It was High Noon in Mexico City, June 7th, 1999; National Freedom of the Press Day. 12:05, to be exact.

President Ernesto Zedillo — under whose watch, 400 foreign journalists and human rights observers have been deported from the country — had just delivered his annual speech, saying: "If there is something we can be sure of at the end of this century, it is that in our country whoever has something to say can do it in full liberty without repression or censorship of any kind."

Across the city, TV talk-show host Paco Stanley, 56, a heavyset comedian famous for more than two decades on the Televisa network and, for the past 18 months, on its main competitor, TV Azteca, was leaving a restaurant and boarding his Lincoln Navigator. He was accompanied by entertainment reporter Jorge Gil and by his chauffeur. His television co-host Mario Bezares was still in the restaurant's bathroom.

Thirty seconds and 24 gunshots later, Paco Stanley was dead. His chauffeur was wounded, a bystander was killed by stray gunfire, and his wife was injured. A silver Jetta sped away, delivering the assailants to freedom.

The news of Paco Stanley's assassination hit the country like lightning. The news anchors and reporters of both major TV networks were indignant over the report of their fallen colleague. Their anger was immediately focused upon Mexico City Governor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.

"I hold you responsible, Governor Cárdenas, because you haven't delivered what you promised," snarled TV Azteca anchor Jorge Garralda as he glared into the camera amid shouts of "Enough already!" and "Resign!" from co-hosts and studio technicians.

That night during prime time, the TV station's owner, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, delivered a live editorial: "Today it was Paco. Tomorrow, it could be you or me or anybody. The impunity attacks us and where is the authority? Why do we pay taxes? Why do we have elections? Why do we have three powers of government? How can there be so much government and no authority? In this city, as in so many other cities of Mexico, the impunity, the ineptitude of authority and also the indifference of the citizenry have already reached their limit. Today we cry for Paco, and for whom we will cry tomorrow? It's clear that the authorities have failed, but also that we, the Mexican people, are failing ..."

The assassination of Stanley was the 630th attack against journalists during President's Zedillo's first five years in office. According to the Mexican Network for the Protection of Journalists and Media, 202 of these attacks had occurred in the prior year; six journalists had been killed in the line of duty.

But this was Paco Stanley, both more and less than a journalist: an entertainment figure, a big, jovial funny-guy, a cross between Phil Donahue and Ed Sullivan. The networks had virtually ignored the previous attacks on Mexican journalists. But Paco was the first TV personality to fall in violence.

As Televisa and TV Azteca called for the resignation of Cárdenas, the city's security forces investigated the crime. The first clue that all was not how it seemed was in the bloodshot eyes and slurred voice of Stanley pal and co-host, Mario Bezares, who had been inside the restaurant's men's room during the attack. And he had been there, according to witnesses, for a while. The cocaine powder it turned out he had been inhaling had, paradoxically, saved his life, noted veteran newspaper columnist Carlos Ramìrez, in the Mexico City daily El Universal. (In fact, Bezares is currently in prison awaiting trial for alleged participation in the plot to kill Stanley, with the prosecutor charging that Bezares set Stanley up.)

A TV Azteca representative told the city prosecutor that he'd better not make public the cocaine found in Stanley's bloodstream and pockets. A year later, these facts are coming to brighter light as station executives have been ordered by the courts to testify about their not-so-journalistic actions.

The broadcaster had threatened a campaign to suggest that the city prosecutor had intentionally planted the drug on the talk show host. City prosecutor Samuel del Villar countered with a move to investigate the president of TV Azteca for his prior knowledge of Paco Stanley's involvement with narcotics, as well as for obstructing justice by threatening prosecutors not to tell of Paco's coke habit. It seemed that the Cárdenas government might now be able to dismantle the drug trafficking organizations lurking inside the TV networks, which the federal prosecutor has been unable — or, more to the point, unwilling — to disband. "And to Congress comes the opportunity to review the license of TV Azteca in light of its use of blackmail to hide narco-trafficking, the number one problem of national security in the country," wrote El Universal's Ramìrez.

The other national television network, Televisa, like TV Azteca a defender of Mexico's ruling PRI party and constant enemy of the Cárdenas opposition government, had begun its coverage of Stanley's death with the same shrill tone as its competitor: "Resign! Resign!" Then came the results of Stanley's autopsy. Televisa news anchor Jacobo Zabludovsky — who had earlier in the day cried, "Somebody should resign!" — nervously changed his tone to announce somberly that Paco Stanley had been found with cocaine on, and in, his person.

Stanley had been one of the most visible spokesmen for TV Azteca's "Live Without Drugs" campaign (modeled after the U.S.-based Partnership for a Drug-Free America). He had hosted many talk shows dedicated to the evils of drug abuse. Public outrage boiled over. Banners sarcastically sporting the TV Azteca logo were hung from thousands of bridges, overpasses and buildings in the federal district: "Live Without Drugs...and Without Lies."

The Mexican print media, with its televised competition discredited, underwent a journalistic renaissance. And the story they dug up quickly went deeper, much deeper, than Paco Stanley's personal drug habits. The Mexican public soon learned that Stanley was not only an addict but a drug trafficker who had enriched himself by walking in the highest levels of the narco.

And Stanley, who in the 1980s had waged an unsuccessful political campaign as a PRI candidate for a legislative post, was known not only to federal authorities — and to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — as a drug trafficker, he was protected by them. For, along with the contraband found in Stanley's pockets, was a license to carry firearms reserved only for police — one that falsely designated him as a public safety official. The permit had been granted 27 days before his death by then-federal Secretary of Government Francisco Labastida. By June 7, Labastida had become a presidential candidate. The Paco Stanley case was now nipping at his heels and threatening to expose the Narco-State.

Print reporters — so often subject to threat and assault in their work — were angry at the favorable treatment given to Stanley. They surrounded the new Secretary of Government, former Oaxaca governor Diódoro Carrasco, as he left a public event at the Colegio de Mexico on June 10. "I will not make any comment," the successor to Labastida repeated twice. La Jornada reported: "Some reporters said, in voices perfectly audible to the functionary, that they would also like the credential that had been delivered to the assassinated TV host ... because they, too, had been assaulted."

Then, El Universal, Mexico's most widely-read daily, published a document from the federal judge's file on the case of the late cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the "Lord of the Skies." It contained testimony from a former Carrillo associate, now a protected government witness, who said, "Paco Stanley was given cocaine by Amado Carrillo Fuentes ... inside the house at 56 Cima Street." This mansion was now being used, reported El Universal in February, 1999, by the DEA as their illegal telephone-espionage center in Mexico. The press also reported that Stanley, along with his wife and co-host Bezares, owned mansions, autos and other properties with a value far beyond what his $150,000 annual salary could afford. (Bezares' annual salary was closer to $40,000.)

TV Azteca tried in vain to stop the hemorrhage of its secrets. The station dredged up a DEA official to state that the agency had no evidence of drug trafficking by Stanley. But the documents had already shown otherwise.

On the street, in homes, on radio call-in programs, the Stanley case captured the anger and attention of the public. "The newscasters of TV Azteca have not only lost their audience," announced Abraham Zabludovsky of competing Televisa (and son of Jacobo), "the audience has lost respect."

Ten months later, one U.S. media outlet finally touched upon the story behind the story: that TV Azteca itself is alleged to have been purchased from the government with $30 million U.S. in illicit drug money. On April 16th, 2000, the Washington Post reported on the Mexico City prosecutor's investigation into the Narco-Network: "City Prosecutor Del Villar also has alleged that one of the nation's two television networks, TV Azteca, was used by former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari's brother to launder illicit money. The network has denied the charges. The former president's brother, Raul, is in prison on a murder conviction and corruption charges."

But this is not a story about how the Mexican media is corrupt and, by inference, one that implies that the U.S. media is crystal clean. In fact, NBC TV just became a part owner of TV Azteca. And the station's yellow journalism has not changed at all. It continues backing the ruling regime and smearing its critics unfairly.

Televisa, the other national network, is now alleged to be owned in part by narco-money. Last spring, banker Robert Hendández, who had earlier been accused by the Yucatán daily Por Esto! of trafficking tons of cocaine on his Caribbean beachfront properties, was brought into Televisa's ownership as a partner and director. This was after presidents Clinton and Zedillo laundered his image by holding their anti-drug summit on his ranch.

The Mexican public was not only angry at the institutions of the Narco-Media, which had tricked them upon Stanley's death, and the Narco-State, whose protection of drug traffickers was more naked than ever. After five days last June of clear and documented revelations of how government and media worked on behalf of the drug trade, the public was achieving a coherence in its understanding of the farce of drug prohibition.

Meanwhile, investigative journalism, due to the indignation and coherent analysis of serious journalists, was experiencing a resurgence. It seemed that any day now, thanks to relentless reporting, the Narco-State's plan to install Labastida as its commander-in-chief was, perhaps, hours from its defeat.

Then, on Saturday, June 12, the Godfather of the Mexican Narco-State — the shadow owner of TV Azteca and so much more of the nation's wealth — flew from his hideout in Dublin to Mexico City to bring everything back under control. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, for the first time in four years, set foot on Mexican soil.

He was met by presidential guards at the airport. They were not there to arrest him — there is no warrant for his arrest in spite of charges by Swiss and other governments that, as president, he enriched himself to the tune of billions of dollars with drug pay-offs and money laundering — but, rather, to protect him. He was and is, after all, the most hated man in Mexico, widely considered to be the country's greatest criminal, destabilizer of the nation, drug trafficker, money launderer, shadow owner of media and of banks, destroyer of the Mexican middle class.

The pretext of Salinas' visit was the wedding of a relative, one that had been postponed months earlier when Salinas suddenly let it be known that he couldn't make it. For every million Mexicans who have seen their safety and security damaged by the U.S.-propped Salinas-Zedillo-Labastida Narco-State, there is at least one millionaire who was wildly enriched by participating in the project that Salinas had accomplished: the privatization of Mexico's wealth and the covert nationalization of the Narco. This Salinas accomplished with the backing of two U.S. presidents, Bush and Clinton.

Salinas called a press conference and invited only reporters he had always controlled: a Who's Who of the narco-media. TV Azteca and Televisa received one-on-one televised interviews. He asserted the innocence of his brother Raul Salinas de Gortari, and he defended his legacy. He met with business and political allies, many of whom were invited to the wedding. He made a mansion in one of Mexico City's historic neighborhoods his fortress, guarded not just by the presidential guards on loan from Zedillo, but also a large private security force of his own.

Crowds gathered to protest. Placards sang of his treason against the nation.

Journalists dropped their investigations into the Paco Stanley case and turned their pens on Salinas. Four years of a country's pent-up rage was directed at him, and Salinas merely smiled.

In one fell swoop, he sponged up the anger and hatred of the nation. He was gone again in 48 hours. Control had been re-established. Zedillo and Labastida came out of their bunkers: The president had hidden on an Armed Forces base in Guadalajara at a ceremony with General Enrique Cervantes, who is suspected, according to a recent "60 Minutes" exposé, of laundering more than $100 million in drug money. PRI-friendly media outlets spun many theories on the visit, all claiming that it reflected a division between the hated Salinas and Zedillo. The mask was back on. By the time the devil left, the anger had dissipated, its energy spent. A spectacular scandal had worked to cover up the real one.

Five weeks later, a federal judge reduced Raul Salinas's prison term from 50 to 22 years; under Mexican law he could be free in five. And the judge left room for further reduction in the sentence.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari had saved TV Azteca, he had saved his brother and the Narco-State marched on.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld Online and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.

Trouble at TV Azteca
May 8-12, 2000

Veteran Mexican Journalist says TV Azteca Acted Unethically
May 13, 2000

Related stories about the Narco-Media:

L.A. Times Story Censored by Translation
April 30, 2000

Assassinated "Journalist" Was a Cop
May 6, 2000