In April of 1975 when my wife and I finally completed the two-year hallucinatory ordeal of buying the Colony Reporter (as it was then called), a government fiat ruled Mexican journalism: “NO FREE PRESS.” Even a hint of such an inclination tended to prompt a strong “Keep that up, we’ll shut you down... and deport you.” This made publishing a newspaper in Mexico both surreal and a bit scary. Still, after a period of daunting, if short-lived, wrangles, we concocted strategies that allowed us to dodge the censors.
Most useful was quoting Mexican politicians’ verbatim nonsense on radio, television, or in the Spanish-language press. We let awesomely foolish verbatim declarations uttered by government officials and politicians dangle nakedly on the page with no mitigating explanation. This “game” made some English-speaking employees jittery; to defy the government fiat, for a foreigner, was a crime meriting deportation.
My wife and I had just returned from New York where I worked for a series of “alternative” magazines and newspapers whose purpose was to challenge conventional reporting. Those publications were after news that conformist outlets ignored, mistakenly believing readers weren’t interested in the facts of what made things really happen. It was called muckraking. But it was not aimed at bringing down orthodox society, as some fantasized, merely to notice things that were not being noticed.
The sole exception to Mexico’s press fiat was the fervently acclaimed Mexico City daily, Excelsior. It was edited by Julio Scherer Garcia from 1968 until he was ousted in a 1976 coup ordered by President (1970-1976) Luis Echeverria. Most Mexican readers had believed that Scherer would be assassinated. That’s what eventually happened to Manuel Buendia, Mexico’ most famed crime reporter, who targeted government officials participating in both corruption and assassinations. He was shot to death in the back as he crossed a Mexico City street “in broad daylight” by a man who escaped on a motorcycle driven by a waiting associate. 
Scherer’s ouster was seen by many as the end of his career not just at Mexico’s most important newspaper, but the end of his influential journalistic career in general. It appeared to be a cultural, political and economic disaster. Actually, Echerverria opened an unrecognized wide door for Scherer and those staff members (including Mexico’s intellectual god-father, Octavio Paz) who followed their boss out the doors of Reforma 18, Excelsior’s headquarters.
That exit lead to the creation of a news magazine, “Proceso,” the first issue of which was rushed into publication to appear just before the end of Echeverria’s presidential term. That first issue was not kind to him.
Progreso has been described as a unique Mexican magazine that’s a combination of Newsweek edited by a staff with an unforgiving liberal point of view, an insistence for publishing the unsoftened truth, and the knack for presenting the kind of investigative journalism one finds in today’s “Rolling Stone.” In other words it’s a magazine grabbed off of newsstands throughout the Republic by that rather tight percentage that can afford such a politically, but not crazed, left-leaning fare, many of who are intellectuals weary of being openly “lied to,” very often including, covertly, government officials as well as so-called “opposition” politicians.
In 1975, the government’s political party, oxymoronically now named the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had ruled Mexico under one moniker or another since the assassination of revolutionary general Alvaro Obregon July 27, 1928. Obregon was pridefully stepping into his second term of the much opposed Plutartco Elias Calles-Obregon trade-off planned by these two leaders of what was then more of a faction than a political party.
He was killed at a political celebratory open-air banquet by a newspaper cartoonist who was a fervent Catholic. Most Mexicans expected that kind of reaction to be prompted by a sly Obregon-Calles-Obregon back-and-forth tradeoff to come from one of the still ambitious, persistently unsatisfied, well-armed military groups.
The fact that Obregon was assassinated by a “citizen,” no matter how provoked, shook the assorted corps of Revolutionary leaders, alarming all factions. It meant, someone nervously noted, that you really couldn’t trust anyone, not if cartoonists were going to start shooting powerful, successful national heroes.
Following independence, Mexican “political parties” remained mere political factions. Calles, traveling in Europe, saw political parties there effectively bringing together various interest groups within a single organization that could attract outside support, fastening strength and unity together.
Back in Mexico, Calles, still known as El Jefe Maximo, encouraged the formation of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) which came into being in 1929. Though less dangerously organized than predecessors, it was still not shaped to “compete within a democratic political arena.”
The PNR and its string of offshoots, many sage political analysts will tell you today, was still made up of, and faced factions that remained bellicose, too ready to solve problems with firearms, shunning mediation. In some ways the PNR offshoot, today’s PRI, is still too prone to solve political problems (meaning opposition) with methods tending to be punitive. One former priista, weary with the party’s present corruption, and (he says) forceful methods, has joined a smaller, and less popular party.
The path of his change was opened by Proceso articles reporting events occurring in the reader’s municipality. “Nobody was paying any attention to the political corruption, the outright robbery that was going on. Proceso was.”
Proceso, with its sleek, colorful, often challenging covers and ambitious articles, became for many years the only news outlet that performed such unrelenting serious investigative reporting of significant events regarding Mexican political, economic and social life. The disadvantage of that: such coverage was so contrary to Mexico’s conventional press that many would-be readers couldn’t believe Scherer’s stories. They simply seemed so tough, so amazing and so unforgiving in comparison.
Then Proceso would cover a scurvy event that such readers knew about, or that relatives in a distant pueblo corroborated. It was usually an outrageous event that no other outlet was covering. It was too harsh, reporting in such damning detail regarding local, state or national government misbehavior that it “couldn’t be true” — except it was.
Scherer’s “slogan” stated that journalism “would lose its meaning if it didn’t follow the dark labyrinths of power.” To some that sounds a bit dramatic, but regular Proceso readers long ago found that this drama is... well, true, often embarrassingly so. In that way Scherer changed how journalism is now done in Mexico: the fight to give Mexico a better form of democracy roughly continued.
That is why the profession of journalism, performed in that way, has become ever more dangerous than it was before that moment long ago when a young Excelsior reporter sat down at his Olivetti typewriter to test what was shaded by the “dark labyrinths of power.”
More than 100 reporters have been killed or disappeared since 2000. One of these was Regina Martínez Pérez who worked for Proceso. She was killed April 28, 2012, in Xalapa, Veracruz. It is not the government that gets reporters fired, a word-slinger recently said, but drug cartels protected by the police and the military who kill journalists.
Besides editing Excelsior and Proceso, Scherer wrote 22 books. His wife, Susana Ibarra Puga, died in 1988. He is survived by nine children and numerous grandchildren.