Sex, divorce, censorship and the church

03 Nov 10 | Americas, Mexico

Las Aparicio, a telenovela produced by Argos Comunicacion, the cutting-edge Mexican production house headed by Epigmenio Ibarra and his wife Veronica Velasco, has managed to anger both the Mexican church and Venezuelan president. Called “immoral” by Hugo Chavez and Mexican prelates, the series finished in September on the free-to-air television channel Cadena Tres in Mexico. Its critics were angered by “open scenes of lesbianism,” and a strong dosage of realism. The programme is about a clan of women who only have daughters and turn that curse into a strength. The characters include ghosts, a lesbian couple and divorced professional women and the women have sex and look to life after divorce. A typical Argos recipe for breaking taboos in Mexican television. After having initially pulled the programme from schedules at the prodding of local church officials, 11 Mexican cities eventually got to watch the show and Chavez finally relented and allowed the series to be shown on Venezuelan television at midnight.

Mexico is the home of the telenovela. The genre in the 1940s. There are various storylines, but the most popular ones are the telenovela rosa, which always involves the story of a poor woman who falls in love with a rich man, and the evil woman who tries to stop the love from flourishing. When I first moved to Mexico, I spent the first year watching these telenovelas to see if they have anything to say about Mexican culture. They don’t.

Epigmenio Ibarra is the antithesis of a rosa producer. At the beginning he was seen as an anti-christ just for producing a different type of story. Television owners think that people want stories of chivalry and traditional values that put religion at the top of the heap, says Epigmenio, a medium built man with glasses who has a penchant for staring down at his interviewer. I met Epigmenio in Central America as he reported the news for the Mexican news agency Notimex. A clever man, he managed to find sources on both sides of that vicious civil war — he was loved by both army generals and guerrilla leaders. He remains close friends with former guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos who teaches at Cambridge.

Seventeen years ago, Epigmenio returned home after the Central American wars ended. He tried to continue reporting on the Gulf War and the Balkan wars, but it did not feel the same. He decided to take a stake in the now-changing Mexico, which was in the throes of moving from a one party system, run by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). He met his wife Veronica Velasco, a television reporter, and tried to get into the national television business. In Mexico there was only room for two news networks, Televisa, which is the second largest media conglomerate in Latin America after Consorcio Globo, and Television Azteca. “They closed the doors on us,” he recalls. “So we started doing telenovelas.”

Epigmenio and his wife started working with Azteca, as Veronica was a former television star who had worked with one of the chain’s channels. They did a series that investigated crime and justice, but they broke big when they produced political drama Nada Personal a thinly veiled critical look at the political soap surrounding former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With Nada Personal, the socially conscious telenovela was born.

Since that first hit, Argos has produced a series of groundbreaking programmes that have taken on lesbianism, womanising priests, philandering politicians and strong women. The house’s most recent series, Capadocia — which it produced with HBO — deals with women in prison, and chapters are inserted with real life “hijuelos” or bastards, capturing real stories of drug trafficking, political corruption and social upheaval, which Argos introduces in the weekly or daily episodes, making the series uncannily close to real life.

“We are not interested in making a telenovela that features women who cry but still have perfect makeup. We look for a thinking viewer who does not want to be fed a story,” says Veronica Velasco, a tall, dark-haired striking woman.

Argos Comunicacion, the couple’s production company launched in 1992 — is today a sort of family business, with Epigmenio and Veronica at the helm, and other family members working in key positions, including one of Epigmenio’s daughters, Erendira, who played a lesbian in Las Aparicio. They have other business partners, including Mexico’s richest man Carlos Slim, who has invested in their production house. But the couple controls the content of Argo’s productions.

Epigmenio and Veronica recount the awards their series have obtained in the last 17 years, more out of awe at having conquered all odds than out of ego. “We won five awards in the recent International Festival of Telenovelas in Argentina,” adds Epigmenio, as we sit around a large square table in his spacious office. It is here in the Casa Azul — a turn of the century large mansion in Colonia Condesa — that he runs a production/talent scout and drama school conglomerate. Aware that many of the telenovela or Mexican starlets come out of the drama schools run by the two large television networks, he has also focused in trying to create more sophisticated and focused talent.

“It is the first time one telenovela has won all those awards in the festival in Argentina,” he continues. “We use the same writers TV Azteca uses, but they don’t win awards there,” tells Veronica. Cadena Tres was less of a struggle for Argos, which has had legendary falling outs with TV Azteca, its old outlet. Cadena Tres is a smaller media conglomerate. This new network is run by another Mexican millionare, Olegario Vasquez Raña, who owns hospitals and a newspaper.

Epigmenio continues to be involved in politics. He supported Andres Manuel Obrador the candidate on the leftist Partido Revolucionary Democratico (PRD), who ran for president in 2006 and lost to current president Felipe Calderon, amidst charges of vote fraud. On his twitter account, he writes anti-government messages. But one thing he learned being a war correspondent is that peace should be kept at all times. He says El Salvador’s biggest achievement was to reach peace after twelve years of war.

Argos’s latest plan are to produce a new soap called “The Weaker Sex”, a parody of a group of men who are abandoned by their wives and girlfriends. It is an old story in the United States and Europe. But this is a serious topic in a society that it is still dominated by the macho man and his virgin girlfriend telenovela that the other networks produce.

Still, Epigmenio and Veronica continue to be the outsiders who learned how to be insiders in Mexico. Their number one lesson from all the years producing telenovelas and series is: “You can’t touch the church and its values. We learned that when we tried to write about a womaniser priest. So we have figured out how to work out socially important stories without elaborating much on the church.”

Mexico is a very religious country, says Epigmenio. “We were told all priests were good when the Maciel scandal was at its height.” [Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative catholic sect, was exposed as a sex offender and has subsequently been formally denounced by the Vatican].

“We believe that the analysis commercial television uses to measure what Mexicans and Latin Americans want is wrong,” says Epigmenio “Lets not assume entertainment is something vacuous…television should also take risks,” he concludes.

Egypt: Media crackdown continues

19 Oct 10 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost

Egyptian authorities have continued their pre-election crackdown on the independent media. Most recently private production companies that provide live broadcast services to independent television stations have had their licences revoked. It is reported that they will have to broadcast directly from studios affiliated with the state in order to receive new licences. The move follows the sacking of an opposition newspaper editor, the refusal to allow entrance to international monitors, and restrictions on sending out mass text messages. Critics say this is bound to inhibit reporting in the run-up to both November’s parliamentary elections and next year’s presidential poll.

New Zealand: TV presenter resigns over race row

11 Oct 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features

A breakfast show anchor for Television New Zealand has resigned after being accused of racist behaviour. Paul Henry was shown laughing at the mispronunciation of the name of the Delhi Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit, which should sound more like “Dixit” in English. The Indian government lodged a formal complaint, calling the presenter’s comments “racist and bigoted”. Henry had already been suspended over accusations of racism, after suggesting that Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand, who is of Indo-Fijian descent, was not really a New Zealander. The television host said he was “astonished” and “dismayed” at the uproar his comments had caused.

Commercial conflicts hampering efforts to unite Mexican media workers

17 Sep 10 | Uncategorized

A battle is brewing between two Mexican media giants: Grupo Reforma and the television network Televisa. This might seem to be a debate about ethics, but it is not what it appears to be.

About a week ago, Televisa, the second largest media group in Latin America, launched a series of news stories describing how Grupo Reforma, one of Mexico’s most respected newspaper empires, published advertisements for sex services which contributed to the trafficking of women in Mexico. The stories were broadcast on Televisa’s nightly programme, which has the highest ratings in the country — 40 million viewers, according to some media commentators. The issue of publishing sex ads in the national media is an ethical debate that should probably be brought to the fore in Mexico. According to the International Organisation for Migration, Mexico has a serious problem with woman-trafficking networks, which are run by drug-trafficking groups. But the odd thing about the Televisa story is that it never mentioned the other half a dozen Mexican tabloids which publish nude centrefolds in the style of British tabloids, as well as pages of “sex for hire” ads, which are often more graphic than those found in Reforma.

Since the first stories appeared, the question of what lies behind the media feud has been swirling around Mexico. The most credible explanation, mentioned by a number of columnists, is that the fight started when Reforma published a business story accusing Televisa of receiving special government treatment in the allocation of a lucrative mobile phone contract with communications giant Nextel. A former telecommunications government official also claimed that Televisa was given a good deal. The contract gave Televisa and Nextel the right to enter so-called “quadruple play”, which combines broadband Internet access, television and telephone, with wireless service provisions, at a price 28 times less than the expected cost, according to some news accounts.

In response to the accusation, Televisa demanded that Reforma publish a lengthy letter, which the newspaper refused to do. And so the battle began.

This kind of row is what gets in the way of media collaboration on issues such as press freedom. Recently, Televisa and other media executives sat down for the first time to discuss joint measures to protect the press in Mexico. Reforma, however, did not participate in the meetings — one of its executives said it did not like to mix with other news media executives. The Reforma conglomerate is known for revolutionising Mexican media in the 1990s when it launched its newspaper, also called Reforma, in Mexico City. The paper was the first to include all political views at a time when subversion of the press by those in power was common. Since those heady days, Reforma has remained the centre right daily that is read mostly by Mexican elites. Like Reforma’s two other dailies, El Norte, in the industrial city of Monterrey, and Mural, in the city of Guadalajara, the newspaper is known for strict editorial guidelines.

Reforma´s publisher, Junco de la Vega, left Mexico two years ago for Austin, Texas, after the powerful Gulf Cartel, which has control of the east coast of Mexico, sent the newspaper a video detailing the daily routine of de la Vega’s entire family. Junco’s forced exit was never publicised by the other news media, and this apparent lack of sensitivity for attacks on other colleagues was a prelude to the dangerous situation now facing the entire media community in Mexico. Even de la Vega´s decision to abandon the country has been facetiously disparaged in some columns, which insinuate that de la Vega is a coward for leaving. Let’s hope this latest spat does not have a negative impact on recent advancements in co-operation shown by the media outlets facing attacks by drug cartels.

However, the way in which business interests can blindside the debate in Mexico is worrying. The stakes are high, nevertheless. Nextel is currently working on expanding its nationwide 3G wireless networks in Mexico. Televisa hopes to create an innovative communication platform by adding Nextel’s wireless and broadband services to its existing portfolio of pay-TV services, offering market-leading content and multiple distribution channels. Televisa controls 70 percent of the pay-TV market.