Pemex on Trial: The Investigative Press, Oil Boom, and Challenges to Regime Legitimacy in Mexico, 1976–82

On September 20, 1979, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) director Jorge Díaz Serrano appeared before the Mexican congress for nine hours of televised questioning. In an unprecedented display of internal party dissent, ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) representatives asked Díaz Serrano to answer press accusations. Congressmen cited as the source of their concern the investigative reportage of Heberto Castillo, who over the past three years had unearthed evidence of the state-owned oil company’s corruption. The interrogation represented the first occasion in which PRI representatives publicly challenged a functionary who enjoyed strong presidential support. It demonstrates investigative journalists’ critical role in the regime’s splintering in the 1970s, a period during which scholars have perceived the PRI as united by oil boom spoils.

            This paper analyzes the polarizing public debate that followed President José López Portillo’s 1976 announcement that Mexico would become a net exporter of oil. Armed with leaks from dissenting officials, journalists published stories that revealed the state’s inability to administer oil wealth fairly and transparently. While muckraking articles undermined official misinformation, political columns served as forums where politicians and intellectuals registered their dissent and printed rebuttals to ideological opponents. Working within the context of a contradictory state policy that alternated between repression and material support via advertising revenue, investigative journalists inaugurated new methods for eroding populist legitimacy in Mexico. The paper also offers a methodological contribution, showing how print media offer a fecund field for analyzing how regime alliances shifted earlier than the literature has recognized. This study forms part of my dissertation, which examines the ways in which the democratization of the public sphere corresponded with the PRI’s internal democratization.