México

PPT confirms an extremely serious situation in the area of communication and media

Aram Aharonian

29/09/2014

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Mexico faces an extremely serious situation in the area of communication and media, characterized by an extreme deficit of democracy, a grave systematic attack on human rights and a constant infringement of the essential principles of a State of Law. This is the conclusion of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT).

In the framework of the Session on Free Trade, violence, impunity and the rights of peoples in Mexico, the PPT, in Mexico City, held the final thematic session on Disinformation, censorship and violence against communicators, responding to a request for attention, denunciation and justice formulated by a wide network of associations, youth movements, communication workers and journalists, representatives of the academic world, free media and community radio stations.

Elements of the strategy of social movements, expressed in the hearings of the PPT, give priority to the respect for human rights and the equality of rights. In these strategies, the jury found diverse forms of political action such as struggles and resistance – under the slogan “to resist is to create” – the demand for public policies of equality, the search for an alternative to hegemonic thought, concrete practices of emancipation. There are new ideas: the rejection of inequalities and forms of domination, respect for nature, gratuity, common goods and public services, the democratization of the media, protection against repression, and a rejection of criminalization.

In their diagnosis, the PPT pointed out that Mexico is playing a very dangerous experimental role in world evolution: a strategy conducted on a world scale in order to impose a monopoly of power. The sessions of the Tribunal made it possible to identify the elements that compose this world strategy of the violation of the rights of freedom of expression and of access to communication.

Among these are the control of the media by financial capital associated with international capital; the monopoly in telecommunications; the subordination of political power to financial power; the reduction of the State’s social role and its role as protector of rights and freedoms; neoliberal economic and social policies; the unlimited deployment of hegemonic thought involving the violation of individual and collective freedoms and the values of equality of persons; the criminalization of social movements, the infiltration of mafia networks; the instrumentalizing of terrorism: the intimidation that has led to over a hundred assassinations of professional and popular communicators.

The Tribunal brought out the fact that the pre-eminence of this economic model in Mexico, semiocapitalism, is expressed in the integral relevance that the duopoly has over the Mexican economy, as in the constant growth of the sector called “information in mass media” within the total of the Mexican GDP, to which one must add the economic impact and the volume of business in cultural industries in the country.

In this way, Mexico functions as a paradigmatic laboratory in the formation of a general process of restructuring the model of capital accumulation, that is not only based on liberalization and privatization of media, but also reveals the slow tendency of capitalism to recombine its power nuclei, situated in the structures of the production of material goods and services, with an increasing economic relevance of structures producing signs, subjectivity and meaning, above all in areas of the media.

The Tribunal pointed out that the media monopoly on the production and circulation of information not only rests on an explicit alliance between political and economic power, but also converts media activity into a constant flow of legitimation of the dominant economic model and the stigmatization of any subject or project that promotes a practice or a rationality that differs from the dominant discourse. This media model leaves society defenseless in the face of a one-track discourse of truth that, far from presenting a democratic character, determines the existence of a media ecosystem that is quite simply totalitarian.

92% of television signals are in the hands of the mercantile television duopoly Televisa-TV Azteca, which also controls print media, editorials, production firms, internet portals, telephone services, cable and satellite television, casinos, banks, loan offices, and is associated with many other enterprises of financial and stock market activity.

Media, the first power

The testimony collected by the Tribunal documented the fact that the exercise of political power in Mexico answers to the mandate that commercial television imposes on the three constitutional powers (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and that this relation is complemented by three structural factors.

The first is the generalized corruption and impunity in the system of administration and application of justice: 98% of every kind of crime and offense are not even denounced, and of the meager percentage of denunciations (2%), over half receive no sentence. The second is a relation of complicity between the media and political power that was systematically constructed during decades of hegemony of a single Party, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). Entrenched practices of control over media through the discretional use of official advertising have resulted in various forms of media subjection and servility. The absence of professional associations of journalists, a phenomenon that is complex and hard to understand, contributes to communicators reproducing this phenomenon in their daily work.

In the third place, the precarious professionalization and the limited training of communicators weakens their work situation. On average a journalist in Mexico makes between 300 and 400 dollars per month, or collects sixty cents (of a dollar) per news story. In order to satisfy basic needs, he or she may have up to three jobs, or submit ten stories daily. The newspaper owners, tied to the interests of the governing class, are the principal obstacles to the training of their reporters and the improvement of labour conditions.

According to the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination (Conapred) the big media contribute to reproducing and sustaining all forms of discrimination that have been practised in Mexico from the colonial period, with its 300 years of slavery: by skin colour, stature, looks, age (children, youth, the elderly), sex, sexual preference, regional origin, language (above all, if it is an indigenous language), civil status, mental or physical handicaps, belonging to certain groups, religious beliefs, matrimonial life and its vicissitudes, among many other factors. All these forms of discrimination are encouraged in the limited variety of television and radio media genres.

The accusations attest to the fact that the virtual political monopoly exercised for over 80 years by the Partido Revolutionario Institutional, which once again occupies the presidency today, depended for its success on a monopoly of radio media, promoted and supported from its beginnings by the presidents of the Republic who handed out radio frequencies, without attention to any norms, to certain of their friends and allies.

The head of Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, did not exaggerate when he told the journal “Proceso” that he and Televisa were “soldiers of the President and of PRI”. Nevertheless, the relation became inverted, according to testimony based on studies of the Universidad Autónomo Metropolitana: from Televisa and its owner being soldiers of the President, the President is now a soldier for Televisa, as are the other constitutional powers.

More than citizens, consumers

The Tribunal insisted that the overall evolution of the media and of cultural industries indicates that the production of subjectivity does not only constitute the ideological support for the reproduction of the dominant mode of production, but increasingly has become a one of its fundamental objects: media industries in Mexico demonstrate to what extent the production of subjectivity and communication have become commoditized, to the point of becoming a space dedicated to business and profit.

The transformation of citizens, from being those who access and produce communication and information media, into mere audiences and consumers, denies them participation in decision-making and in the design of the quality of media content.

In the context of a generalized destruction of the social fabric of the country, the media and communication ecosystem is affected to an alarming and dramatic extent by a violence of a dual nature. On the one hand, there is direct violence against freedom of expression and information that falls hardest on journalism professionals and on citizens who participate in the third sector of communication, fundamentally initiatives of social communication of a community nature.

On the other hand, there is a symbolic violence that imposes a discourse in society, alongside media narratives and imaginaries that disseminate values, forms of subjectivity, ways of life and ethical inclinations: in a word, a culture, in affinity with the dominant economic model and the existential regimes that it imposes.

On hearing and analyzing the documented accusations of social organizations and movements (campesinos, indigenous people, workers, academics and youth) presented in the hearings, the Tribunal concluded that the lack of access to information – and of being able to exercise the human right of access to information –, the duopolist concentration of the mass media and the continued violence against communicators, very seriously affect individual and collective rights of Mexicans.

The reform of the State and the recent two-party political alternation in government (2000-2012) have not touched this concentration: governments, political parties, legislators (and hence laws) have been subordinated to the interests of the duopoly Televisa-Televisión Azteca, further consolidated in free trade agreements.

The Tribunal took into account the social division that is growing in a country afflicted by enormous inequality, home to the richest man in the world and to 50 million people who lack the minimal conditions of survival. A country that presumes to have cultural diversity and carries out policies of annihilation of their aboriginal peoples, a nation noted for social struggles, that now criminalizes and eliminates any kind of citizen protest.

The Tribunal pointed out that Mexico has lacked and continues to lack any normative regulation inclusive of all social sectors on questions of human rights to information, freedom of expression and communication, and persists in the application of laws that support a corporative monopoly, even as it openly criminalizes citizens, organizations, communities and peoples who struggle for their rights.

It affirmed that violence against the press has been manifested in attacks on media outlets with explosives and high-powered weapons, disappearances of professional and grass-roots journalists; the displacement and/or exile of communicators due to direct threats against them; self-censorship of the media or the infiltration of delinquent gangs in their newsrooms; humiliation, assassination and disappearances of women journalists; attacks on social network users that distribute information about violence, and all kinds of physical and psychological aggression tending to sow fear and terror among communicators. It recalled that because of all this, the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression considers Mexico to be the most dangerous country in the continent for the exercise of journalism.

In the present century, according to the Mexican General Procurator’s Office, 102 journalists were assassinated, 18 have disappeared, and an uncountable number have been displaced and/or obliged to go into exile. The assassinations of journalists doubled during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), when the application of a militaristic strategy of security left 60 thousand persons assassinated and 10 thousand disappeared. To these are added the increase in assassinations and aggression against human rights defenders, in a country where there are zones of forced silence, in which criminal groups decide what is to be published in the media.

The Tribunal took into consideration that more than half of the accusations presented by organizations for the defence of freedom of expression indicated that the perpetrators of aggression against journalists were identified as agents of the state – military, police, local authorities – and that 13 per cent came from organized crime, in a country where the approval of institutional mechanisms for the protection of journalists has not limited the increase in violence against them and even less prevented the impunity of the aggressors, which has been a constant during the last three presidencies. In the first nine months of 2014, 201 aggressions against journalists were documented, an average of one every 28 hours.

At the same time the Tribunal noted that two years after the creation of the Law of Protection of persons defending human rights and journalists, the mechanism has still not been engaged and indicators reveal an increase in aggression and threats – physical, psychological, legal and cybernetic – that endanger the physical, moral and financial integrity of journalists, not only from organized crime, but also from actions ordered and executed by local, state or federal authorities, against press workers and persons who struggle for the freedom of expression and access to information.

In the past 20 months, 11 journalists were assassinated in the States of the centre-South and Northwest of the country (two in Tamaulipas and Oaxaca, one each in Zacatecas, Guerrero, Veracruz, Sinaloa, Coahuila, Puebla and Chihuahua), and that in 21 of the 32 States there were denunciations of physical aggression, robbery or destruction of equipment, arbitrary detention of journalists as they did their work, all in the face of the inaction of the authorities responsible for the prevention of violence.

Between 2002 and 2013, 180 cases of violence against women journalists have been registered and documented, 60 per cent of these committed by public servants, administrators and police, including the crime of feminicide.

The anti-reform and the end of privacy

The Tribunal considered the fact that the constitutional reform of the Telecommunications Law (2013) generated expectations in many social sectors, but then was subject to secondary legislation, approved in July 2014, that wiped out these expectations. The State, once again, promoted changes to consolidate the status quo.

In effect, the new Telecommunications Law allows for serious violations of the right to privacy and freedom of expression, access to information, the right to information, free access to the Internet, obliging providers of telecommunication services to reveal to authorities of security and administration of justice the geographic location in real time of mobile communication equipment, and this without any need for judicial warrants.

The reform establishes the right of “the authority” to deploy massive vigilance of the Internet, of mobile phones, of fibre optic, land lines, and satellite services for geolocation of users in real time, where they are, where they are speaking to, with whom they are communicating, what they say and ultimately, in acts of a mass character or of social protest, to block the transmission of signals and to subject Internet content to previous censorship. The concessionaries, that is to say, the companies, are obliged to provide these services of espionage, location tracing and personal data archiving: they are compelled to save user data for at least two years.

The telecommunications reform, conceived basically as an attempt to diminish the parallel power of the monopolies of broadcasting and telephone services, obscured the slight signals that pointed to a possible strengthening of media with a social orientation. Community and indigenous radios were subjected to demands that are similar, or even more strict, than those for private concessions, in order to obtain a frequency in the 10 per cent of the spectrum or to keep it. The Tribunal considered ridiculous the 20 watts of power conceded to them for transmission, while they are denied, in a discriminatory manner, any possibility of selling advertising that would allow them to sustain their operations.

In order to understand the origins of the telecommunications reform adopted in July 2014, it is indispensable to consider it in the context of the youth rebellion of 2012: for the first time in history the streets were filled with citizens calling for the democratization of communication and the end of Pri-ist control of society. The testimony of young people in the hearings described in detail the episodes that originated and that took place during the creative movement that occupied national and international attention over more than nine months.

The Tribunal ascertained that media criminalization against persons, groups or social movements is a political tool to generate opinion, justifying the use of force, and is employed to cover up economic, political, social, religious, ideological and/or cultural stances. This is used under the pretext of the common good – the fatherland, social unity, order, security, decency – but it is employed as a mechanism of social control to intimidate, disqualify, neutralize, inhibit or harass conduct that questions any expression of the ruling power. Criminalization is established from normative and discursive fields, through legal persecution of actions opposed to the status quo, and by militarization and police action. Through the media, it is employed to identify, disqualify and invite persecution, omitting any consideration for the inalienable rights of citizens.

The Tribunal also underlined the fact that many informers and opinion makers in the media – especially those that belong to the duopoly – exercise criminalization and lynching (at times not only intellectual) of those who dare to reclaim their rights, in diatribes in which there are accusations without any basis in fact, defamation, slander, incitation to hatred and racial and social discrimination as well as gender discrimination.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Aram Aharonian is a Uruguayan-Venezuelan journalist and teacher, director of the journal Question, founder of Telesur, director of the Observatorio Latinoamericano en Comunicación y Democracia (ULAC). He participated as a jury member of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in the final thematic hearings concerning Disinformation, Censure and Violence Against Communicators, in Mexico City, 17-19 September 2014.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/103798