Day for Readers” in his column, in which he printed readers' complaints and publicized his own role as a patron to the disenfranchised.Footnote 130 Buendía was neither the first nor the only journalist to solicit reader input. Crime reporters historically responded to and published readers' denunciations of abuse by authorities.Footnote 131 By the late 1970s, radio programs also invited contributions from listeners, who called in to discuss recent news articles or to voice complaints.Footnote 132 Thus, while Buendía was particularly powerful, his intermediary role was not unique.
Buendía's reputation for resolving readers' personal issues only grew over time.Footnote 133 In February 1981, Mexico City resident Luis Héctor Valdez sent a letter to denounce that he, along with 20 bystanders, had witnessed about 15 police descend from a truck “Gestapo-style” to rob fruit from a street stand in Mexico City's middle-class Roma neighborhood.Footnote 134 He explained that the “humble couple” who owned the stand had been unable to defend themselves against the police's “gangster-like behavior.” Valdez questioned the relationship between established legal protections under the constitution and their practical application. He wondered, “In practice, are there any individual rights for our people?” Unlike most letter writers, Valdez did not describe himself as a reader of Red Privada, and instead noted that a friend had recommended that he write to Buendía to see if the columnist would publicize the matter.Footnote 135 Even among those who did not regularly read his column, Buendía had gained a reputation as an authority figure who could fulfill state functions. Valdez believed that a denunciation made to Buendía was more likely to result in a fair investigation than one made to the police or the courts.
Similarly, in May 1983, María Luisa Salcedo wrote to Buendía about the abuses she and her husband had suffered nearly a decade earlier.Footnote 136 She described herself as a “modest housewife who reads your column as often as I can.” She accused by name a PRI congressional candidate who had expropriated the Salcedo home outside of Mexico City in 1975. During her congressional campaign that year, the candidate asked to use their home as a base while it remained vacant on the real-estate market. Salcedo and her husband had agreed, but when the race ended with the politician's victory, the congresswoman-elect stationed a guard at their home and prohibited them from returning. Salcedo expressed the feelings she was left with after years of failed legal battles to reclaim their property: she was “both indignant and totally disillusioned to see the types of political representatives imposed upon us and how our laws fall short of bringing justice.” She believed that if Buendía published her story, it might make officials accountable for their actions.Footnote 137
For readers who had encountered injustice, an unresponsive bureaucracy, and corruption, Buendía provided the possibility of expedient resolution. Letters in his archive detail his success in procuring employment and visas and resolving quotidian problems (such as complaints of noisy neighbors) for readers.Footnote 138 He was connected to the political system and could use it to gain favors, but the fact that he remained outside of it lent him greater credibility. He represented the potential for the PRI's regeneration in which so many wanted to believe. In their letters, both Valdez and Salcedo associated the constitution with the foundation of the political system, but at the same time they pointed to a generalized frustration at the lack of accountability. Rather than register their dissent through the PRI's corporative bureaucracies, they looked to the press to voice civil society's protests. Filing these letters in his archive, Buendía curated his historical legacy as a power holder who acted as an intermediary between the state and Mexican readers.
Conclusion
On May 30, 1984, at 6:30 in the evening, Buendía exited his office in Mexico City's Juárez neighborhood and walked toward the parking lot.Footnote 139 At the busy corner where Calle Liverpool meets the major thoroughfare Insurgentes, a figure approached the columnist from behind and shot him five times. Despite the busy hour, Buendía's assistant was the only one to witness the assailant hop on a motorcycle and make his escape. Rumors spread in the press that a high-ranking official of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad had ordered the killing.Footnote 140 Among the causes for suspicion was that DFS agents—the first responders at the scene—immediately ascended the stairs to Buendía's office. They allegedly took as evidence a folder containing his most recent research, which promised to implicate the DFS in the drug trade.Footnote 141 One year later, the discovery of DFS Director José Zorrilla's involvement in drug trafficking provided prosecutors with the motive for the columnist's murder. Yet it was not until January 16, 1993, that Zorrilla was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison.Footnote 142
The murder of a Mexico City journalist, let alone one with Buendía's status, was unprecedented. In comparison to other parts of Latin America, Mexico City had remained one of the safest places to be a reporter. This was underscored by the fact that so many intellectuals exiled from Cuba, Central America, and the Southern Cone came to Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. More than a reversal in the opening up of the press, Buendía's murder signaled the continuation of a capricious policy toward journalists and the expanding influence of drug trafficking on Mexican institutions. Buendía's relationship with DFS informants gave him access to high-level information, raising the profile of his column. As both an insider and a critic, however, the lines of acceptable dissent were constantly shifting, and Buendía's liminal position exposed him to great risk.
In 1985, the film director Ismael Rodríguez Jr. offered a fictionalized portrayal of the Río Tula murders with his film Masacre en el Río Tula.Footnote 143 The movie reminded viewers of Buendía's groundbreaking coverage of the 1982 case, which linked Mexico's police forces to expanding drug trafficking routes. Masacre en el Río Tula told the story of Víctor, a Mexico City cab driver unwittingly drawn into a Colombian criminal gang. The film depicted a villainous Mexico City police force profiting from the capital's surging criminal activity. The Colombian gang and Víctor appear sympathetic in comparison, as the movie ends with their torture and murder at the hands of the police. Within one week of its release, the Cinematography Directorate removed Masacre from major theaters.Footnote 144 The film not only irreverently mocked city police, but also subtly rebuked the Mexican government for attacks against free speech. The police commissioner in the movie warned, “It is more dangerous to kill a journalist than a drug boss.”Footnote 145 Referencing the political fallout of Buendía's assassination, the film intimated that civil society had turned against the PRI.
Buendía's career sheds light on the relationship between the press and Mexico's political opening. As both a regime insider and one of the country's most confrontational columnists, his journalism built upon divisions within the ruling party—divisions that had become increasingly public since the early 1960s. An analysis of Red Privada also shows that the boundaries of permissible public speech expanded during the 1970s, as Mexico City journalists signposted and reinforced shifting societal expectations. The regime contributed to this opening by allowing, and at times actively encouraging, new voices and perspectives to enter the public sphere. Yet few legal or institutional safeguards accompanied this aperture. From the 1960s through the 1970s, freedom of expression relied on a president's or official's positive disposition and willingness to leak information. Journalists capitalized on the informal mechanisms available to them and took advantage of small openings to voice criticism.
An examination of political columns provides a new perspective on debates regarding the degree to which the PRI relied on coercion or consent to consolidate and maintain its mid-century rule.Footnote 146 Much historiography has turned to the recently declassified domestic intelligence reports produced by the DFS and the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS). Historians Tanalís Padilla and Louise Walker assert, based on these sources, that “a culture of secrecy was essential to the PRI's decades-long rule.” However, an analysis of political columns reveals that the PRI managed dissent not only through secrecy, but also, and crucially, through exposition.Footnote 147
By examining private archival sources, this article demonstrates that the manipulation of information relied as heavily on calculated revelations as it did on surveillance and concealment. However, these strategies often produced unintended consequences. For example, attempts to censor Buendía's column on the tractors deal generated an even larger scandal. While public officials hoped to influence press coverage by providing leaks, they could not control the tenor and focus of the reportage that followed. Indeed, internal regime divisions became an unanticipated subject of press debates. That officials nonetheless chose to leak information to journalists demonstrates their willingness to open up decision making by exposing closed-door politics to the reading public. An analysis of political columns thus illustrates a great degree of conflict within the administration. This supports scholars' recent description of the post-1940 Mexican state as a “dictablanda” or soft dictatorship, malleable enough to allow internal dissent. Power holders tolerated, invited, and contributed criticism of the government, while reserving the right to shut down the very spaces for debate that they had opened.
The most prominent political columnists engendered a growing expectation among the reading public that policy decisions and issues of local concern should be debated rather than dictated. They did so by addressing topics of wider concern, writing in more accessible language, and welcoming letters and contributions from readers. Cultivated in Mexico City and syndicated nationally, the most prominent columnists identified the shape they believed Mexican democracy should take. They thus created new normative expectations about governance by identifying which events were cause for outrage and which would be tolerated. At the same time, columnists, like politicians, sought to accrue power and influence for themselves. As much as they introduced and legitimated certain minority views, they also silenced others.Footnote 148 While political columns were undemocratic spaces, open to politicians' influences and limited in their views of what political change required, they nonetheless contributed to the unraveling of Mexico's one-party regime.
