Muy buenas noches: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War

Introduction

xxi Introduction perspiration formed on his forehead and soaked his shirt, as Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, the son of one of the country’s most influential media moguls, greeted members of the news media. It had been six years in the making, and now Azcárraga Milmo was ready to unveil Estadio Azteca (Aztec Stadium). He wiped his brow, grabbed a microphone, and welcomed reporters and photographers to a press luncheon. Up until this point, Azcárraga Junior, as he was sometimes affectionately called, had walked in the shadows of his father, El León (The Lion), Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who in 1950 bellowed that he was the “czar of Mexican radio and that he would soon be the country’s television czar.”¹ Yet on this sweltering spring day of May 29, 1966, the day the stadium was inaugurated, Azcárraga Milmo moved beyond his father’s shadow and strolled alongside the president of the republic, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. The two men walked across a well-manicured soccer field, Those homes may lack good water services, a heater, a good gas range or a washing machine but those matter less than a tv set. Luis Becerra Celis xxii Introduction through a dimly lit concrete tunnel, and into a black late-model sedan. A driver paraded the president and the emerging media magnate around the hundred thousand–ton concrete structure. Azcárraga Milmo owned the stadium, as well as its home team, Club América. He had acquired the team in 1959 in anticipation of building the stadium and his company’s empire.² At the same time, 105,000 soccer fans gathered, as television camera operators recorded the inaugural ceremony and activities.³ On Telesistema Mexicano’s xhtv, Channel 4, announcers reported that four years after the then president Adolfo López Mateos laid the first stone of the stadium, another president helped to inaugurate it.4 One of the two television announcers remarked that “Azcárraga Milmo and the president were about to enter the car and that the president was always with Emilio Azcárraga.”5 As the evening news began, Jacobo Zabludovsky, the best-known news anchor in Mexico City, and Pedro Ferríz Santa Cruz delivered details about the inaugural ceremonies to capital residents. Ferríz commented, “We, as Mexicans, also feel proud to have a stadium of this magnitude, and in every way it is the best out of any place in the world. I have been to Maracanã Stadium in Brazil and Wembley in England, the National in Santiago and the one in Tokyo, and, in my judgment, ours is more functional in every way.”6 News film of Díaz Ordaz and Azcárraga Milmo walking together provide a metaphor for the close connections between the government and the media during the second half of the twentieth century. By and large scholars have concluded that Televisa, what Telesistema Mexicano would become in 1973, walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri, Institutional Revolutionary Party), the party that ruled for seventy-one years (1929–2000).7 No legitimate scholar would dispute the fact that close political ties between television executives and the party help to explain the long-standing rule of the pri, but this is only part of the picture. Just how did this occur on a daily basis and over time? Introduction xxiii Government decisions that regulated communications and telecommunications infrastructures undoubtedly aided in the development of the television industry and enabled Televisa’s success, which by the end of the twentieth century stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Grupo Televisa dominated in both production and profits in the Spanish-speaking world. By 1977 the company transmitted 21,423 hours of television programming to an estimated 28 million viewers, with 60 percent of the company’s programming produced domestically. The company ’s television advertising revenue reached US$144 million, while revenue from all advertising sales totaled US$184 million.8 Long before the first twenty years of television (1950–70), media barons and government officials had begun to develop political, economic, and social ties.9 The close relationship between media magnate Rómulo O’Farrill and President Miguel Alemán Valdés opened the door for O’Farrill to act as a prestanombre (front name) for the sitting president in the creation of the country’s first television station, xhtv...