Learning from Carlos Denegri, a crooked Mexican newsman

IN 1939 CARLOS DENEGRI, a young reporter, investigated a murder by gunmen working for Maximino Ávila Camacho, the governor of the state of Puebla and brother of the next president of Mexico. Denegri delivered a detailed account of Ávila’s crimes to the editor of Excélsior, the country’s most important newspaper. The editor did not publish it, explaining that the governor was a source of much paid advertising. “In this business we don’t only sell information and advertising space: above all, we sell silence,” he went on. Denegri quickly lost his idealism, and accepted a monthly stipend from the governor “for publicity and information services”.

These imagined words provide Enrique Serna, a Mexican writer, with the title of his new novel, El vendedor de silencio (“The Merchant of Silence”), a semi-fictionalised biography of Denegri, the country’s most prominent journalist from the 1940s to the 1960s and once named by the Associated Press as one of the ten most influential reporters in the world. Mr Serna offers a rich account of the incestuous relationship between politics and the media and the machismo and impunity that lay at the heart of the authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed for seven decades...

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