Sheinbaum Moves to Gag Mexico’s Media
The president insists she backs democratic norms, but individual liberty is vanishing.
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum at the National Palace in Mexico City, Aug. 14. Mario Guzman/EPA/ShutterstockMexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says the “audience rights” initiative she announced last month is designed to protect the public from fake news.
But by making a government agency the arbiter of the truth, the president’s effort greenlights censorship.
Journalists, writers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs are alarmed.
The slow strangulation of democratic pluralism in Mexico by Ms. Sheinbaum and her Morena party started with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-24), also known as AMLO.
He governed as a classic populist, expanding welfare rolls to buy loyalty at the ballot box.
But as someone who came up in politics during the 71-year rule of the repressive Institutional Revolutionary Party, he understood that perpetual power for Morena required more.
By the end of AMLO’s presidency, Morena had wrested control of the formerly independent National Electoral Institute and the Electoral Tribunal.
When the party failed to secure a supermajority in 2024 lower-house elections, electoral authorities manipulated rules around proportional representation to make it happen.
During his final month in office AMLO pushed a new law through Congress establishing the election of all judges.
The Mexican judiciary has become a farce.
This creeping authoritarianism, which AMLO dubbed Mexico’s “fourth transformation,” or 4T, continues.
Ms. Sheinbaum insists she supports democratic norms.
Yet under her leadership, the Morena machine is using its sharp teeth and claws to shred any remaining protection of individual liberty and the rule of law.
In an Aug. 1 essay titled “Towards a Police State” for the Mexican monthly Nexos, Sergio López Ayllón and Pedro Salazar Ugarte of the Institute of Legal Research at Mexico’s National Autonomous University write that the measures being used to slowly dismantle democracy are “interconnected.”
“Viewed together, they reveal a state with extraordinary capabilities to monitor, impose economic sanctions, freeze assets, deprive individuals of their liberty, and interfere in the lives of people and businesses, without a judiciary captured through electoral means acting as a defender of violated rights.”
Still, Morena remains short of absolute power and it faces midterm elections next June.
Most Mexicans vote their pocketbooks, and despite Morena’s recklessness in running up debt and deficits, the peso has been strong.
But organized crime and its alleged links to Morena politicians are sore spots.
Corruption could become a hot campaign issue, and controlling the narrative on the airwaves, where most Mexicans get their news, will be crucial for the party.
Ms. Sheinbaum is trying to get out in front of this problem by silencing critics.
The groundwork was laid last year with the dissolution of the autonomous Federal Institute of Telecommunications.
That independent watchdog was replaced with a federal government agency, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, which, under Ms. Sheinbaum’s initiative, will judge the veracity of media reporting.
It will decide if words uttered on the evening news are something the public shouldn’t have heard.
Ms. Sheinbaum says the fines that will be applied for such verbal violations are still being discussed.
Media outlets may self-censor to avoid financially debilitating penalties.
The power that the state will have in policing radio and television isn’t in doubt.
The outcry from Mexican democrats who cherish free speech has been extraordinary.
Mexico’s National Chamber of the Radio and Television Industry warned that the guidelines are “ambiguous” and that “the bill allows the government to define what constitutes false or decontextualized information.”
Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, a former director of Mexico’s national intelligence agency, took to the pages of Mexico’s La Aurora last week to point out the double standard.
For the past eight years, he charged, the Morena governments have “dedicated” their televised morning show “to lying, concealing information, and flooding us with fake news.”
They have “done nothing but stigmatize, discredit, intimidate, leave unprotected, and sow hatred against the media, journalists, and critics.”
This ruling elite “destroyed” autonomous regulators and “now wants to portray itself as the defender of our right to be well-informed.
What audacity.”
It’s doubtful that Ms. Sheinbaum would be on board if the opposition were in power and made itself the decider of who should be heard and who should be silenced.
In 2021 she tweeted: “It is one thing to make a debate public and quite another to make lists with implicit threats, characteristic of fascism.
In the 4T there is freedom of expression.”
Yet on Wednesday Luisa María Alcalde, legal adviser to the president, released a list of journalists, commentators, politicians and news outlets that the government says are guilty of politicized reporting.
Perhaps it’s a miracle that after so many years of Morena in the presidency, fragments of Mexican freedom remain.
For how long is anybody’s guess.
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