Inside Mexico, the media have mounted a sustained attack on the capital's left-leaning mayor that could help squash chances for democratic reform.

MEXICO CITY -- Governing Mexico City, the most out-of-control, overcrowded, environmentally contaminated megalopolis in the western hemisphere, would be a thankless task for any mortal, but for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, buffeted daily by a city press pack that takes pains to rub salt in his wounds, it is a Via Cruces that he must endure in order to reach the nation's highest office.

For the tall, dour son of one of Mexico's most beloved presidents, the press attacks are nothing new. When he left the long-ruling (69 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1988 to run for president as a Left coalition candidate, Cárdenas became the target of unmerciful calumnies--when not being totally ignored. An interview that year by the Televisa communications conglomerate's malignant anchorman, Jacobo Zabludovsky, featured two phony "illegitimate sons" of Lázaro Cárdenas damning Cuauhtémoc as "a traitor to our father's memory" and endorsing the PRI's now vilified Carlos Salinas de Gortari for president. When the election was stolen for Salinas, Cárdenas's protests and the subsequent political killings of more than 500 of the Left leader's supporters received little mention in the PRI-controlled media.

Cárdenas's second stab at the presidency in 1994 was similarly belittled and blacked out. Footage shot during a mammoth rally of 50,000 people at the Autonomous University of Mexico City was edited to show only the candidate's lips moving and included no pan of the huge crowd. His one moment in the media spotlight--a debate between the three candidates--fizzled when Cárdenas, a notoriously poor public speaker, fumbled badly. The clips were shown over and over again for months as a warning to voters.

During his 1997 campaign to become the capital's first elected mayor, media coverage was as contaminated as the city he now runs, according to Alianza Civica (the Civic Alliance), a nonpartisan citizens group that keeps tabs on electoral inequities. PRI hopeful Alfredo del Mazo walked off with the lion's share of the news content (slightly more than 50 percent of all election-related items), although Cárdenas was often mentioned on the evening news--as the butt of bitter tirades by pro-PRI commentators. TV Azteca even invented a lampoon hand puppet, Cuauhtémochas, which still derides the mayor nightly on prime-time news. On the print side, the attacks were just as relentless and unfounded. El Universal, which bills itself as a "plural" daily, ran a series based on doctored "proof" exposing Cárdenas's "secret bank account."

Bad Milk

Despite all this, Cárdenas won the mayoralty by a two-to-one landslide. But overwhelming public support hardly silenced the press mob--in fact, the offensive continues at top volume. "No government has ever been covered with such rudeness," the mayor snapped one day last spring as he elbowed his way through an aggressive swarm of reporters awaiting his emergence on the sidewalk abutting City Hall.

The press's mala leche (bad milk), as the mayor refers to it, has a material genesis: Upon taking office last December, Cárdenas put an end to the weekly bribes dispensed to the press (sobres, or envelopes; chayos; and embutes in Mexican newspaper argot) by the mayor's office for running favorable stories. The venomous sniping began instantaneously.

Though Mexico City has 20 daily papers, the best-selling publications do not top 100,000 circulation in a nation of 96 million citizens. Mexicans get most of their news from the broadcast media--two TV giants, Televisa and TV Azteca, and more than a score of radio news outlets.

During the first ten months of Cárdenas's administration, nightly news broadcasts invariably led with stories on violent crime and the city government's failure to check it. There is little question that Mexico City is in the throes of a harrowing crime wave, but what Cárdenas's media adversaries fail to communicate is that the incidence of crime in the capital doubled under his PRI predecessor. Moreover, Cárdenas inherited a police force that, according to a former attorney general, is responsible for 60 percent of the crimes committed in the capital. Weeding out the bad apples has been slow and difficult.

Photo ©1994 Mercedes Romero .

The intense focus on crime is driven as much by ratings as it is by political exigencies, says Miguel Acosta, who analyzes media for the Mexican Academy on Human Rights: "The nota roja (crime story) sells advertising." Acosta also observes that viewers have a hard time distinguishing true crime shows such as Duro y Directo from prime-time news.

But TV Azteca, a government network that was sold off to a Salinas administration booster, and Televisa, whose late founder Emilio Azcarraga often boasted of his PRI affiliation (he offered the party $75 million to beat Cárdenas in 1994), are not only in a race for ratings. Their programmed attacks on Cárdenas are part of a pro-PRI agenda whose shrillness borders on absurdity. One example: When the Mexico City government rescued 21 street kids who were living in central city manholes and sent them off to the luxury resort of Cancun for rehabilitation, TV Azteca stormed into the treatment center demanding interviews, inciting a melee with social workers intent on protecting the young peoples' privacy. For three nights running, Azteca's nightly news show, Hechos, attacked the Cárdenas government for restricting freedom of the press.

The mayor's first annual State of the City address September 17 provided a glimpse of typical TV coverage of Cárdenas. Rather than feature the speech, Azteca turned its cameras on protests by PRI and conservative National Action Party (PAN) assembly members. When President Ernesto Zedillo, a PRI veteran, delivers a similar speech, the camera never leaves him, and protesters are invisible, even if they include a man in a pig mask stationed directly under the podium to spoof the speech, as happened in 1996.

Radio is billed as the most democratic of the Mexican media, with a developing culture of citizen denuncia (denouncements) of government evils. But as in the United States, talk radio is a blood sport played on distinctly conservative grounds. Organized call-in campaigns echo the PRI-PAN anti-Cárdenas crusade, and Monitor, the most listened-to radio news and listener-access show, is deluged by callers blaming the mayor for crime, pollution levels, forest fires and other natural disasters, street-vendor violence, and even murder (after a PRI functionary was killed in a taxi hold-up).

With the exception of the left-center La Jornada, the printed press is just as unceasing and one-sided in its attacks on Cárdenas. Every 24 hours, ten major newspapers, four specialty dailies (sports and finances), four afternoon scandal sheets, and a handful of low-rent rags published in the surrounding Mexico state excoriate Cárdenas and his administration for failing to curtail abuses that perpetual PRI rule has deeply embedded in the system. Three papers seem to have been specially created to slam the mayor.

Cronica, a two-year-old daily, is the creature of Salinas's few remaining defenders (editor Pablo Hiriart often served as flack for the ex-president). "Bus Drivers Sue Cárdenas Officials for Abuse of Authority," Cronica's lead story boomed this past August 27. The next story down was about how "police incapacity" was provoking citizens to carry guns. "Assembly Turns Down Cárdenas Proposal for New Judges," the headline read under a photograph of the mayor that looked like he had just escaped from the House of Horror. "PRI Blames Mexico City Government for Deaths Caused By Rains," filled out the inside front pages. The only glint of light in this unrelentingly grim picture of life under Cárdenas was the announcement of electric car service, donated by the city government, to carry the disabled to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe for spiritual treatment.

Another print startup, Mexico Hoy, is a vehicle for the presidential ambitions of Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo. A typical Mexico Hoy hit piece offers faceless allegations about Cárdenas's misdeeds--20 news gatherers recently resigned from the paper, charging that their stories were being distorted by editors and capped with misleading headlines.

Photo ©1997 Wiebke Lohman

Reforma, a four-year-old, ostensibly non-partisan daily with a growing circulation and snappy computer graphics, is, in truth, a crypto-PAN soapbox that goes for Cárdenas's jugular, running monthly "scientifically" conducted polls that trumpet his plummeting approval ratings in big, bold front-page type. In the small print, one discovers that the mayor's 5.3 rating in September was several points higher than that of his PRI predecessor when he exited office, and that Cárdenas is still the front-runner in the presidential election to be held in July 2000. Recently, Reforma ran a full page of Cárdenas's responses to questions the obsessively cautious mayor did not want to answer, among them his opinion on the World Cup match between Mexico and Holland. "I Didn't See the Game," read the blaring headline on the front page of the city section.

The foreign press corps pays close attention to Mexico City, running scorecards on Cárdenas's performance at various milestones (100 day, six-month anniversaries). Particularly sensitive to personal security issues like crime and contamination, correspondents have not been kind. The Miami Herald's Andrés Oppenheimer parrots Reforma's line, expressing great disappointment at Cárdenas's accomplishments. Surprisingly, The New York Times has shown sympathy--Anthony DePalma's piece on the greening of the city (August 15), Sam Dillon's favorable profile of city attorney Samuel del Villar, normally a disagreeable man (August 16), and Paul Berman's Sunday magazine peon to the new mayor (August 2) are recent examples of the Times' largesse.

The subtext of all the attention showered on Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas by national and international media is, of course, the July 2000 presidential election. Engraving upon public consciousness the sins and ineptitudes of the fledgling Cárdenas administration is essential to the ruling party's intention to retain maximum power two years down the pike. Both the PRI and the PAN must erase the hope that millions of voters shared when they seized power at the polls in 1997, and the press has been their handmaiden in this task. If, in the end, the malevolent media blitz is successful in blowing Cárdenas off the electoral map, the prospect of democratic change in Mexico will be dimmed dramatically.