andersen-ottaway lecture

1996 Andersen Lecture
Alejandro Junco de la Vega
Publisher of Reforma and El Norte newspapers, Mexico

Cyberspace And A Free Press

There is a Mexico that is struggling to open up to democracy and information. Another one holds on to a past of violence and intolerance. Both are laid open to the explosion of technology and the opening of frontiers.

Thank you for allowing me to share some experiences, a product of my work in the information business, an industry that, in my opinion, will tip the balance in favor of change.

My first experience has to do with sports. Please bring to mind Atlanta ‘96. Many of us here and millions of people around the world anxiously await the four year cycle that brings us the ultimate in athletic achievement: the Olympic Games.

On this occasion, for the first time, our newspapers were to have national coverage so we gave it our best planning and effort.

Our intention was to present a job well done for our readers. We brought together the best to cover the events, hooked up to every kind of telecommunications...everything was covered to the "T"...well, at least we thought so.

When the athletic community converged in Atlanta and the torch initiated the Centennial games, we were really into the two part Olympic spirit...friendship and hard competition.

Halfway through the games a problem originated that was totally out of our control. The Mexican team...our athletes...were outstanding with the first part....friendship....but when it came to the second part....competition...well things didn’t go as well. Ten days had passed... no gold... no silver...no bronze.

What is a customer oriented newspaper to do?

Well, we went by the books....if our clientele wanted medals, then medals they will get. With the help of a little humor...we created the imaginary Mexican Olympic Games ‘96.

As medals were being presented in Atlanta, our newspapers started to award Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. There was, however, a small catch....rather than present these medals to deserving athletes, they were presented to "not too deserving" politicians.

In diving, for example, the gold medal was unanimously given to the Salinas Family. They were outstanding in "diving" into the nations resources and making it their own....each and every family member were true champions in their category.

In the long jump, the gold went to our ex-minister of education who evaded justice by jumping across the Rio Grande to land in the sunny beaches of South Texas.

Through humor, we expected a few smiles from our readers, some complaints from our politicians and taking some pressure off our Olympic ordeal.

What we never imagined was that our Editor-in-Chief and myself would end up before a court of justice faced with criminal charges and a penal suit.

A Federal Senator from the State of Nuevo Leon was offended because one of our medals was granted to the State Comptroller for investigating a sweetheart deal between this legislator and our State Government.

The Senator argued that mentioning this "touchy" subject -- with satire -- was cause enough to charge the newspaper for criminal offenses and demand imprisonment for its publisher and editor.

What had started as a spot of humor turned into a philosophical issue.

Should Mexican newspapers be free to write about public officials and their negotiations with public funds or should we limit ourselves to copying government press releases, cooking recipes and be contented with the scores of the soccer games?

To make matters worse, what was also on the table was the subject of the selective enforcement of justice. The Mexican Judicial system is not particularly famous for its swiftness and competency in finding criminals.

But in the case of our Olympic joke...our felony was legally examined, the evidence analyzed, our malice established...and the conclusions reached in one half a day!

We had committed a crime. The weapon...a Compaq with Microsoft Word. Proof of malice...a statement from an unknown person who alleges that before he read about the medal awards, he had a good opinion of the senator, and after the awards, his opinion changed. The evidence...a photostatic copy of our editorial pages.

Within 18 hours after the Senator filed his charges and presented his case we were taken before justice. This was truly a new Guinness record; the speed that Mexican justice took off to go after newsmen, was quite a contrast to the snails pace that the mafiosi so cleverly bank on.

Fortunately for our cause, public opinion sided with us, and within 15 days charges were dropped. For this reason I have the pleasure of being here with you today, and not in our Alcatraz with Salinas.

Another case that I would like to share with you about the ongoing struggle between freedom and control, has made me meditate on how information, once an exclusive domain of journalism, is now finding new and effective ways of reaching and empowering citizens.

Though you may not be accustomed to view the computer and technology as an instrument to encourage information and democracy and to develop a Good Government, I believe that this is precisely the contribution that technology will bring to our generation in Mexico.

In the United States, democracy was born with the advancement of the technology of its time, the invention of moveable type and the printing press. By making it possible to print books, pamphlets, newspapers and gazettes typesetters participated in the birth of democracy: they saw it grow with ink in its veins.

Since then journalism, practiced with professionalism and freedom, has played an important part in the development of US democracy; the right to choose would have been fruitless or worse, without access to information.

The printed word, as a registrar of public affairs, speaker of informed voices and a watchman, in other words an activist of democracy, has been around for four centuries in your country.

In Mexico, mass media, at least the history that I have lived through, has not played the same role. It has not been free from the influence of the Government nor, truthfully speaking, has it always been professionally run.

Newspapers have depended for more than half a century on a government company that controlled newsprint PIPSA, radio has depended on its federal concessions, TV on telecommunications and satellites, journalists surviving on payoffs, and other perverted dealings like paid news which has further muddied our industry and diminished our credibility.

But now, with digital and network technology the grip that the government or corrupted journalists have had on the flow of information is loosening. Today information flows in more diverse forms, less subjected to censorship, government influence or our own incompetency.

Let me share with you a story that illustrates this point.

The community of Monterrey had been suffering the wrongdoings of a violent lawyer who was so ruthless he had become a legend. His name was del Real. This person was famous for taking legal cases and winning them, regardless of the legal evidence or the judicial situation of his customers.

This lawyer also became the most effective way of collecting debts because many times he would skip the legal path altogether and would bully the debtor.

His threats materialized with such brutality and humiliation for the victims that no longer were people willing to fight or defend themselves. This lawyer became a terror in our city and if you were involved in a legal conflict and he was defending the other party it became almost impossible to find a lawyer who would take your case.

You are probably wondering how this could happen without this lawyer being arrested and put in jail. Well, many of us asked the same question time and again.

The speculation was that he spent enormous money in corrupting police and judges. Other people thought that he was under special privilege and protection from the Federal Government. There were also rumors that the state authorities were afraid of him because he knew a lot about the drug trade and which authorities were involved.

The one thing that was well known is that he seemed to have some kind of immunity with the state attorney and police officers. It was common to see them together.

Surprisingly for most of us, Mr. del Real was shot and killed in public, at a restaurant, when he was having coffee with the Chief of the state police. More surprisingly, the killer managed to escape despite the presence of armed bodyguards who usually followed both men to every place they went.

People began to speculate that it was a plot organized by authorities, while others argued that the contract was ordered by a drug lord as a vengeance because Mr. del Real had played as double agent for Federal Police and the drug mafia.

After several weeks, the police investigations led to nowhere and nobody. It seemed as if they did not want to solve the murder. It was at this point that our newsroom was able to conclude an important investigation that led to certain documents that were left by the murdered lawyer.

The documents revealed important information about the extortion and bribing that Mr. del Real used to practice very efficiently. The documents also included letters addressed to government officers with clear proof that they were in association with del Real.

Since there were many documents and many of them were rather explosive in their revelations, we decided to publish a summary in the newspaper. The material published made very fine reading for our public but it was not very pleasant for the authorities. They immediately issued a judicial order to our newspaper.

The way the judicial order was made it became clear to us that the authorities didn’t want our documents to solve the murder case. They wanted them so they could discredit our story and get themselves off the hook.

We became legally obligated to submit the "del Real file" because the Attorney General’s office wanted to verify seven items: if the documents actually existed, if they were original, if they were signed, if the signature was authentic, if they had been delivered, if they had been received by the addressees...and if their contents were truthful.

Now, this put us in a tough spot because, sure enough, the evidence that we came up with did not meet all of their seven requirements. Actually our evidence didn’t meet any.

You see the evidence we in fact had was something better than paper documents. We had Mr. del Real’s computer with Windows, Word and Excel registered under his name, with hundreds of revealing files! With the help of an electronic locksmith we broke the passwords and right before our eyes the del Real mystery unfolded.

All his personal and corruption records and notations were there. Who got what payments, who was in cahoots with whom. Every minor or major item of this crooked lawyer was there. But we knew that the moment we turned the computer over to the authorities, that computer's information could be lost forever.

So rather than giving the authorities physical access, we gave them digital access. We made Mr. del Real’s computer an Internet server, built a user friendly home page and gave the authorities on-line access. With the help of a little promotion from the newspaper, 200,000 hits were recorded on the first day!

By having the complete files available on the Internet, the community was able to know how founded were our newspaper’s stories and the kind of dealings that were made during the period of terror staged by Mr. del Real.

The pressure on the government was overwhelming and changes began to occur in the Justice and Police departments, who got new chiefs, and finally the Governor had to resign amid the growing resentment of the community over such conclusive proof of corruption.

To me this case illustrates how we -- in Mexico -- are at the doorway of a revolutionary development; a digital era, in which more and more information will flow in new and unfettered ways.

Soon personal news services and on demand news will become a viable alternative to mass media. This will bring profound implications for our society, for newspapers and democracy. Networks and PC’s will do for Mexico what moveable type did for the US.

The printed word is made up of four centuries of history. Television and radio have been going for some decades now, the electronic networks are still being born. The coexistence of these industries, new and old, is the uncharted territory that will be very promising for freedom.

The media, once a manageable lot for the purposes of government control is now propagating out of control. Call it a new DTH satellite that is transmitting several hundred channels from a US orbit to millions of homes in Mexico, or a new Internet server that allows users to have access to more specialized information, the field is becoming wide open. All the professionals of the media are competing for the attention of readers, viewers, listeners, and "surfers" in cyberspace.

In a period of 15 years, for example, homes have changed from having no videocassette players, satellite dish, PC’s, Cable or Internet to having all this technology available to high end users who are still low in numbers but very high in strategic importance.

I would like to conclude by repeating something that you know all too well:

Information is one of the raw materials in the construction of freedom. Determination and conscience, without information, is at the mercy of manipulation.

Societies that have suppressed or restricted freedom, have done so by controlling the flow of information. Ceausescu’s Rumania, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Tito’s Yugoslavia or Castro’s Cuba are clear examples of where censorship determines what news can be published.

Conversely, where more information flows, more freedom and democracy flourishes. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall tumbled not because of the vision or benevolence of their leaders, but by the relentless hail of munition in the form of ideas and information.

Enormous change has occurred by the simple revelation of information. Is there any doubt that history would have played out differently if the flow of information, criticisms and opinions had been held back on cases such as Nixon’s Watergate, Colosio’s assassination, or the deals of Raul Salinas?

The benefits of free flow of ideas and of speech are respected not only in our constitution but within the International treaties Mexico is part of.

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, Article 19 states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference".

The criminal charges that were brought against us and the possibility of being incarcerated because of our Olympic humor are a form of "interference".

The obstruction to the circulation of Reforma in the streets of Mexico City with the boycott still imposed on us by the Monopolistic Carriers Union which forced us to go out onto the streets to sell our newspapers is another form of interference.

The dilemma to turn to the Internet or the authorities for dissemination of the del Real documents was another tough decision...as it was in the 80’s the struggle to end the paper monopoly that was held by PIPSA.

Standing up for freedom, and exercising it with responsibility, has been the cornerstone of the men and women who make REFORMA and EL NORTE.

But, paradigms change. Soon we will all belong to the digital age. And those who grew up with computers and who have experienced living in an more open society, will have an important part in deciding how to make information -- a factor for -- and not -- an impediment to -- the development of our country.

There is a responsibility to search, find and solve the new philosophical, marketing and business paradigms of the new technology.

As with the printed word, if placed in clean hands and open hearts, it will soon be another component of progress; quality information...for quality decisions.

Thank you very much.