Citizens of scandal : journalism, secrecy, and the politics of reckoning in Mexico

Author / Creator

Freije, Vanessa, 1986- author

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Summary

"CITIZENS OF SCANDAL traces the shifting relationship between civil society, national print media, and public officials in late twentieth-century Mexico. As Vanessa Freije shows, from the 1960s thr...

"CITIZENS OF SCANDAL traces the shifting relationship between civil society, national print media, and public officials in late twentieth-century Mexico. As Vanessa Freije shows, from the 1960s through the 1980s, an increasing number of reporters in Mexico denounced corruption. Freije argues that the circulation of investigative reporting had transformative effects on Mexican political culture and urban citizenship. For one thing, the publicity of wrongdoing altered political practice by undermining state attempts to manage public discourse. Additionally, publicizing official wrongdoing centered collective attention and forged new political subjectivities. Freije thus exposes how publicity became an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, tool of Mexican political citizenship. Despite the increased transparency of information, reporters often withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. These tensions-between transparency and secrecy, representation and exclusion, and free speech and censorship-defined the Mexican public sphere in the late-twentieth century as presented in the book. The chapters take on a variety of temporal and geographical scales to examine widely-circulated stories in the Mexican national public. Chapter 1 examines how Mexico City journalists and the broader public reckoned with the limits of state-led development, and, by extension, the Mexican Revolution. Chapter 4 takes up the iconic scandal of Arturo "el Negro" Durazo, Mexico City's chief of police (1976-1982) who was embroiled in drug trafficking, embezzlement, and most dramatically, murder. These popular media often gave racialized and gendered explanations of corruption, which influenced the broader Mexican imaginary. Chapter 6 analyzes local, national, and international coverage of the 1986 gubernatorial elections in the northern state of Chihuahua. These and the other news stories explored in the book raise thorny questions about the politics of scandal, revealing that many readers and reporters understood the press as an advocate that could not (and should not) be objective"--

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