Benjamin T. Smith's monograph delivers a bold, convincing reassessment of the complex relationship between Mexico's Fourth Estate, the post-revolutionary state and an increasingly restive civil society during the so-called golden age of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) and its early decline. The author combines a close reading of a remarkably broad range of periodicals of various genres with energetic archival scrounging, puts forth useful conceptual frameworks like ‘gangster journalism’ and delivers his results in a manner that is a joy to read. The Mexican Press and Civil Society's many contributions include a useful taxonomy of Mexican periodicals based on implicit ideology, readership and relationship with the PRI. For instance, he contrasts the bland ‘industrial press’ (the staid veterans Excélsior and El Universal, the newer Novedades and José García Valseca's insipid, venal El Sol chain) with the ‘artisan press’ (smaller, more oppositional operations usually based in provincial cities). Such spunky start-ups served as seedbeds for an increasingly robust public sphere, one that survived sporadic state suppression and co-optation largely intact. The rhizomatic spread of the artisan press, not the 1976 foundation of the iconic investigative news magazine Proceso, Smith argues, was the decisive event in the creation of a free press. This, in turn, hastened Mexico's transition from a dictablanda (soft dictatorship) with populist traits to a (troubled) democracy.
By dividing the book into sections on readership, the press in the capital and provincial journalism, Smith is able to isolate and analyse various forms of press censorship. He devotes an entire chapter to heavy-handed muzzling of the increasingly sharp-tongued satirical press in 1948. After that watershed event, the PRI regime developed different tactics tailored to regional differences and perceived levels of political threat posed by independent journalism. The regime co-opted the ‘respectable’ (non-tabloid) national press with minimal violence. Financial incentives, boozy socialising and a common ideology of nationalism, social conservativism and fear of communism created a cosy relationship. Cooperation with the state boosted the bottom line of the mainstream press, at least in the short run. By stifling investigative journalism and ignoring popular dissent, however, the industrial press lost readership and respect over time. Seen from a comparative perspective, the PRI's capture of the mainstream Mexican press, Smith argues, was a less refined version of state management of the press in the United States and Western Europe during the Cold War. Moreover, the PRI could never erase all dissent from the mainstream press. Political columns run in the national dailies contained plenty of disguised criticism of PRI officials’ corruption and mediocrity, although such criticism had to be decoded and not everyone agreed on the code – who would have guessed that ‘talentoso y capaz’ (talented and capable) meant ‘stupid’ (pp. 29–30)?
Outside Mexico City, on the other hand, the PRI used bloodier and ultimately less successful tactics. Smith has a keen eye for the texture of the regional relationship between the press and the local PRI: in Guadalajara, politicians gave tamed reporters their own housing plots. Smith's fine-grained study of three brave provincial journalists shows the symbiotic development of a freer press and an increasingly assertive civil society. The first, Mario Renato Menéndez, was the prodigal son of the conservative press dynasty still publishing the Diario de Yucatán. Menéndez, caught up in the leftist, combative spirit of the generation of 1968, started the contrarian ¿Por Qué? It combined tabloid-like coverage of scandals and crimes with withering (and unfiltered) criticism of the PRI. A second pioneer, Judith Reyes, is known as the Mexican Joan Baez. Several years before Tlatelolco, she started the crusading bi-weekly Acción in Madera City, Chihuahua. Acción defied norms by naming names (including military officers’), featuring letters to the editor airing popular demands, and incorporating popular expressions into print, such as ‘¡pácatelas!’ (‘bang!’) (p. 270). Acción's heterogeneous audience and allies included peasants with agrarian demands – a potentially explosive cross-class combination at a time when the spectre of the Cuban Revolution haunted PRI politicians. Like Reyes, a third regional muckraker, ex-taxi driver Alfredo Ramírez Villavicencio, worked to unite disparate groups across Oaxaca City's civil society with the long-lived El Chapulín.
These regional oppositional coalitions and the artisan newspapers that helped spawn them proved ephemeral (Oaxaca City aside), in part because the lure of armed struggle was a clarion call many heeded. The PRI frustrated them with a mix of selective violence, counter-attacks from the friendly press and charges of subversion (be it communist or Henriquista). Moreover, Smith points out that this oppositional alliance of independent journalism and civil society never emerged in regions where conservative coalitions headed by local oligarchies like the Monterrey Group held sway, or where the PRI's regional affiliates garnered significant popular support. In other words, the free press flourished in the holes in the PRI's Swiss cheese, to use Jeffrey Rubin's phrase. The PRI ensured that the regional opposition never coalesced into a serious national electoral threat, in part by tolerating a somewhat critical press outside of the capital. One could argue that at times a free press served the PRI by culling out the most corrupt and incompetent politicians.
My only quibble with this formidable monograph is the term ‘civil society’. I am not sure that civility can be achieved without a legal system guaranteeing basic rights. Of course, no other term really describes politically active sectors of society. Moreover, Smith uses the concept to bring hidden but significant changes into sharper focus. For instance, he sheds light on women's changing roles, as Reyes was but one of many female journalists who escaped the society columns to cover politics. Smith's approach also helps shift the study of political culture away from art and ritual to print. For instance, Smith shows the vibrant interplay of journalism and Mexico's vibrant oral culture, rich with jokes, albures (double meanings), puns and idiomatic phrases. The demotic nature of newspaper prose productively problematises the very notion of civil society. This topic – demonstrated by Smith's illuminating (and enjoyable) treatment of tabloids – has also been productively explored by Pablo Piccato recently. Long derided as lowbrow, Mexico's tabloids were surprisingly informative and well written. Their macabre crime coverage, mordant humour and mostly lower-class readership likely lulled national authorities into assuming the tabloids were basically apolitical. Regional PRI politicians, especially in urban areas, proved to be much more vulnerable to the independent press, forcing the post-revolutionary regime to make meaningful concessions to social groups antagonised by corruption and poor governance.
Smith's seminal study underscores the free press’ role in Mexico's political transition and, in the process, substantially revises accepted chronologies, challenges chilango-centric views and identifies long-overlooked key journalists. Like the Revolution of 1910 as analysed by Alan Knight, the revolution in journalism depicted here by Smith began in the hinterlands, fed off local grievances and evades easy ideological categorisation. It helped bring down a centralised regime in Mexico City by spilling ink, not blood. ¡Pácatelas!
