Daring Grupo Reforma Publisher Gives Speech Zane Hill - TheAdvertiser.com
go to original April 1, 2012

Alejandro Junco de la Vega, publisher of Mexican newspaper conglomerate Grupo Reforma, seemed shaken as he told a crowd of student and professional journalists about his hometown, Monterrey, Mexico.

"My city was viewed as the next investment hot spot in the world," he said.

Shaken?

"A hot spot indeed," he continued.

Can't be that bad.

"But of massacres."

It is. Junco used a comparison to the game "musical chairs" to better explain.

"In the end, only one child wins. All the others lose," he said. "In our real and all true adult world, I'm witnessing, personally, a more desperate version of that game being played out. Some have already lost their chairs.

"For them, the game is over. They're not smiling."

He admitted his sentiments might seem "darkish." But the 63-year-old publisher lives in Austin, Texas. Death threats from Mexico's infamous drug traffickers have forced him there.

Junco was speaking to the Society of Professional Journalists Region 12 Conference, which UL's chapter hosted this weekend at the Crowne Plaza on Pinhook Road.

Grupo Reforma boasts seven dailies and employs more than 800 in the fight against corruption and violence in Mexico, to end the game of musical chairs that makes the news with story after story of kidnapping and massacre.

"The sooner we act, the sooner we can stop this game and the earlier we can start to fill the room again with a chair for everyone," he said.

Junco highlighted a number of codes and laws, similar to those in the U.S., that nominally govern the justice system in Mexico. The actual standard operating procedures, however, paint a much more grim picture.

Innocent until proven guilty? Right to a public trial? Burden of proof? A public defender?

More like jails overcrowded with people who haven't even been charged yet. Civilians tortured into a confession. Private trials held in a judge's quarters and ex parte communication on fishing trips. Unpunished perjury.

Mexico is one of four countries in the world that does not have orality in trials. They instead take up thousands of pages, while 92 percent of all hearings are without a judge. In fact, 80 percent of the inmates have never stood before a judge at all, according to Junco.

"I had a friend who was in jail for nine years before he was sentenced," he said. "He passed away before he reached the sentence."

Junco showed the group his newspapers' front pages in the slideshow. They included stories of unions being paid millions to break their strikes and governors rising to the head of their political parties even after being implicated in exponential increases of falsified documents.

In another, there was a story about a casino set ablaze because the owners wouldn't pay the protection fee to the gangs. Where were the police? Standing idly by as the fire was set, as proven by the accompanying photo.

Junco ascribed the dysfunctional culture to a tragedy of the commons. That is, because there isn't a formal ownership of commodities like land and oil, no one is accountable for what happens to it. Citizens don't have a sense of ownership, so they don't care.

"Children grow up thinking that this is OK," he said. "This anonymity is a very, very dangerous thing."

Junco said his front pages often have his friends urging him to tone down the coverage, claiming it's bad for foreign investment, social morale and the economy. Of course, it's bad for the individual journalists, too, they say.

"Our enemies also say, 'Tone it down.' Only they do so with a louder voice. And grenades," Junco said, noting that three grenades have been lobbed at one of his newspapers in the past year.

"I've decided we will not tone it down, because if we did, we would be concealing the truth," he continued. "We believe, in our newsrooms, that a century-long tradition of suppressing the truth and corruption has brought us to the state we are in."

Junco's own writers have been kidnapped and returned with a message to stop their reporting. To protect his writers, Junco said he stopped running bylines with the stories. However, at events significant enough to have the TV crews there too, the cameras would start turning toward the journalists rather than the story.

According to Junco, there is no easy, quick solution. The "cancer of dysfunction" is too ingrained for that and it goes further than simply the pipe dream of stopping gun and drug traffic.

"Only when you change the system and rules of conduct will people change," he claimed.

Junco often referenced a quote from former U.S. President John F. Kennedy concerning the relationship between the two countries, united by their beginnings, struggles and goals. Unfortunately, he believes Mexico has taken steps backward in the 50 years since.

Not all hope is lost. Junco said there are plenty of people who only accept the current system because of the rational desire to maintain their safety. Prosperity and stability are their hopes and desires, too. Just like ours. Inflation remains extremely low and there is no fiscal deficit. There is increasing foreign investment.

"There is a flame here that can be found, ladies and gentlemen," he said.

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