Pablo Piccato
Columbia University
This paper will examine the organization, language, content and readership of the police news in Mexico between the 1930s and the 1970s. It will argue that police news allowed writers and readers a degree of critical engagement with representatives of the states that is difficult to find in other areas of Mexican public life after the consolidation of a single-party regime up until the beginning of the transition toward a competitive electoral system. The combination of text and photographs allowed the nota roja to produce a powerful narrative language around some broadly publicized cases. The evidence of impunity and police corruption gave readers the right to criticize the state in a critical way. The role of reporters as intermediaries between the police investigations and readers entitled the latter to build a skeptical perspective on justice.
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