The Periodista
Patrick Oster
"The Mexicans. A personal portrait of a people"
2002
ISBN 0060011300

In many countries, 1968 was an extraordinary year, a year of violence, a year of change. Mexico was no different. There were riots in the streets of Mexico City, just as there were in Chicago, Paris, and Prague. The precise reasons for the demonstrations were never quite clear. Students led the protests, as they did elsewhere. But they weren't united in their complaints. When police bashed in heads during a clash between rival student groups, however, a disorganized mob became a movement. Other Mexicans, perhaps looking to vent anger about the authoritarian ways of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, took to the streets, too. One famous silent protest drew 400,000 people.

This visible unrest came at an embarrassing time for Díaz Ordaz. The 1968 Summer Olympics were set to begin in October. Mexico was the first Third World nation to be given the honor of the games. The government had chosen peace as its Olympic theme to show that the poor nations of the world had a better way than the bellicose superpowers. But when increasingly violent disturbances showed no sign of easing as the games approached, Díaz Ordaz decided he had had enough. When a noisy crowd gathered on October 2 at the Plaza Tlatelolco, concealed soldiers opened fire without warning and killed hundreds.

Many of those who survived were jailed. Others fled the country. Those in exile were exposed to then-radical ideas of feminism, gay liberation, and grass-roots democracy. Many in Mexico look upon the massacre at Tlatelolco as a pivotal event in Mexico's history, one that still reverberates in the country's political development. Some say its impact is roughly equivalent to that of the riots outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, or the 1970 killings at Kent State University. But another, less-noticed event of 1968 had just as profound an effect on Mexico. A few months before the 1968 massacre, Julio Scherer García became editor of Mexico's leading newspaper, Excélsior. Scherer, an incorruptible journalist, was in the right job at the right time to make a difference. And he did.

Excélsior's coverage of the events of 1968 was unsparing. Diaz Ordaz, surprised by the magnitude of negative public reaction to his savage crackdown on the protesters, wound up a recluse for the short remainder of his term. When he anointed Luis Echeverría as his successor, the stage seemed set for six more years of unrest. Echeverría had been Díaz Ordaz's interior minister. It was he who had carried out Díaz Ordaz's brutal plans for the Tlatelolco dissidents. Echeverría had called Scherer regularly in 1968 to demand that Excélsior tone down its coverage of the protests and the post-massacre crisis. Scherer had refused. A tense relationship developed. But when Echeverría became president, he seemed to change. Not long after he assumed office in December 1970, he freed a number of the dissidents who had been arrested in 1968. He said Mexico needed a "democratic opening" to restore the political balance after the harsh years of Díaz Ordaz's regime. He encouraged the press to be critical of the government.

His leftist rhetoric was taken a bit too literally by some. Armed guerrillas began appearing in rural areas, especially in the state of Guerrero. Small bands of rebels, such as the Party of the Poor, gained a reputation as folk heroes. Urban guerrillas, such as the Revolutionary Action Movement (MAR), sprang up too, with the clandestine help of the Soviet Union and North Korea. By early 1971 it must have appeared to Echeverría that his democratic opening was getting a bit out of hand. When an MAR plot to make Mexico another Vietnam was uncovered in March 1971, his government's atmosphere of tolerance for dissidence got decidedly chilly. In June 1971, Echeverría's real feelings about protest emerged. In that month, students staged the first mass protest in Mexico City since the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. A few thousand gathered to support a strike in Monterrey. Out of nowhere, a band of paramilitary goons known as Los Halcones ("The Falcons") appeared and killed about two-dozen demonstrators. Echeverría blamed the killings on right-wingers. He said the right was trying to undermine his democratic opening. Some leftists bought this. But shortly thereafter, political dissidents, the first of about four hundred began to "disappear."

All the while, Scherer kept a spotlight on unfolding political events. Excélsior also kept Mexicans informed about how Echeverría's populist, big-spending economic policies were going sour. The government's budget deficit was soaring. So was the amount of foreign debt Echeverría was incurring to finance it. Excelsior wrote about the growing corruption of the administration. It criticized Echeverria for failing to end widespread social injustice. In the process, it broke the tradition of Mexico's historically tame, self-censored press. It became, in the words of one Mexican historian, the real legislative power in the country. It checked and balanced Echeverría's emperor-like presidency. It filled the vacuum left by the rubber-stamp national legislature.

Clearly, Echeverría would have liked to put out this new flame of press freedom. But moving against such an established institution as Excélsior would have been like a U.S. president trying to muzzle or shut down the New York Times. Excélsior had been founded in 1917, in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. It was twelve years older than Echeverría's party, which had ruled Mexico since 1929.

Echeverría bided his time on direct action against Excélsior. But he began to move against it in subtle ways. With no complaint from his supposedly left-wing government, conservative business leaders, many the private political allies of Echeverría, initiated an advertising boycott in 1972 against Excélsior. They said they were protesting the papers leftist editorial line. Excélsior dropped from first to fourth among newspapers in advertising lineage. After four months, however, Excélsior had not buckled under to business demands for a new editorial line. The boycott was ended when Echeverría, who could have stopped the protest the first day, ostensibly came to the papers rescue by ordering state enterprises to cover the deficit created by the private sector's actions. Excélsior had some breathing room for a while after that. Some other publications were not so lucky. In 1974, police raided the offices of a tiny weekly magazine called ¿Por Qué? It had reported on guerrilla activities. The reports hadn't been supportive of the guerrillas. But Echeverría seemed to equate coverage with sympathy. The police wrecked ¿Por Qué?'s facilities, closed the magazine down, and held the staff prisoners at an army torture center for two weeks, according to several reports. The magazine's reporters were beaten and threatened with death if they resumed publication.

Things turned particularly sour between the president and the paper atter Excélsior criticized a 1975 vote by Mexico in the United Nations. In that shocking vote, Mexico sided with about seventy other countries, many of them in the Communist block, on a resolution that branded Zionism as a form of racism. At the time, Echeverría was campaigning to become U.N. Secretary-General after he left office in December 1976. He was also lobbying to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Widely publicized criticism by his country's leading newspaper certainly did not help either cause. Echeverría probably wanted to crush Scherer and his paper right after the vote. But 1975 was the wrong time to attack Excélsior. The process for picking a new Mexican president had begun. Echeverría, as was a Mexican president's prerogative, had picked his finance minister, José López Portillo, to be his successor. His choice would be legally ratified at suspenseless presidential elections in July 1976. Getting the public to accept a Mexican president's un-democratic selection of his successor has always been a delicate matter. It was not the sort of thing that would have been helped by cracking down on Mexico's most respected newspaper. Echeverría decided to wait until after the elections for his frontal assault on Excélsior. But he intensified his subtle campaign against it.

Channel 13, the principal government television station, withdrew its substantial advertising from Excélsior. El Nacional, the government newspaper, began attacking Excélsior by name. Other newspapers, under pressure from the government, chimed in. In February 1976, the Mexican Editorial Organization, a group in which Echeverría was financially involved, bought Excélsior's principal competitor, El Universal, as well as the papers of the El Sol chain. Both would benefit from Echeverría's behind-the-scenes campaign against Excélsior. In June, when a group of peasants seized a few hundred acres of land that Excélsior owned, Televisa, Mexico's largest television network, slanted its already pro-government coverage against Excélsior. Excélsior had been depending on development of that land to produce needed operating revenues. Such seizures were common in Mexico. Revolutionary promises of land reform were often invoked by poor Mexicans who wanted land but did not have the money to pay for it. In cases where title was shaky, a common situation in Mexico, the squatters sometimes got the land. The government would support them in a public show of revolutionary fervor. In this case, there was no question that Excélsior was the rightful owner. But the government did nothing to evict the squatters. One explanation may have been that the group was headed by Humberto Serrano, a member of the national chamber of deputies and a political ally of Echeverría's. The mute response of government to violations of Excélsior's rights was a pattern that would grow.

When the July 4 presidential elections were over, Excélsior spoke out on the subject of the land seizure. Scherer, a man of dignity and propriety, had thought public complaint during the campaign would have been unseemly. He told readers that Excélsior was getting no help from the government, a situation he found "alarming." Readers did not learn, however, of an even more distressing development. Conservative members of Excélsior's staff had demanded an extraordinary session of the cooperative that owned Excélsior. The right-wing rebels, secretly backed by Echeverría, made no bones about their intent to use the assembly to oust Scherer as editor. Echeverría's direct attack had begun.

When the meeting took place, on July 8, the rebels were joined by outside agitators, some of whom came armed. Pleas to the police for help went unanswered. Scherer sensed that there was a real danger of loss of life in the explosive atmosphere of the meeting. He and his two hundred followers walked out. The rebels took over Excélsior. The paper that had become the best Spanish-language newspaper in the world under Scherer became safe and tame again. It remains so today.

Scherer, however, did not become safe and tame. By November he had started Proceso, a muckraking weekly magazine that has been a thorn in every president's side since its first issue. With a circulation of only 75,000, Proceso does not have the impact of Excélsior, which claims a daily circulation of 200,000. But Proceso is the most fearless, most respected publication in Mexico. It is the best single source of what is really going on in the country. It has regularly exposed corruption in Mexico's vital oil industry. It has written about atrocities by the normally sacrosanct Mexican army. It published the first articles on the allegations of murder, drug trafficking, and extortion against former Mexico City police chief Arturo Durazo, once one of the most feared men in Mexico. It broke the story about the White Brigade, a secret government military unit that used illegal methods to crush armed guerrillas between 1977 and 1980.

Proceso's beginning as a muckraking magazine was a difficult one. The government controls all the newsprint in the country. An angry Echeverría didn't want to sell Scherer's new operation any paper. Buying imported newsprint would have been extremely costly, so Scherer cajoled a couple of his competitors into selling Proceso some of their surplus newsprint. Proceso's first edition was published. Some 100,000 copies were sold. Three weeks later, Echeverría's term ended. Scherer and Proceso got a new lease on life. The new president, José López Portillo, was Scherer's cousin. He promised full press freedom, just as Echeverría had. Things did get better for a while. But government tolerance did not last, despite blood ties. Family feelings did not stop Scherer from publishing the embarrassing truth about what was wrong with Mexico and why his cousin was to blame.

Proceso has survived more than a decade. But it has not been a financially enriching experience for Scherer personally. He remains a man of modest means. It could have been otherwise. Many reporters and editors become quite rich, thanks to monthly bribes and subsidies that the government provides to journalists to keep them in line. Taking money from the government must have been an especially strong temptation for Scherer. His family had been wealthy once. He had had the taste of riches. But hard times had hit his family. His once-wealthy banker father went bankrupt. The three Scherer children were told they would have to look for work. The Scherers were formal types, with more than a few professionals in their ranks. In upper-middle-class style, they discussed history and culture at the dinner table. In mealtime homilies, Scherer's father and mother had stressed the need to be socially useful, productive and honest. "Responsibility" and "dignity" were words commonly heard between soup and dessert. When financial fortunes went bad for his father, Scherer decided to try his hand at journalism. No one had ever been a journalist in the Scherer family. Such a career was not exactly what his parents had had in mind. But they did not try to stop him. Scherer is glad they did not. He found he loved reporting and writing. He has never regretted his choice.

From the begining, Scherer rejected all sinecures from the government, an attitude that made many of his more pliant colleagues suspicious of him. He demands the same of his reporters at Proceso. His magazine does buy its newsprint from PIPSA, the state-owned newsprint monopoly, which significantly subsidizes the price of paper. Proceso also accepts a few ads from state-owned industries and government agencies. Revenues from government advertising don't add up to much. But they might have been a considerable source of income given the large portion of the economy that the government controls. At some newspapers, such publicity amounts to 75 percent of total advertising revenues.

Scherer also forbids Proceso's reporters from accepting the government's monthly cash bribes, known as embutes. Mexican reporters make very little, typically sixty to seventy dollars a week. Those embutes (also called sobres or igualas) can amount to two or three times their regular salaries. Reporters who cover the president, the finance minister, or PEMEX, the state-owned oil company, can make even more. If they work for a major newspaper, especially if they write a column, they can become rich.

Scherer likewise bans acceptance of money that is handed out on presidential or ministerial trips, or during coverage of political campaigns. In the oil-boom days of President López Portillo, reporters typically got their airfare, hotel, and meals paid for by the government during such trips. On foreign presidential visits, they also got $1,000 a country as "walking-around" money. During President Miguel de la Madrid's administration, in keeping with the atmosphere of economic crisis, the embute practice was temporarily ended. After coverage got a bit critical, however, it reappeared. Walking-around money for foreign trips also continued, although at less spectacular levels than in López Portillo's day.

Proceso does not accept gacetillas either. They are articles written by the government or private citizens and published in a newspaper or magazine for a fee. Only a few newspapers, such as the English-language Mexico City News, mark such copy as advertising. Some newspapers are so accommodating that they run such stories under the byline of the reporter who normally covers the agency or company paying for the story. In hotly contested elections, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will typically buy a gacetilla for the space normally reserved for a newspaper's lead story. The headline over the gacetilla might say something like "PRI Wins in Landslide!" The story would not be likely to say anything about vote fraud or opposition protests. The same story, with exactly the same wording, might appear in several other papers.

Just to make sure that a reporter doesn't mind being pushed aside for a story written by the people he covers, the reporter gets a commission on each gacetilla. Some reporters are so comfortable with this arrangement that they suggest gacetilla topics, serving as both reporter and ad salesman in the process.

Proceso's course of financial independence has cost it not only money but access to top government officials. Scherer, who has interviewed Fidel Castro, Konrad Adenauer, Salvador Allende, John F. Kennedy, Willy Brandt, Augusto Pinochet, and other heads of state, was never granted an interview with President de la Madrid, who talked with other Mexican reporters. De la Madrid did not, however, try to punish Proceso for any of its many articles that were critical of his administration. The same was not true for López Portillo, who saw cousin Julio publish photographs of López Portillo's lavish five-mansion complex along with stories about his inexplicable accumulation of wealth during the height of Mexico's oil-boom years. In 1982, López Portillo ordered all government entities to withdraw advertising from Proceso, creating a temporary financial crisis.

Normally, no other Mexican publications publish stories about a president's personal or financial life. Stories about the Mexican army are also extremely rare unless they are flattering or superficial. A Mexican periodista ("reporter") doesn't have to be told what to write and what not to. The self-censorship that is the norm in the sold-out world of Mexican journalism has unwritten rules that everyone understands. If reporters do break the rules or misinterpret them, they will invariably get a call from a top government official who will question their patriotism if not threaten them. During de la Madrid's time, this function was performed by Fernando Pérez Correa, the undersecretary of the Interior Ministry, and by Manuel Alonso, de la Madrid's spokesman If the reporter or editor won't heel under, sometimes he or she will get pressure from the boss. The boss may get a call from the government, or he may just be worried enough about government reaction that he will act on his own. This is what happened when Pete Hamill was editor of the Mexico City News in 1986 Hamill, a noted U.S. journalist, had called for hard-hitting coverage of a university strike that the government did not like. The government, probably sensing that a call from Pérez Correa or Alonso would be futile with a journalist of Hamill's stature and integrity, said nothing to him directly. But after several weeks of straightforward student-strike stories, Hamill was called in by the News's owner, Rómulo O 'Farrill, Jr. O 'Farrill said he wanted the paper to take a more anti-student line. Hamill refused and quit. The new editorial team did what O'Fartill wanted.

Government restraints on television news are similar. Few calls have to be made to complain about Mexican television programs. The government controls a good portion of the channels in Mexico. The pro-government Televisa network controls most of the rest. Just in case, though, the government regularly inspects scripts of television shows, which stations must provide in advance. There isn't much trouble with radio news, either. It is the single most important source of news for Mexicans. But its short news programs, rarely accompanied by commentary or analysis, tell Mexicans little that would disturb the government. One exception was the live radio call-in show of Francisco Huerta. His program, Public Opinion, presented a particularly nettlesome problem for the government, because officials had no chance to screen and censor the callers' usually antigovernment comments. To eliminate the problem, the government just eliminated the show. There was less of this during De la Madrid's time. But in early 1988, the antigovernment economic commentaries of Nilda Morell were dropped after the government put pressure on the network that featured her program on its stations.

Foreign television programs are also watched closely. About 350,000 homes in Mexico get cable service that provides shows from the three major U.S. networks, PBS, and ESPN. Officials from Pérez Correa's office often tell Televisa, the principal cable operator, when not to broadcast programs that are negative about Mexico. Most news programs are delayed in transmission so that they can be viewed ahead of time. This has given government officials a chance to black out critical reports on Mexico by the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour and the CBS Evening News, among others. All local U.S. news programs from border cities such as San Diego and El Paso have been permanently blacked out because they regularly report on U.S.-Mexican border problems. The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour was dropped from cable service for about a year after one critical report on Mexico during De la Madrid's term. In early 1985, Cable News Network's Headline News service was also canceled following the network's concentrated coverage of violent opposition demonstrations in the border town of Piedras Negras.

If a call from the government is not enough, a reporter may find himself or herself the subject of personal attacks by columnists on the payroll of the government. This even happened to reporters of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal during my four years in Mexico. Reporters who hit particularly sensitive subjects may experience worse. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a reporter for Unomásuno, a left-wing Mexico City daily, was kidnapped in 1984 in a paramilitary-style operation. His unidentified abductors told him he was being punished for some articles he had written on Mexico's handling of Guatemalan refugees. Released unharmed, he considers himself lucky. An alarming number of crusading Mexican journalists have just been killed. According to Freedom House, which monitors human rights worldwide, more Mexican journalists were murdered in 1987 than those of any other country. The most famous assassination of a journalist occurred in May 1984, when Mexico's best-known columnist, Manuel Buendía, was gunned down in broad daylight in Mexico City. He had many enemies. He had written frequently about corruption by former Mexico City police chief Arturo Durazo, graft in the oil-workers' union, spying by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and clandestine activities of the Mexican ultra right. The government officially condemns such murders. But it rarely brings the murderers to justice. So far, there is no proof of any government involvement in such atrocities. Some political observers speculate that some of these murders, especially those outside Mexico City, may be a reaction to the inadequacy of Mexico's libel laws. Rich business executives, large land-holders, or powerful local officials-the typical targets of hard-hitting, some times libelous, news coverage-have little legal recourse against reporters whom they feel have libeled them. They may just decide, this theory goes, that execution is the only real remedy they have.

With all these restraints-fear of loss of subsidies, intimidating calls, shutdown of one's publication or show, kidnapping, disappearances, and murder-it is not surprising that there is not a full airing of ideas in Mexico's press. But this is not to say that Mexico has a fully censored press. Even Scherer will tell you that. The continued publication of Proceso attests to it. There are certainly worse examples of censored media in Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, and other countries in Latin America and elsewhere. In Mexico, one can regularly see articles critical of the ruling party and of government policies in many newspapers such as Unomásuno, El Financiero, La Jornada, El Diario de Yucatán, and El Norte (de Monterrey). The Mexico Journal, an English-language publication that first appeared in the fall of 1987, also provides unvarnished reporting. During the 1988 presidential campaign, there was also regular coverage of all the antigovernment complaints of opposition candidates, although the volume of coverage of the ruling party's candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, dwarfed all opposition coverage combined. Some Mexican cartoonists, especially those of Proceso, can be vicious. Some even lampoon the president, once an unheard-of affront. But to focus on the existence of critical newspaper coverage is to miss the point. Most Mexicans don't read newspapers or magazines. Even less read critical intellectual journals. More read comic books than read a newspaper. Most get their news from radio and television, which are not critical at all. The most popular television news program, Televlsa's 24 Horas, rarely says anything against the government. Its largely discredited host, Jacobo Zabludovsky, is openly anti-left and pro-government in his frequent snide asides during the program. Occasionally, as happened during a natural gas disaster in Mexico City in 1984 and during Mexico City's 1985 earthquakes, Zabludovsky let the unsparing eye af the camera show Mexicans what was really happening in the streets But these were the exceptions, not the rule.

The real issue in Mexico is not freedom of the press but freedom of information. There is none. Even under the rules of self-censorship' Mexican reporters could write quite a bit about Mexican life if they could get information about it. But Mexican bureaucrats regard information as power, something they give out only for something in return. Sometimes even the President doesn't get the facts he needs to make informed decisions because his underlings are playing power games over the required data. Rumor, hearsay, and gossip are highly valued, for sometimes they are all there is. Frequently they appear in the press reported as fact. High Mexican officials often talk in elliptical sentences that do not respond to reporters' questions. Out of inordinate respect or fear, reporters rarely point out that a question was not answered. Interviews with the president never get beyond the softball-question phase. Frequently, officials in the news spotlight just refuse to grant interviews. There is no tradition of the public's right to know.

This dampening effect on the circulation of ideas and information spills over into other media. The least affected medium is books, probably because books have the least impact. Mexicans don't have enough money to buy books, or not enough education to want them or understand them. Only 6 percent of Mexicans buy and read books, according to the 1980 census. Through the government -financed Fondo de Cultura Económico (the Economic Culture Fund), the government also determines, to a large extent, which books will be published. The Fondo's endorsement can be very important in total sales because Fondo paperback editions are often chosen as Mexican classroom texts. Films are censored, but usually of sexual rather than political material. Few Mexican films deal with Mexican reality, and virtually none with politics. Self-censorship is the rule in such areas, rather than the government's direct hand. Mexico once enjoyed a golden age of films in the 1930s and 1940s. But much of what is found in theaters, these days it comes from the United States or Europe. Those films that are Mexican are mostly mindless comedies or violent shoot-'em-ups.

Even pure intellectual thought gets co-opted through government financing of think tanks, scholarship, prizes, and grants. The National Research System, set up in 1984, awards grants of up to $450 a month to about two thousand intellectuals. Likewise, intellectuals who write columns for newspapers that accept embutes, gacetillas, or other government subsidies are often restricted by the newspaper's own idea of what the government will and will not tolerate. Some intellectuals have shown a tendency since the current economic crisis began in 1982 to be more independent. On issues of vote fraud, environmental reform, and the economy, a small number are speaking out, choosing penurious independence over government bribes. Gabriel Zaid, in his book The Presidential Economy, has challenged the wisdom of the government's traditional domination of the economy. The Group of 100, a collection of Mexican writers, artists, and other intellectuals, has complained about Mexico's abominable environmental conditions and gotten the government to make some limited reforms. But many Mexican intellectuals remain like the characters in Arturo Azuela's novel Shadows of Silence. They write spare articles in obscure publications, pretending they have struck a vital blow for freedom. They argue among themselves about who has done the most to advance Mexican intellectual thought. Privately, they indulge in self-pity about how little they have done. Their fecklessness is tragic for Mexico. With no real opposition from political parties, the Catholic Church, the army, or other traditional centers of power in Latin America, intellectuals could make a difference if they had the courage to do so.

Strangely, the government has largely left alone one of the most popular media, comics. Just as Mexicans are gaga over telenovelas ("soap operas"), they are nuts about fotonovelas, the name for most comics in Mexico. About seventy-five million Mexicans read a comic bock a week. One can find Superman and Spider Man comics at the corner newsstand. But the most common comics are adult stories about cowboys, cops-and-robbers, or true romance. Maybe the values touted in such stories explain the government's indifference to what comics say. Typically one finds themes of male domination, female obedience, respect for government authority, honor in poverty, and acceptance of one's grim lot in life as God's will. For example, in Trampa para un Maldito (Trap for a Bad Guy), a Western, Waneka, an Indian from the state of Sonora, spends most of the story discovering that her bandit father is a drunken, murdering louse. In the end, he dies, as does Waneka and her brother. Mexican comics don't go in much for Hollywood endings.

Women fare particularly badly in comics. The government does nothing to stop this despite official pronouncements about the equality of women under the law and the need to show them more respect. In many comics, one can see women in the midst of a striptease, women mud wrestling, or women in a variety of skimpy clothes that bare breasts and buttocks. Garter belts and G-strings seem the favorite costumes of comic artists who try to outdo each other in coming up with new angles to look down a woman's blouse or up her skirt.

Comic publishers argue that this low-level literature is about all the average Mexican's sixth-grade education can handle. They insist they provide an educational service by teaching readers, in some comics, about world history. Some comics may give Mexicans a rough outline of Roman or Greek history. But the average comic writer needs a little brushing up on current events. One of my favorite out-of-whack modern comics told a story about Mayim, a voluptuous Egyptian. The plot had Mayim trick an American, Alex Copek, into planting a bomb aboard a U.S. airliner. Mayim wanted to get revenge for the U.S. bombing of her village. Why the United States would have bombed its ally Egypt, which gets about two billion dollars in U.S. foreign aid annually, was never explained.

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Faced with such manipulation of ideas and expression, it's a wonder that anyone in Mexico bothers to try to get the truth out. It's particularly improbable that Julio Scherer is one of those trying. Now a grandfatherly sexagenarian with wispy gray hair, he hardly looks the part of a to-the-barricades rebel. An affable man in relaxed settings, he is painfully shy when asked to state his views on anything.

Scherer hardly ever grants an interview, a bizarre posture for a professional journalist. He can get violent in his zeal to avoid them. Once, when a Mexican television crew set up an ambush-style interview, he grabbed the crew's camera cable, pulled the camera forcefully to the ground, and stalked off. In my own case, after numerous unsuccessful requests by phone for an interview, Scherer finally agreed to let me talk to his associate Froylán López Narváez to see if Froylán could answer my questions. I got quite a bit about Scherer's personal and professional life from Froylán, whom I had known before. But some questions required personal responses. I narrowed them down to one typed page.

Reluctantly, Scherer agreed to see me a few days later and answer my questions. When I arrived, he came out of his office, in shirtsleeves and casual pants. We chatted briefly. I asked if we could begin the interview. At the last minute he begged off. "I'm too embarrassed," he said. "I don't like interviews."

As a compromise, we agreed that I would leave my list of questions and my tape recorder. Froylán would later turn the recorder on and ask the questions for me. Later, I could pick my recorder up. After a few days, Scherer said even a tape recorder was too intimidating. He preferred to write out his responses. I knew he had written two bocks, one on his experiences with the last four presidents of Mexico, the other a biography of the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Maybe, I thought, he only feels comfortable giving his views in print. I humored him. But after two weeks of excuses as to why he couldn't find the right words to write down, I went back to talk to him personally. I caught him in the hallway on his way to lunch.

He was terribly apologetic. "I know l've been a pendejo ("asshole") about this. But I wanted to get the answers right. It's hard for me. I'm searching inside me for the proper way to say it. I'm not finding what I need."

My questions had really boiled down to two. I wanted to know why he had passed up government bribes to journalists when all his contemporaries had not. After reading his writings, talking to his friends, and meeting him in person, I thought I had the answer to that one. He was just a decent man, the victim of a good upbringing by parents of integrity. The second question was more important, for I wanted to know if he thought there would be more freedom of the press in Mexico in the future. Would Mexicans finally get the data they needed to make informed decisions? Would they be allowed to speak out more? I knew I had time for just one question, and this was the one I asked him. With no tape recorder in front of him, with no intimidating blank piece of paper in his typewriter, he answered immediately. It was just one journalist talking to another.

"There are so many factors we don't know about yet," he said. "Things, of course, are better now than under Echeverría and López Portillo. That wouldn't be hard. Whether they will get better, though, I couldn't say for sure. I hope they will. But then I always hope for the best."