Murders of Nota Roja: Truth and Justice in Mexican Crime News

MURDERS OF NOTA ROJA: TRUTH ANDJUSTICE IN MEXICAN CRIME NEWS*

In mid twentieth-century Mexico, crime news was the terrainon which civil society addressed the separation between truthand justice — the disjunction between people’s knowledgeabout the reality of criminal acts and the state response to thoseacts. This gap, which had seemed to define matters of crimeand punishment since the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Dıaz,remained under the more socially inclusive system establishedafter the 1910–17 revolution.1 Beginning in the late 1920s,newspaper readership and journalistic innovations in crimenews, characterized in Mexico by the graphic and assertive styleof the popular nota roja publications, created and nurtured abroad and engaged public. Reporters, editors and photographersdeveloped an effective language in which to tell stories to anavid and critical audience. Criminals, particularly murderers,also reached the public via interviews and confessions. And, ofcourse, journalists and criminals could more effectively revealto the public the details of a given crime than could judges ordetectives. Yet when officials used violence, including tortureand extrajudicial execution, they still enjoyed considerablesupport from the press, even if the result distorted or silencedthe voices of suspects in the name of justice.

Beginning gradually in the 1920s, those factions that hademerged victorious after the previous decade’s civil strifeestablished a regime based on a broad alliance between labour

* I would like to thank Amy Chazkel, Seth Fein, Federico Finchelstein, RuthHalvey, Alan Knight, Nara Milanich, Caterina Pizzigoni, Gema Santamarıa,Mauricio Tenorio and Rihan Yeh, for comments on earlier drafts; RobertBuffington for the encouragement to publish this; and Xochitl Murguıa, NataliaRamırez and the American Council of Learned Societies for their assistance.

1 A phase of reconstruction and radical reform ended c.1940 and was followed by anincreasingly authoritarian regime. On the Porfirian rigour against criminals, see PabloPiccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC, 2001); ElisaSpeckman Guerra, Crimeny castigo: legislacion penal, interpretaciones de la criminalidad yadministracion de justicia (Ciudad de Mexico, 1872–1910) (Mexico City, 2002); RobertBuffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln, Nebr., 2000).

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and peasant organizations, progressive intellectuals and nationalcapitalists. A single-party system minimized electoral competi-tion from 1929 and disciplined the political class across thecountry without eliminating patronage. Just as new social actorswere integrated into the state, thanks in large part to the expan-sion of public education, the owners, editors and producersof the most powerful media organs (national newspapers, radio,cinema, later television) became closely allied with the presidentand his retinue, and thereafter refrained from radical criticism.It is not surprising, therefore, that until recently scholars definedthe post-revolutionary regime as a solidly corporative structure.New historical research indicates that, in fact, public lifecould be violent and decentralized, and that diverse socialactors were finding new ways to negotiate their relations withthe state. Although constrained by the implicit rules of nationalistdiscourse, dissent was a component of daily public discourseand local politics decades before the student movement of 1968and the subsequent process of electoral reform, with its changesto the rules of participation, leading to the first presidentialvictory of the opposition in 2000.2

If we examine the conditions of news production, its contentand its interpretations of crime during the middle decades of thetwentieth century, we can recover an important chapter in thedevelopment of Mexico’s public sphere. Crime was a themethat allowed critical ideas about the government to be pub-lished with little or no censorship. Commercial success supportedthis autonomy, but it was not equivalent to the manipulation ofpassive consumers: the nota roja encouraged the critical involve-ment of readers in public affairs, creating a shared sense of thereality of everyday life. For anyone who has read sensationalistjournalism in Mexico or in other countries, the above theses maynot seem to fit with Jurgen Habermas’s model of the public sphereas a non-coercive, rational and open realm populated by educated

2 Alan Knight, ‘Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?’, Journal of Latin AmericanStudies, xxvi (1994); Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers,Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson, 1997); Paul Gillingham andBenjamin T. Smith (eds.), Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968 (Durham, NC, 2014); Pablo Piccato, ‘Altibajos de la esfera publica en Mexico,de la dictadura republicana a la democracia corporativa: la era de la prensa’, inGustavo Leyva et al. (eds.), Independencia y revolucion: pasado, presente y futuro(Mexico City, 2010).

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citizens and one antithetical to contemporary mass mediacontrol.3

Two features of the nota roja were indeed less than attractivefrom a strictly Habermasian viewpoint. First, the journalisticmedium caused murder to become a broadly disseminated utter-ance, turning criminals into the authors of stories and narratives.Murder was an act full of meaning, something to be explained andinterpreted with the use of reason and sentiment, even judgedfrom an aesthetic perspective. Often, the narratives assembled inthe nota roja challenged the legal truth: given the ineffectiveness ofofficial procedures in clarifying the facts, first-hand testimoniesnecessarily became relevant, even if they came from despicablecharacters.4 Theirs were among the multiple, often ordinary,voices that gave a stronger authority to nota roja explanationsthan to judicial rulings. Secondly, the nota roja justified the useof violence as part of public life. The consensus which lay behindthe coercion and extrajudicial execution of some suspects restedon the generally accepted premise that justice seldom came for-mally from the state. Readers believed that they had to search forthe truth, and sometimes also for punishment, beyond the courtsand police investigations. Thus, just as the press was a reliable

3 Although the study of the public sphere in Latin America is expanding, the histori-ography has focused on the nineteenth century and has ignored less prestigious andmore recent publics. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the PublicSphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger andFrederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989); Craig J. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and thePublic Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics(New York and Cambridge, Mass., 2002). On Latin America, see Pablo Piccato,‘Public Sphere in Latin America: A Map of the Historiography’, Social History, xxxv(2010); Elıas Jose Palti, ‘Guerra y Habermas: ilusiones y realidad de la esfera publicalatinoamericana’, in Erika Pani and Alicia Salmeron (eds.), Conceptualizar lo que se ve:Francois-Xavier Guerra historiador. Homenaje (Mexico City, 2004). For two methodo-logical models on the history of crime news, see Dominique Kalifa, L’Encre et le sang:recits de crimes et societe a la belle epoque (Paris, 1995); Lila M. Caimari, Apenas undelincuente: crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires, 2004).On the impact of crime news on public debates, see Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: TheTrial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley,2007).

4 See Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate(Princeton, 2009), 24; Jerome Bruner, ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’,Critical Inquiry, xviii (1991). A dialogical analysis of the polyphonic novel andparticularly its antecedents in the Menippean satire and carnival can be usefullyapplied to the nota roja: see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed.and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), 115.

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source of facts, it was also a vehicle to express support for punitiveviolence.

Considering crime news an important component of the publicsphere challenges prevailing interpretations of the nota roja, bothacademic and lay, as a minor journalistic genre defined by itsunpleasant and vulgar contents, particularly its shocking imagesand demotic language. Histories of journalism in Mexico neglectthe crime news, with most focusing on the struggles of the tradefor free, critical and cultivated speech — particularly after presi-dent Luis Echeverrıa’s attack on the independence of Excelsiorin 1976. Although it increased the number of newspaper readers,the nota roja could not be, from this perspective, a vehicle forthe consolidation of democracy. Such contempt stems fromacademic views of Mexican mass media as devoid of intellectualmerit and co-opted by the powerful state. During the middleyears of the twentieth century, the Mexican government didexchange economic support and political access for the loyaltyof important newspapers, while editors cultivated a close relation-ship with presidents and ministers and abstained from criticizingthe venality of the regime. Nota roja reporters were always closeto the police (the most visible practitioners of corruption in every-day life), and became the lowliest example of journalism’s ethicalpoverty. This is in part the effect of a short-term perspective:by the 1970s, the association of press and state had indeedreached the nota roja, by which time much of the criticalindependence examined below had disappeared.5

5 On the nota roja, see Julio Scherer Garcıa and Carlos Monsivais, Tiempo de saber:prensa y poder en Mexico (Mexico City, 2003), 165; Vıctor Ronquillo, Nota roja 50’s: lacronica policiaca en la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City, 1993); Ana Luisa Luna, La cronicapoliciaca en Mexico: nota roja 40’s (Mexico City, 1993); Victoria Brocca, Nota roja 60’s:la cronica policiaca en la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City, 1993); Carlos Monsivais, Losmil y un velorios: cronica de la nota roja (Mexico City, 1994); Marco Lara Klahr andFrancesco Barata, Nota[n] roja: la vibrante historia de un genero y una nueva manera deinformar (Mexico City, 2009); J. M. Servın, D.F. confidencial: cronicas de delincuentes,vagos y demas gente sin futuro (Oaxaca, 2010), 31. On the press in general, seeHumberto Musacchio, Historia grafica del periodismo mexicano (Mexico City, 2003);Marıa del Carmen Ruiz Castaneda, Luis Reed Torres and Enrique Cordero y Torres,El periodismo en Mexico: 450 anos de historia (Mexico City, 1974). Recent work hasreassessed critical reporting, particularly in local newspapers, and documented vio-lence and censorship as components of public life: Paul Gillingham, ‘Who KilledCrispın Aguilar? Violence and Order in the Postrevolutionary Countryside’, in WilG. Pansters (ed.), Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico:The Other Half of the Centaur (Stanford, 2012); Alan Knight, ‘Habitus and Homicide:


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From the beginning, nota roja headlines played with words,conveyed moral outrage, and summarized crimes in brutallydirect terms, characterizing victims or criminals in sardonic andmemorable ways: ‘The plumber who killed a cobbler in an absurdfight’, or a famous example cited in a song, ‘Violola, matola,enterrola’ (‘He raped her, he killed her, he buried her’).6

Literary studies of the nota roja elaborate upon the inane, casualtone of headlines (‘He wanted to have fun and they destroyedhis face with bottles’) or condemn the intrusive methods of jour-nalists.7 For cultural critics, the premise of those headlinesand pictures, still common on Mexican news-stands, is thathuman life and dignity have no value. Thus, they see the notaroja simultaneously as a pornographic escape from everyday lifeand as a hyperrealist depiction of ordinary violence. For CarlosMonsivais, the most sensitive and erudite reviewer of the genre,it satisfies an ‘unconscious . . . addiction’ to blood and mayhem,while its headlines offer a ‘symbolic nod to morals’.8

The contradiction of seeing the nota roja as an instance ofboth escapism and realism derives from an underlying inter-pretation of Mexican culture. By mass-reproducing and cele-brating violence, according to twentieth-century intellectualsconcerned with national identity (lo mexicano), the nota rojahighlighted primitive aspects of the country’s culture andthereby lent support to an image of Mexicans as a peopleinclined to commit violence for trivial motives and to laughwhile doing so. Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude was aninfluential articulation of these views, but earlier criminological

(n. 5 cont.)

Political Culture in Revolutionary Mexico’, in Wil G. Pansters (ed.), Citizens of thePyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture (Amsterdam, 1997).

6 El Universal Grafico, 1 Jan. 1947, 5; Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios, 31;Cuauhtemoc Medina, ‘Alarma! Crimen y circulacion’, Poliester, ii, 6 (1993), for thelink between nota roja and judicial narratives; Miguel Donoso Pareja, Picaresca de lanota roja (Mexico City, 1973).

7 El Universal Grafico, 3 Jan. 1955, 5; Wilberto Canton, Nota roja: reportaje en dosactos (Mexico City, 1965). In Crımenes ejemplares, Max Aub wrote brief confessions inthe style of headlines — ‘Lo mate porque me dieron veinte pesos para que lo hiciera’:Max Aub, Crımenes ejemplares (1957; Madrid, 1991), 8. For Roland Barthes the ar-bitrary relationship established between two events, a caricature of causality, definedthe French fait divers: ‘Structure du fait divers’, in Roland Barthes, Essais critiques(Paris, 1964). The possibilities of this compressed language were explored also inFelix Feneon, Nouvelles en trois lignes, ed. Patrick and Roman Wald Lasowski (Paris,1990).

8 Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios, 29.


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works had already dwelled on the violence of popular languageand interactions, describing peasants’ melancholic brutality andindifference to death, and the underclass pelado intemperance.Criminologists and public intellectuals shared a notion ofMexican modernity as economic development and ‘civiliza-tion’, which the nota roja undermined with its troubling por-trayal of the national psyche.9

Reading the nota roja in a comprehensive manner forces us tochallenge these views. Looking at too many pages in one day ofpublications such as Alarma!, visually and verbally nasty, oftenmoralistic, sometimes racist and homophobic, might provokenausea. A recent aesthetic re-evaluation of the visual style ofnota roja presents this strangeness for the benefit of cultivatedaudiences. In this article, however, attention to context andproduction will remind us that people from all walks of liferead the nota roja, not as escapism but as a peculiar form ofengagement necessary to navigate the dangers of everydaylife in the city. Much like contemporary conceptual artists,those readers framed their interpretations within existing per-ceptions of the police and judicial systems, and the disjunctionbetween justice and truth. For them, the nota roja blurredconventional moral boundaries, nurturing a sense of ironythat should not be interpreted as a callous disregard for life,but rather as a way to highlight that disjunction. This articleexamines those pragmatic readers in relation to the work ofthe journalists and criminals who generated events, stories andexplanations.10

9 Scherer Garcıa and Monsivais, Tiempo de saber; Octavio Paz, El laberinto de lasoledad (Mexico City, 1950); Samuel Ramos, El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mexico(Mexico City, 1934); Julio Guerrero, La genesis del crimen en Mexico: estudio depsiquiatrıa social (Paris and Mexico City, 1901); Roger Bartra, La jaula de lamelancolıa: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico City, 1987), 49, 52, 86–7,130, 160; Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in theMexican National Space (Berkeley, 1992).

10 Mexico City is the focus of this research. For the recent aesthetic re-evaluation ofnota roja gore, see the work by SEMEFO, Teresa Margolles and Enrique Metinides.Cuauhtemoc Medina, ‘SEMEFO, The Morgue’ in Ruben Gallo (ed.), The MexicoCity Reader, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (Madison, 2004). Humour was essential to notaroja, argued the reporter Miguel Donoso Pareja: see his Picaresca de la nota roja, 71–6.Humour also characterized detective fiction: Ilan Stavans, Antiheroes: Mexico y sunovela policial (Mexico City, 1993), 107; Cathy Fourez, ‘Quand Hercule et Sherlockse enchilan’, in Arts sombres: le site des univers obscurs (May 2005),5http://arts.sombres.pagesperso-orange.fr/Detectives_mexicains.htm#4; Jose Martınez de la Vega,Humorismo en camiseta: aventuras de Peter Perez (Mexico City, 1946).


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I

In the first chapter of Ensayo de un crimen, Rodolfo Usigli’s 1944novel, the main character, Roberto de la Cruz, goes through hismorning routine. When he is ready to have breakfast at an elegantMexico City restaurant, this sophisticated dilettante opens thenewspaper. He skips the national political news and the reportsabout the war, and goes directly to the crime news. He looksfor the latest homicide, ‘reads the details with passion’, butfinds the case simple and vulgar, motivated by greed, unworthyof the ‘immoral publicity’ of the press.11 Later on, he decidesto commit a murder that will be aesthetically satisfying, anexpression of free will and artful performance. He carries out acouple of crimes, but is brought to tears when he reads that thenewspapers attribute his oeuvre to accident or to someone else.This means his work will not be ‘registered within the frameworkof reality by the police, the autopsy and the newspapers’.12

He cares about publicity, but not for its own sake: ‘What hewanted was the truth, the reality of a crime . . . as he haddreamt it: gratuitous, perfect’.13

The influence of Thomas De Quincey has been identified as acentral element in Usigli’s only published excursion into themurder novel. Yet, in contrast to De Quincey’s emphasis on‘fine arts’, Usigli highlights the role of the nota roja as the vehiclefor creation. Crime news was indeed central to the detectivefiction that emerged in Mexico in the 1940s. Ensayo de uncrimen became, years later, the most prestigious example, partlythanks to Usigli’s reputation as a playwright, but other short stor-ies and novels quoted fictitious police reports or were inspired byreal crimes. In all of them, newspapers provided the objectivebackdrop against which the work of detection took place.Several early voices in the genre, such as Antonio Helu and JoseMartınez de la Vega, also worked as journalists.14 The longest

11 Rodolfo Usigli, Ensayo de un crimen (1944; Mexico City, 1986), 7, 8.12 Ibid., 185. For an analysis that highlights the search for the truth and the role of

newspapers, see Jose Luis de la Fuente, ‘Rodolfo Usigli busca la verdad: Ensayo de uncrimen, antecedente policiaco mexicano’, Alter Texto, i (2003), 99; Vicente FranciscoTorres, Muertos de papel: un paseo por la narrativa policial mexicana (Mexico City,2003).

13 Usigli, Ensayo de un crimen, 101, 184.14 Editions of stories and novels published first in newspapers and magazines

include Antonio Helu, La obligacion de asesinar: novelas y cuentos policiacos (MexicoCity, 1998); Jose Martınez de la Vega, Peter Perez, detective de Peralvillo y anexas


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and probably most popular series, the adventures of ChuchoCardenas by Leo D’Olmo, centred on a journalist who solvedcases in collaboration, but more often in competition, with in-ept policemen. The stories, about 320 of them, appeared everySunday between 1947 and 1955 in the pages of La Prensa, yetthe true identity of their author or authors remains uncertain,and the stories have been almost completely ignored by scho-lars.15 The policial genre, as it was known in Mexico, thrived,featuring titles and series from established authors from theUnited States, France and Britain. Yet there were specific pat-terns in Mexican stories: the use of deductive logic and worldlyexperience lay in the hands of civilians; the refined intelligencewas that of the criminals; and the simple-minded brutality camecourtesy of the police.16

For Roberto de la Cruz, as for many of his real-life contempor-aries, crime news was the definitive record of crime, a necessarypart of everyday life. The thoroughness of the nota roja coveragewas generally assumed: what happened was registered there,and vice versa. Among the thousands of letters addressed toMexican presidents requesting their intervention in cases ofhomicide, many contained newspaper clippings. Those notaroja pieces recorded both the crimes and the continued libertyof the alleged killers with an accuracy that the authors of theletters, usually relatives of the victims, could not find in judicial

(n. 14 cont.)

(Mexico City, 1994); Martınez de la Vega, Humorismo en camiseta. See Thomas DeQuincey, On Murder, ed. Robert Morrison (Oxford, 2006). Mexican references to thiswork include Vicente Lenero, ‘Prologo: la belleza del crimen’, in GerardoVilladelangel Vinas and Edgardo Ganado Kim (eds.), El libro rojo: continuacion, i,1868–1928 (Mexico City, 2008); Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios; Stavans,Antiheroes; Alfonso Quiroz Cuaron, Asaltos a bancos en Venezuela y America (MexicoCity, 1964); Fernando Fabio Sanchez, Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico(Nashville, 2010); de la Fuente, ‘Rodolfo Usigli busca la verdad’. For a similar pro-ductive interconnection between crime news and detective fiction in the case ofArgentina, see Sylvia Saıtta, Regueros de tinta: el diario ‘Crıtica’ en la decada de 1920(Buenos Aires, 1998).

15 For example, Leo D’Olmo, Otros cinco hermanos (Mexico City, 1947); LeoD’Olmo, La extrana casa de Tacubaya (Mexico City, n.d.); a partial compilation inLeo D’Olmo, Aventuras de Chucho Cardenas (Mexico City, 1988).

16 See Glen S. Close, Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: ATransatlantic Discourseon Urban Violence (New York, 2008); Persephone Braham, Crimes against the State,Crimes against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico (Minneapolis, 2004);Stavans, Antiheroes; Torres, Muertos de papel; Marıa Elvira Bermudez, Cuento policiacomexicano: breve antologıa (Mexico City, 1987); Marıa Elvira Bermudez, Los mejorescuentos policiacos mexicanos (Mexico City, 1955).


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or police investigations. The widow of Demetrio Varela, fromMilpa Alta, D.F., for example, sent President Adolfo RuizCortines a letter in November 1955 with a clipping fromLa Prensa. She demanded the arrest of Gregorio Silva, who re-mained free because of his political connections. Police investi-gators also included clippings among their notes, or senthundreds of copies of Mexico City newspapers to other cities inorder to help find and capture suspects still at large.17

Crime news had a large circulation, although the numbersfor newspapers printed and sold are notoriously difficult to estab-lish. Even the ministry of the interior, responsible for supervisionof the media, had widely different numbers for the circulationof the major newspapers: 120,000 a day for the mainstreamExcelsior in a 1961 estimate; 20,000 in another from 1966.18

Editors tended to exaggerate the numbers, and the powerfulunion that monopolized street distribution manipulated sales.But scattered information points to the strength of nota rojanewspapers and magazines, and of the afternoon editions ofmainstream newspapers, which also largely focused on crimenews. In 1966, La Prensa, which devoted its first and last pagesand the majority of its content to crime news, sold between35,000 and 70,000 a day. In 1923, El Universal Grafico sold20,000 copies in the afternoon, whereas the morning editionsof El Universal and Excelsior shifted 60,000.19 According tothe street sellers’ union leaders, La Prensa always enjoyed theloyalty of voceadores (newspaper-hawkers).20 A magazine with apolice theme, Detectives, published from 1931, claimed to sell

17 Archivo General de la Nacion, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Fondo AdolfoRuiz Cortınez, 541/676. Another example in AGN is Fondo Miguel AvilaCamacho, 541/57. These letters, almost 2,000 per presidential period, betweenCardenas and Lopez Mateos, are catalogued under ‘Homicidio’ in the presidentialarchives at the AGN. On the distribution of papers, see Archivo Historico del DistritoFederal, Mexico City, Seccion Jefatura de Policıa, Serie Investigacion y Seguridad,Servicio Secreto (hereafter AHDF, JP, ISSS), box 12, exp. 80, 1957; AHDF, JP, ISSS,c. 10, exp. 65, 1948. For the police using the press, see also Amy Chazkel, Laws ofChance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life (Durham, NC,2011), ch. 6.

18 Jacinto Rodrıguez Munguıa, La otra guerra secreta: los archivos prohibidos de laprensa y el poder (Mexico City, 2007), 90, 94, 149.

19 National Archives, Washington, DC, Department of State, US Consulate,Mexico City, M274, roll 240, 812.91/18; roll 242; Scherer Garcıa and Monsivais,Tiempo de saber, 165.

20 Gabriela Aguilar and Ana Cecilia Terrazas, La prensa en la calle: los voceadores y ladistribucion de periodicos y revistas en Mexico (Mexico City, 1996), 119.


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42,720 copies.21 In the 1960s, Alarma!, the most popular maga-zine of the genre, was said to sell half a million copies during thedevelopment of a famous case of multiple homicides in a brothelin Guanajuato.22 The numbers above might not sound especiallyhigh for a city that, in 1950, had a population of 3,137,600inhabitants and a literacy rate of over 80 per cent. Yet, given thelarge number of publications and their rapid circulation acrossthe city, it is not wise to underestimate the impact of those copiesin circulation. And, as writer and editor Martın Luis Guzmanadmitted, ‘crimes are the key to circulation’.23

La Prensa remained the most successful daily in the genre interms of sales. Founded in 1928, it went through difficult timesinitially but had stabilized by the early 1940s. It led the vanguardfor the use of images and in 1972 it was the first to use colouron the covers. It often claimed to have the highest circulationin the country. Weekly magazines and afternoon editions ofEl Universal and Excelsior focused on the same themes andborrowed styles, writers and even images from La Prensa.24 Notonly upper-class men such as Usigli’s protagonist de la Cruzbut also working-class women and children read it. La Prensahighlighted its female readership in photographs from its cover-age of the 1934 triple homicide in a barber’s shop in the districtof Tacubaya, in Mexico City (see Plate 1).

With their images of crimes and criminals and their largeheadlines, these newspapers were posted and sold in prominentplaces, becoming part of the urban landscape. Young voceadorescried out headlines and reached every corner of the city a fewhours after the events — usually more promptly than any othermedia. The suspect in the triple homicide of 1934 was arrestedat 5.30 p.m.; ‘By 7 p.m.’, La Prensa boasted, ‘we had floodedwith copies . . . the entire capital and its farthest suburbs’.25

The cultural impact of the nota roja reached beyond thestreet and the kiosk. Movies and radio picked up its themes and

21 Detectives, 15 Aug. 1932; Detectives, 22 Aug. 1932, 8–9.22 Brocca, Nota roja 60’s, 111.23 Cited in Angel Miquel, Disolvencias: literatura, cine y radio en Mexico (1900–1950)

(Mexico City, 2005), 156–7; Instituto Nacional de Estadıstica y Geografıa,‘Poblacion, hogares y vivienda’,5http://www3.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/temas/default.aspx?s¼est&c¼174844.

24 La Prensa, 24 Jan. 1957, 9. Compare La Prensa, 3 May 1951, 16, and Alarma!,12 May 1951, 6.

25 La Prensa, 29 Apr. 1934, 6.


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1. Women reading. La Prensa, 1 May 1934, 29.

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narrative resources. In the 1950s a radio programme entitledCuidado con el hampa (Beware of the Underworld) aired morethan 115 episodes. Each one described the modus operandi ofa specific kind of criminal in terms intended to help the audienceavoid the dangers of life in the city. Movies used the nota roja’salacrity and its ability to condense information dramatically. ‘I didnot kill her!’, cried Pedro Infante, in the role of Pepe el Toro, whileholding a copy of La Prensa that reproduced his words, in a scenefrom Nosotros los pobres (1948), one of the most popular moviesof Mexican cinema.26 Such authors as Juan Bustillo Oro andAntonio Helu straddled both scriptwriting and fiction withpolice themes. Directors also took inspiration from the nota rojain films with noir themes: movies set in the urban underworldproduced in Mexico increased from three in 1946 to fifty in1950. Audiences found resonances between criminal cases andmovies, both foreign and home-grown.27

The nota roja conveyed an emotional force that no other formof journalism could hope to achieve. Indeed, the appeal tothe emotions was clear from the headlines, which vilified suspectsand demanded swift justice, but just as often printed suspects’denials, such as Pepe el Toro’s. ‘The jackal’s paw’ was the head-line above the photograph of Santiago Rodrıguez Silva, suspect inthe murder of three women in the Tacubaya barber’s shop (seePlate 2). A few days earlier, in relation to this case, La Prensa’seditorial exclaimed: ‘Revenge! is the unanimous and justifiedoutcry. . . La Prensa is shaken by the same feeling of social outrageand, being the representative of the people, offers its co-operationin the capture’.28

The emotional language was part of an interaction betweennewspaper, authorities and readers intended not only to stirthe latter’s feelings but also to incite their participation in theresolution of cases. In the Tacubaya murder, for example,La Prensa printed images of the crowds outside the crime sceneand in the railway station where Rodrıguez Silva was expectedto arrive (see Plate 1). Articles described people’s hostility

26 Fonoteca Nacional, Mexico City, Coleccion Televisa Radio, magnetic audiotape, Cuidado con el hampa; Ismael Rodrıguez (dir.), Nosotros los pobres (1948), starringPedro Infante as a falsely accused man.

27 Alvaro A. Fernandez Reyes, Crimen y suspenso en el cine mexicano, 1946–1955(Zamora, 2007), 52, 102, 98; Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios.

28 La Prensa, 28 Apr. 1934, 6.


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2. ‘Chacal de Tacubaya’. La Prensa, 1 May 1934, 1.

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towards the suspect, and invited readers to follow the investi-gation, to contribute their opinions or evidence, and even toparticipate in the chase. In relation to this case, the newspaperpublished one of its ‘Encuestas relampago’ (flash polls), inwhich reporters asked passers-by about specific cases or aboutjustice in general. One poll asked ‘Is the rehabilitation ofcriminals possible?’, while others sought opinions about the re-establishment of the death penalty, something which thenewspaper favoured.29

II

When the nota roja appealed to its readers, however, it was notalways with the goal of amplifying its own ideological position;at a more general level, the appeals also sought to get theminvolved in the pursuit of truth through the use of criticalreason.30 Editors expected readers to question police and judicialinstitutions and seek the truth with the help of logic, intuitionand experience. The goal was to achieve a truthful result thatwould withstand public scrutiny on the pages of the press and,if necessary, in court — although there was no clear hierarchybetween the two. Paradoxically, this form of civil engagementdid not exclude voicing feelings in favour of the extralegal useof violence against criminals. Although the death penalty hadbeen abolished in most jurisdictions, executions remained a

29 La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934, 8; Everard Kidder Meade, ‘La ley fuga y la tribunaimprovisada: Extrajudicial Execution and Public Opinion in Mexico City,1929–1940’, paper presented at the colloquium ‘Crime and Punishment in LatinAmerica: Practices and Representations’, University of Colorado, Boulder, 7–8Oct. 2011.

30 ‘Reason’ here is not used as an ideal notion but historically, as a set of rules forpublic discourse that would make possible an uncoerced discussion of validity claims;in Mexico and other countries of Latin America those rules were based on a strongpost-independence tradition, associated with the Enlightenment and, specifically,with public opinion’s struggle against religious faith. Jurgen Habermas, ‘The PublicSphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)’, New German Critique, iii (1974), 53; JurgenHabermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardtand Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Elıas Jose Palti, La invencionde una legitimidad: razon y retorica en el pensamiento mexicano del siglo XIX (un estudiosobre las formas del discurso polıtico) (Mexico City, 2005), 89, 194–5; Francois-XavierGuerra, Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispanicas (Madridand Mexico City, 2000), 23; Rafael Rojas, La escritura de la independencia: el surgimientode la opinion publica en Mexico (Mexico City, 2003), 84–5, 124–5; Daniel Gordon,‘Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of PublicOpinion’, French Historical Studies, xvii (1992).


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fresh memory from the revolutionary era and the ley fugaremained in use. Dating back to the era of civil unrest afterindependence, the ironically named ley fuga meant the killing ofprisoners under the pretext that they were attempting to fleeand was often used as a form of extrajudicial execution.31

Condoning violence against suspects and the use of reasoncame together in the context of a broadly shared scepticismtowards penal institutions.

The critical engagement of readers with the state through thenota roja also rested on newspapers’ propensity to publish evi-dence about the corruption or ineptitude of government officials,from judges to police on the street. In minor crimes, such astheft or extortion, the nota roja published abundant examples ofsuspects left at large, as well as opinion columns denouncingjudges or policemen who abused their positions or acted in col-lusion with criminals. In 1959, for instance, Detectives denouncedan influyentazo (politically connected person), relative of a formerpresident, who avoided punishment after killing a sanitaryinspector. Many letters to the editor denounced policemenwho were thieves, murderers, kidnappers or extortionists.32 Forsuch columns as ‘Vox Populi’, published in La Prensa, thiswas common knowledge, often conveyed by readers’ letters, towhich authorities preferred to remain blind. For the anonymouswriter of ‘Vox Populi’, the proper administration of justice inMexico was no more than ‘a dream’.33 This direct engagementof readers also produced short articles, images or lettersabout urban problems such as neglected potholes and rubbishbins or lost children.34 Not all critical references to the authorities

31 For Julio Guerrero, the ley fuga was more barbarous than lynching, and had beeninvented by conservative general Anastasio Bustamante: Guerrero, La genesis delcrimen en Mexico, 240. See Everard Kidder Meade, ‘Anatomies of Justice andChaos: Capital Punishment and the Public in Mexico, 1917–1945’ (Univ. ofChicago Ph.D. thesis, 2005). In his study of the religious consequences of an excep-tional case of publicly performed ley fuga in 1938 Tijuana, Paul Vanderwood arguesthat the practice was both deplored and approved: Paul J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado:Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham, NC, 2004), 48, 55.

32 La Prensa, 2 Mar. 1957, 20–1; La Prensa, 5 Mar. 1957, 9; La Prensa, 7 Mar. 1957,9; La Prensa, 8 Mar. 1957, 9; La Prensa, 10 Mar. 1957, 9, 41; La Prensa, 11 Mar. 1957,9;LaPrensa, 25 Jan.1957,10;RevistadePolicıa (Nov.1964),20;Detectives, 7 July1959.

33 La Prensa, 25 Mar. 1959, 9; La Prensa, 8 May 1934, 11; La Prensa, 13 Mar.1959, 25.

34 Alarma!, 4 Feb. 1970, 39–40; Alarma!, 10 June 1970, 8; La Prensa, 25 Mar. 1959,9. For US newspapers’ similar function, see David R. Spencer, The Yellow Journalism:The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power (Evanston, 2007), 113.


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were dismissive; when described in a benevolent tone, the short-comings of the police could justify readers’ involvement. ‘Thepolice need help’, argued La Prensa when offering a reward forlocating Rodrıguez Silva.35

Thiscriticalperspectiveonthepoliceplayedout in literary treat-ments of crime and detection: Mexican stories often featuredstupid or violent detectives, who were always trying to pin theblame on the obvious suspect. But the best evidence of the multi-layered engagement of readers’ rationality in the resolution ofcrimes comes from the reportages of famous cases at the heart ofthe nota roja. On any given day there was always one crime thatattracted many readers, usually a murder that distinguished itselffrom the ordinary stories (the ones that disappointed Roberto dela Cruz over breakfast) either because it did not have a clear cul-prit, was particularly bloody, or included criminals, victims andwitnesses who were in themselves interesting characters. The caseof ‘the passion tragedyof the Restaurant Broadway’ is an example,from 1932, in which ‘a cheated husband, of German origin, killedwith three shots his rival when he found him with his deceitfulwife’. Although the guilt of Guillermo Gosserez was not in ques-tion, the reasons for his violent behaviour were of interest. Thecoverage included a first-page portrait of the relaxed and well-dressed Gosserez, information concerning the last time husbandand wife had sexual relations, and discussion of a past romanticliaison that the wife had had with the victim before marrying thekiller.36 Such cases could last days or weeks in the pages of news-papers, making the names and images of the main characters fa-miliar to readers.

Awareof the impactof thesecases onsales, newspapersdeployedcareful and intense coverage. The presentation of information wasthorough and, as the days went by, articles assumed an increasinglevel of knowledge on the part of readers. Stories usually beganwith a detailed description of the crime scene, including photo-graphs, drawings and even diagrams. Images, sounds and smellsplaced the reader in the crime scene37 (see Plate 3). In the 1934

35 La Prensa, 28 Apr. 1934, 6.36 La Prensa, 2 Mar. 1932, 4, 13; La Prensa, 3 Mar. 1932, 2, 12; La Prensa, 4 Mar.

1932, 2, 13; La Prensa, 20 Mar. 1932, 3, 14.37 Eduardo Tellez Vargas and Jose Ramon Garmabella, Reportero de policıa! El Guero

Tellez (Mexico City, 1982), 22. On the use of photojournalism, see Jesse Lerner, TheShock of Modernity: Crime Photography in Mexico City (Mexico City, 2007).


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3. Crime scene. La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934, 1.

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case of the Tacubaya barber’s shop mentioned previously,La Prensa bragged about the accuracy of its reporting comparedwith the mistakes of its competitors. It was not just a matter ofproviding the best images and most comprehensive reports, butalso of having the correct hypothesis and making the most directcontribution to the resolution of the investigation. In this case,La Prensa immediately accused Rodrıguez Silva, reproduced hislikeness and, thanks to the work of its correspondent in Leon,Guanajuato, led the police to his capture. With this, trumpetedthe editors, ‘La Prensa achieves one of its greatest and most cele-brated journalistic triumphs’.38

Reporters played a very important role in these stories.They entered the crime scene on the heels of the police, or evenbefore them. On the day of Leon Trotsky’s assassination in 1940,Eduardo Tellez Vargas, from Novedades, arrived at the housein Coyoacan minutes ahead of the police because he had an in-formant in the emergency medical services. He was able to pickup the murder weapon and have it photographed; indeed, he waseven tempted, as he acknowledged in his memoirs, to smuggleout the manuscript of a book about Stalin on which the victimhad been working. In other cases, journalists succumbed totemptation and took evidence with them. Above any moralconsideration, reporters were there to act as the eyes of readers:they presented all even slightly relevant pieces of information,witnessed the initial questioning, intervened in the arrest, orinterviewed suspects immediately after the crime.39

In order to have access to locations, information and suspects,reporters maintained a close relationship with the police. Somecould even pass as police detectives, as Tellez Vargas did that dayin 1940; others carried police badges. It was common for policereporters to spend hours at police stations waiting for the nextstory. According to the testimony of one of them, in the early1930s the chief of the Federal District’s secret service presenteddifficult cases to the journalists playing dominoes at headquar-ters. He would ask them for a ‘sentence’ and agents would follow

38 La Prensa, 29 Apr. 1934, 1, 15.39 Tellez Vargas and Garmabella, Reportero de policıa!, 38, 64–5, 74–5; Roberson,

‘Diario de una instructora de baile’, Revista de Policıa (Dec. 1964), 24–7, 57; LeoD’Olmo, Quien disparo? Novela original de Leo D’Olmo (Mexico City, 1954), 10;La Prensa, 17 Mar. 1959, back page.


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their advice.40 In their turn, police officers at higher levels hadstrong incentives to have their achievements publicized in thepress. The Mexico City chief inspector and his direct subordin-ates served at the pleasure of the president, who until 1997also appointed the mayor of the Federal District. Police chiefswere usually members of the military and did not last very longin their positions.41

Reporters, however, did not have a simple, subordinaterelationship to the state. Several police agencies could inter-vene simultaneously in an important case: the secret serviceof the local police, the judicial police, the motorcycle brigade,the intelligence services of the presidency or the ministry ofthe interior, etc. They would send agents to the crime sceneand engage in parallel investigations that were often charac-terized by competition rather than collaboration. Reportersbenefited from this situation, seeking information and protec-tion from different agencies that were trying to upstage oneanother. Readers knew better than to take the nota roja as amouthpiece of the police; multiple articles and notices on agiven important case could be written by different authorsdrawing on different sources. As Tellez Vargas acknowledged,it was always useful to present information that might contra-dict the official hypotheses during investigations; among otherthings, it helped him earn the trust of suspects and otherinformants.42 Reporters had to navigate between the loyaltiesof multiple sources: while the police wanted to have theirachievements recognized for political gain, the reporter alsosought to present the point of view of the suspect, who could,in turn, propose an alternative and equally attractive accountof the events. By presenting these versions in the form of inter-views, journalists avoided sounding as if they were justifyingthe crime.43

40 Rigoberto, ‘Tribunal de la opinion publica en la jefatura de policıa’, Revista dePolicıa ( July 1964), 16–18, 80; Rodrıguez Munguıa, La otra guerra secreta, 158;Scherer Garcıa and Monsivais, Tiempo de saber, 240; Detectives, 27 Oct. 1929, 3;Alarma!, 7 Jan. 1970, 2.

41 Diane Davis, ‘Policing and Mexican Regime Change: From Post-Authoritarianism to Populism to Neo-Liberalism’, Crisis States Working PapersSeries, London School of Economics, ii, 2007.

42 Tellez Vargas and Garmabella, Reportero de policıa!, 165.43 Servın, D.F. confidencial, 57.


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A measure of the autonomy of nota roja from the state isevident in officials’ recurring but unsuccessful attempts toimpose censorship. The minister of the interior, Silvano BarbaGonzalez, declared in 1936 that stories about crime underminedthe goals of moralization laid down in the six-year plan ofPresident Lazaro Cardenas’s government. Others, in Congressand local officeholders, advocated sweeping measures to stop theoutput of gore and degradation in those pages.44 Barba Gonzalezproposed changes in penal legislation to prevent the publicationof nota roja, which he defined as

the scandalous publication of crimes and misdemeanours with all kinds ofdetails about the circumstances and procedures, as well as the apology oracclaim of the personality of the criminal that might highlight his mentaland physical characteristics in a way that would make him seem, in front ofpersons who are vulnerable to influence or who have antisocial tenden-cies, as a subject worthy of imitation.45

There were attempts by judges and other authorities to stop theinquisitive coverage of reporters in some politically charged cases:talkative suspects such as Ema Martınez or Goyo Cardenas, dis-cussed below, were abruptly held incommunicado despite pro-tests from the newspapers. Editors, including those of La Prensa,agreed to restrict coverage of certain cases and to avoid blood inits colour images, but the tension remained.46 A good relation-ship with the police was necessary for immediate access to stories,yet self-censorship does not appear a serious dilemma in the per-sonal testimonies of nota roja reporters such as Tellez. Their re-lationship with officials remained ambivalent, including as it didclose collaboration as well as the publication of controversialimages and stories.

44 Excelsior, 3 July 1936, 1. On censorship, see Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language,Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Booksin Mexico (Durham, NC, 1998); Jose Herrera H., ‘Las pelıculas cinematograficasmexicanas’, Revista de Policıa (June 1964), 1; Roberto Blanco Moheno, Memoriasde un reportero (Mexico City, 1975), 275; Brocca, Nota roja 60’s, 97. See alsoVicente Lombardo Toledano in El Universal, 18 Oct. 1923, 1. On the moralproject of the revolution, see Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions:Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City(University Park, Penn., 2001).

45 Excelsior, 3 July 1936, 1. See also Novedades, 8 Oct. 1942, 7. For another proposalin the Camara de Diputados, see Diario de los debates de la Camara de Diputadosdel Congreso de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 37th Legislature, year II, iii, 9 (20 Oct.1938).

46 Servın, D.F. confidencial, 211.


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III

Barba Gonzalez’s concern was not for the reputation of the policebut the prominent role the nota roja gave to criminals — eventhough that prominence derived from readers’ lack of confidencein police work. The confession, an account of the crime that camefrom the suspect rather than investigators, became the mosteffective representation of the truth. In private and public forms,voluntary or under duress, confessions had articulated individualresponsibility in judicial and religious venues since colonial times,marking the intersection of the individual conscience and socialnorms. Recognizing guilt could gain leniency from criminal juries,which were used in Mexico City until 1929. Thereafter, during theera of the nota roja, confessions were no longer expected to elicitmercy; they were, if anything, the product of either police brutalityor reporters’ perseverance in bringing to light the truth from asuspect’s conscience.47

Confessions came in multiple forms. In detective stories, reso-lution coincided with the implicit confessions of suspects pushed toadmit their guilt by the tricks or psychological probing of skilfuldetectives.48 In judicial and police practice, confession was com-monly extracted under duress. The police always sought to obtainself-incriminating statements because they simplified their workand were readily accepted by judges: if produced according tolegal formalities, they could not be contradicted even by statementsfrom the same suspect.49 Those reluctant to confess were oftentortured.Officialdocumentsdidnot acknowledge theuseof torture

47 For the ‘mercy . . . engendered . . . with the humble confession of guilt in fulldisplay of regret’, in front of a jury, see El Universal, 4 Oct. 1923, 2nd section, 1. Seealso Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 14. For the central juridical role of confession, bothintimate and public, during the colonial period, see Andres Lira, ‘Dimension jurıdicade la conciencia: pecadores y pecados en tres confesionarios de la Nueva Espana,1545–1732’, Historia Mexicana, lv (2005–6), 1141, 1147.

48 See, for example, Leo D’Olmo, El crimen del garage (Mexico City, n.d.), 28–9;Marıa Elvira Bermudez, Muerte a la zaga (Tlahuapan, 1985), 28, 29; Bermudez,Cuento policiaco mexicano, 230–1; Helu, La obligacion de asesinar, 213.

49 The Code of Penal Procedures required confessions to be plausible according toother evidence, made by adults in full knowledge of their own deeds, and in front of anofficer of the Judicial Police, and ratified in front of a judge. For a sentence that rejectssuspects’ changing their accounts later: Juez Primero de la Primera Corte Penal, AngelEscalante, 13 Sept. 1930, in a murder case against Antonio Martınez and others,Archivo Judicial — Reclusorio Sur (the archive is now housed at the ArchivoGeneral de la Nacion), 23196, fos. 237v–238. For a judge, the crime of ‘criminalassociation’, for example, could only be proven through participants’ statements:ibid., fo. 25.


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but some writs of habeas corpus brought to judges by suspects’lawyers and relatives often denounced it. The wife of AlejandroPonce de Leon blamed the authorities for the ‘savage physicaland moral torture’ inflicted on her husband, a suspect in a 1954homicide case. The police responded to the judge, denying thecharges in the standard form they used to reject all such requests;yet the final report of the secret service itself stated that Ponce deLeon had provided information after ‘severe interrogations’.50

Voluntary confessions published as first-person accounts in pressinterviews were more prominent and convincing. As a journalisticformat, the interview acquired great prestige during the second halfof the century, to the extent that politicians would pay large sums toanswer friendly questions on page one.51 Nota roja reporters usedinterviews to establish the links between criminals’ subjective feel-ings and the events of a given case. In an interview with a notorious1932 murderer, Pedro or Alberto Gallegos, entitled ‘En confianza’(In Confidence), the reporter stressed the sense of intimacy whichsuffused their conversation: ‘We found him just shaved and whist-ling a funeral march transferred to rumba while reading, with visiblesatisfaction, a morning paper’. Gallegos admitted to particularlyenjoying reading ‘the letters from my [female] admirers and thepolice stories, which fascinate me’.52 Such interviews, usuallyauthorized by judges or wardens, included information about thepersonality, life and habits of suspects, as well as explanations ofthe crime. They often implied criticism of confessions obtained bythe police through unethical means because they deceived ‘thosewho have the noble duty to inform the public’.53

Gallegos was well aware of the impact of the words and imagesthat accompanied interviews. He was careful about his presenta-tion to the cameras, and during police interrogations he delayed,cried and contradicted himself, yet kept his style and elegantdemeanour (see Plate 4). Eventually, ‘under the trembling light

50 AHDF, JP, ISSS, box 11, exp. 75, 1954. Despite reforms of the codes of penalprocedures, confessions obtained under torture continue to be accepted in criminalcourts: Leonardo Boix, ‘En Mexico, confesiones bajo tortura: AmnistıaInternacional’, Proceso, 16 Dec. 2011,5http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p¼2916994.

51 Scherer Garcıa and Monsivais, Tiempo de saber, 24.52 La Prensa, 4 Mar. 1932, 5. See also Detectives, 29 Feb. 1932, 9. Gallegos, accused

of the scandalous murder of a socialite, Jacinta Aznar, in 1932, and mentioned byUsigli in Ensayo de un crimen, went by the name of Pedro or Alberto, so reports oftenonly used his last name.

53 Alarma!, 24 June 1970, 6–7.


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4. Gallegos and other suspects. La Prensa, 3 Mar. 1932, 1.

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of a candle, without rest’, he wrote a ‘very long’ confession whichhe gave to La Prensa for publication (see Plate 5). When con-fronted with these pages by the judge, however, in a dramaticscene during a court appearance, Gallegos used a lighter tobring out a message he had written on the same paper with invis-ible ink: ‘Everything written here is false, I have done it to provethat I am innocent’.54

Confessions in interviews were critical for the press coverage offamous cases, not least because they presented the authenticity ofa subjective point of view — the one that was the very closest to thecrime. Aware of this, some prisoners granted interviews strategic-ally. They could reward journalists with an exclusive or, like themultiple murderer Goyo Cardenas, stop talking to reporterswhen coverage seemed to be leaning against them.55 Cardenas,unlike Gallegos, made a smooth transition from criminal act topublic explanation. When the bodies of four women were disin-terred from his yard in 1943, he offered multiple explanations ininterviews with journalists, psychiatrists and criminologists. Hewas injected with truth serum, to strange but unproductive effect,and even wrote a couple of books years later. He described hisgruesome crimes, which he at one point argued were motivated byscience, and provided ample information about his life, his rela-tionships with the victims and virtually any topic he was askedabout. In his case there was a good reason to be talkative:Cardenas tried to pass as insane in order to avoid prison, but toprison he was nevertheless finally sent after escaping from thesanatorium of La Castaneda. In prison he was sane enough toget married, have children, work as a lawyer and be released in1976. In probably the strangest scene in the history of Mexicanpenology, he was applauded during a session of the Chamber ofDeputies as an example of a rehabilitated criminal.56

The public significance of confessions seems to have inspiredcrimes in which murder and explanation were premeditated,following each other in close order and in the process givingpublic resonance to voices otherwise seldom heard. In a

54 La Prensa, 20 Mar. 1932, 1, 3; La Prensa, 1 Mar. 1932, 3; La Prensa, 4 Mar. 1932,3, 5.

55 Blanco Moheno, Memorias de un reportero, 211.56 Meade, ‘Anatomies of Justice and Chaos’, 481; Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios,

92; Andres Rıos Molina, Memorias de un loco anormal: el caso de Goyo Cardenas (MexicoCity, 2010).


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5. Gallegos’s confession. La Prensa, 21 Mar. 1932, 1.

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prominent 1922 case, 14-year-old Marıa del Pilar Moreno killedthe senator who had murdered her father and confessed in inter-views, and later in a book. She explained how the tragedy ofbeing orphaned had forced her to seek public revenge. She wasacquitted by the jury.57 Thirty-seven years later, Ema Martınezkilled Senator Rafael Altamirano in his office. Like Marıa delPilar, she did not try to flee but immediately began to give inter-views to journalists. With tears in her eyes, Martınez claimed‘He sank me . . . He finished my life and left me in the streets!’58

She explained that years earlier she had been coerced into havinga relationship with Altamirano, who was then her boss at thePensions Office; when they broke up, she was fired and herreputation stained. Martınez sued Altamirano for defamationbut the case was dismissed. Fearing for her security, she hadto leave for Chiapas and then Guatemala. She returned toMexico City finally to collect her money, which she used to buya .25-calibre gun and shoot Altamirano in the back.

Ema Martınez’s story created an opportunity to present a crit-ical yet, on the surface, an ostensibly apolitical view of the regime.El Universal and La Prensa, among others, ran the story withoutmuch sympathy shown to Martınez, yet reporters in the policesection faithfully reproduced and confirmed her statements.Editorials and caricatures denounced the corruption and immor-ality in the high levels of state bureaucracy which her caseexposed, even as, at the same time as this case was unfolding,Adolfo Lopez Mateos was directing the arrest of hundreds ofrailway workers and sentencing their leaders to lengthy prisonterms. Both newspapers reproduced the government’s anti-communist rhetoric.59

Ema Martınez killed because, as a victim, she had not beenheard until she confessed to her own crime. Nota roja journalistswere largely untroubled by the fact that, while criminals spoke,victims remained silent. Coverage seldom tried to compensate forthe absence of a narrative from the victim’s perspective. On the

57 Marıa del Pilar Moreno, La tragedia de mi vida: memorias escritas por la nina(Mexico City, 1922); Pablo Piccato, ‘The Girl Who Killed a Senator: Femininityand the Public Sphere in Postrevolutionary Mexico’, in Robert Buffington andPablo Piccato (eds.), True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico (Albuquerque, 2009).

58 La Prensa, 7 Mar. 1959, 2.59 El Universal Grafico, 11 Mar. 1959, 5; El Universal Grafico, 16 Mar. 1959, 1;

Novedades, 7 Mar. 1959, 8; Novedades, 11 Mar. 1959, 9; Amanecer (Queretaro), 7Mar. 1959, 1.


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contrary, stories and photographs showed little regard for theirdignity: images identified bodies and presented them at the crimescene as if they were another piece of evidence. Reporters in GoyoCardenas’s and Rodrıguez Silva’s cases gave details about thesexual transgressions of female victims or the homosexualityof their male relatives, as if to suggest that the victims got whatthey deserved owing to their lack of prudence and morality.As Inspector Herrera, an officer with long experience of thecriminal world, told Roberto de la Cruz in Ensayo de un crimen,some people were marked as victims even before someonedecided to kill them.60

By contrast, criminals, particularly murderers, became morecomplex characters as they attracted nota roja attention. Open-ended interviews and photographs built a nuanced understand-ing of the suspect and his or her actions. Gallegos knew photo-graphs could create a public persona, as suggested by Plate 4.These portraits departed from positivist perceptions of ‘the crim-inal’ as a barbarous subspecies of the human race — a notion thatseemed to be confirmed by the closely cropped rows of facesthat illustrated early criminological works and police magazinesin Porfirian Mexico. According to the influential ideas of CesareLombroso, born criminals looked different from peaceful people,or even from ‘good’ people who committed crimes through acci-dent or passion. For the nota roja readers, however, this theorywas of little use: criminals could be anyone in the crowd or theneighbourhood, well dressed or otherwise. In its early character-ization of Rodrıguez Silva, La Prensa compared him with other‘samples of the Lombrosian’. But as more information camealong, editors recognized that Rodrıguez Silva ‘is no longer themorbid, marijuana-smoking, hypersexual being we first thought,but presents himself with new attributes: astute, of many re-sources, with a magnetic power that seals the lips of the menand women he lives with’.61 Mid twentieth-century media depic-tions of criminals paid attention to skilful, elegant or

60 Usigli, Ensayo de un crimen, 38. For example, in the Goyo Cardenas case, victims’bodies displayed in El Universal Grafico, 8 Sept. 1942, 1; the sexual habits ofthe women killed and the brother of one of them were part of the discussion of thecase of the Tacubaya barber’s shop: La Prensa, 27 Apr. 1934, 12; La Prensa, 28 Apr.1934, 18.

61 La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934, 3; La Prensa, 28 Apr. 1934, 6; Francisco Martınez Bacaand Manuel Vergara, Estudios de antropologıa criminal (Puebla, 1892).


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cosmopolitan examples. Cuidado con el hampa described the cun-ning use of different criminal specialties, from fraudulent under-takers’ agents to guitarreros operating a machine that, theyclaimed, printed banknotes. A gang of Argentinians, uncoveredafter swindling large amounts of money from wealthy Mexicanmen, became an example of the smooth operations of the ‘hampainternacional’.62 Criminal behaviours were changing in a societyincreasingly urban and cosmopolitan. In nota roja stories, thismeant a deeper construction of the criminal: someone with apast and, sometimes, even a conscience. Many factors explainedwhy somebody could become a criminal, and they were impos-sible to reduce to the scientific laws of positivist criminology: theywere the product of personal trajectories best presented in theform of crime news narratives.

IV

Nota roja stories sought to elicit the public’s participation inthe resolution of cases. Newspapers invited readers to piecetogether the information, link it to their knowledge of the cityand its people, and come up with their own interpretations.The nota roja provided up-to-date facts and grounded them inspecific locations. Coverage of the most important cases suppliedinformation as it came to light in order to allow readers to assem-ble the case over time. There was no prescriptive structure,such as the ‘inverted pyramid’ of US newspapers, nor wasthere an obvious sequence of cause and effect, or even a unifiedchronological flow.63

The narrative began as soon as the crime was first discoveredand information began to flow in two temporal directions.64

On the one hand, moving towards the past, readers learnedabout the protagonists, their lives and the conflicts that mayhave pushed them into crime. Nota roja reporters could havebeen following the dictum of a nineteenth-century New Yorkeditor, Lincoln Steffens, who, in discussing the case of a woman

62 Tellez Vargas and Garmabella, Reportero de policıa!, 109, 112–14; FonotecaNacional, Cuidado con el hampa, 29, ‘El timo del millonario’.

63 See Barthes, ‘Structure du fait divers’, 188. Even when US reporters abandonedthat structure, the presentation of ‘tantalizing facts’ followed a logical order: Spencer,Yellow Journalism, 42–3, 104.

64 Kalifa, L’Encre et le sang, 290.


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murdered by her axe-wielding husband, instructed a reporter:‘If you can find out just what happened between that weddingand this murder, you will have a novel for yourself and a shortstory for me. Go on now, take your time and get this tragedy as atragedy’.65 Often using tragedy to define these stories, scholarshave suggested that the classical form was the model which laybehind crimes that were turned into spectacle. Fate was indeedinscribed onto the past of the characters in a given crime, yetthe plot did not follow a traditional structure because it wassubordinated to the continuing influx of information from neigh-bours, relatives or suspects about that past.66 On the otherhand, the narrative moved along with the reader’s present andfollowed the investigation through to its resolution, using infor-mation that the police provided or that industrious reporterscould procure. Coverage offered, as it emerged, both the largeand the small facts that constituted the raw material for thepotential detective in every reader.

Between these parallel lines, of tragedy and investigation, thestructure of nota roja cases did not take the shape of detectivestories with their careful measures of information and inference.Instead, they resembled the early ‘construction of murder asmystery’ that Karen Halttunen described for the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century United States: stories that were‘usually fragmented, chronologically jumbled, and incomplete’,in which contradictory perspectives coexisted, and which werenot always easy to follow. The absence of a master intelligenceto organize the information, which in later crime fiction wasprovided by the detective, required from readers the same kindof active role that juries played in criminal trials.67

Nota roja coverage of famous crimes, however, includedconventional elements that helped its readers to organize theinformation and extract from it broader lessons. The reporter’sentrance into the crime scene was a key moment because itmarked the newspaper’s decision to follow the crime through toits resolution and because it linked the gaze of the reporter with

65 Cited in Spencer, Yellow Journalism, 105.66 Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios, 5, 7, 10, 13; Roberson, ‘Diario de una instructora

de baile’, Revista de Policıa (Dec. 1964), 24–7, 57–8; El Universal Grafico, 31 Dec.1928, 8–9.

67 Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American GothicImagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 93, 100, 116.


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that of the reader. In the case of the Tacubaya barber’s shop, themain article described the ‘horrific scene’ at the ‘pigsty’ where thebodies of Juana Castaneda, Marıa Estela Heredia and TeresaPulido were found. The first page contained drawings and photo-graphs of the bodies, and portraits of the victims and the suspect,Santiago Rodrıguez Silva (see Plate 3). There was no mysteryabout who had committed the crime, yet descriptions of thescene suggested reasons for the brutality.68 These initial descrip-tions, often written in the first person and including the names ofreporters, photographers and graphic artists, conveyed withemphatic precision the sensory impact of the crime: in thebarber’s shop, ‘on the ground of a miserable room . . . turnedinto a huge pool of blood’ there were ‘cots . . . rags’ and murderweapons forming the ‘horrific scene’.69 The stress on place oftenprovided a name for the story (‘the crime of Tacubaya’, ‘thetragedy of the Restaurant Broadway’), which in subsequentdays referred readers back to the original scene, and anchored itto a specific location in the city.

The next component of coverage, closely following the entranceonto the crime scene, was an appeal to the emotions and the intel-ligence and for the participation of the public. La Prensa definedthe ‘fascinating and brutal crime’ of Tacubaya by ‘the cruelty, theviciousness, the ferocity’.70 Such a description could be justified asa portrayal of popular feelings. In the same case, La Prensa pre-sented pictures of an angry crowd outside the crime scene, tearyimages at the burial of the victims, attended by an ‘enormousmultitude, mostly of the humble class’. Editors appealed for thecapture of the ‘heinous criminal’, echoing Tacubaya neighbourswho ‘demand the head of the murderer; that he be hanged from atree; that he receive the ley fuga’.71 This case, however, was not only‘brutal’ but also ‘absorbing’, thus deserving readers’ participationbeyond the expression of their feelings. Their intervention couldinclude denouncing the runaway suspect or responding to thequestions that peppered the articles: Was there an accomplice?

68 La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934, 1. The case is in AHDF, JP, ISSS, box 3, exp. 20, N/522/1204. For a similar centrality of place and social context through the crime scene, seeBoris Fausto, O crime do restaurante chines: carnaval, futebol e justica na Sao Paulo dosanos 30 (Sao Paulo, 2009).

69 La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934, 3.70 Ibid. and back page.71 La Prensa, 24 Apr. 1934; La Prensa, 25 Apr. 1934, 3, 18; La Prensa, 26 Apr. 1934,

3, 6, 18, 21; La Prensa, 29 Apr. 1934, 30.


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What was Rodrıguez Silva’s motive? A rape attempt? La Prensaoffered a reward for readers who helped in his capture and 50pesos to the person who explained, in a hundred words, the truemotive behind the crime to which the suspect would eventuallyconfess. Prizes and questions within articles served ‘the goal . . .of stimulating the instincts of observation, deduction and investi-gation of its readers’.72

This participation was made possible by another conventionof nota roja narratives: the detailed presentation of all relevant in-formation, as soon as it emerged from police sources or the jour-nalists’ own investigations. Brief testimonies, vague tips, revealingphotographs and other items created the nota roja’s characteristicproliferation of articles, captions, text boxes and headlines. Longarticles began on the cover and continued into different sections,requiring readers to move back and forth through the pages ofthe newspaper and the development of the investigation, asthey recapitulated names and places visited in previous days, andintroduced contradictory pieces of information. In the case ofTacubaya, separate articles announced that drops of blood sug-gested the murderer was wounded; that there had been no rapeof the victims; that multiple tips were emerging as to the where-abouts of Rodrıguez Silva, and that ‘All accounts spread about themotive of the crimeare mere suppositions’.73 This fragmentary butpersistent building of the case was in itself a replica, and a critique,of the police investigation, which often consisted of little more thanthe cobbling together of evidence without any concern about thepossible motives.

The reporter and the readers, in contrast to the police, paidattention to the personal stories and psychological traits thatwould explain why some became criminals and others becamevictims — another component of crime fiction. The personalitiesand relations between actors anchored this loosely organizednarrative. Victims, suspects and other characters graduallyacquired depth as reporters interviewed them and investigatedtheir past, as in the transformation of Rodrıguez Silva from aLombrosian criminal to an astute manipulator. After his capture,his close relationship with his mother became prominent in textsand photographs, as well as his liaisons with the deceased. David

72 La Prensa, 28 Apr. 1934, 3.73 La Prensa, 25 Apr. 1932, back page.


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Heredia, a policeman who was the son and brother of two of thevictims, cried and promised revenge at the funeral. Days later,readers learned that, according to the detective Valente Quintana,Heredia slept with the suspect at the barber’s shop and hadintimate physical contact with him.74

The nota roja narratives of famous cases often closed with thechase and capture of the criminal, and the resulting clarificationof his or her motives. The search for the suspect and the truthformed a single goal: ‘Follow in La Prensa the fascinating searchfor the killer and [find out] whether justice manages, in the end,to uncover the motives of this sordid tragedy’.75 The newspaperscored a triumph when its correspondent was instrumentalin Rodrıguez Silva’s capture in Leon. From Mexico City, theeditor managed to interrogate him over the phone, butRodrıguez Silva maintained, implausibly, that he had killed inself-defence.76 Although explanation and prosecution weredifferent processes, journalists hoped to resolve them simultan-eously with a confession and an indictment. When the judgedeclared a suspect bien preso, that is, judicially charged ratherthan merely arrested, newspapers presented the event (in factonly one step in the judicial process) as the end of the story, thepoint when public opinion reached its conclusion about a caseand turned its attention to the next one. The accused waited inprison for a sentence, yet from the perspective of readers andjournalists he or she was already condemned, not least becauseprisons were nasty places in which the indicted and the sentencedmingled. Trials dragged on for months or years, but they hadfew public audiences. When reached, sentences could be irrele-vant from the point of view of suspects who were already in prisonor who, alternatively, could shorten prison terms through moneyor powerful sponsors. The lack of interest in the newspapersabout this phase of the penal process is not surprising: besidestaking place a long time after the crime, sentences came fromjudges who were often considered corrupt.77 The narrative’s

74 La Prensa, 28 Apr. 1934, 18. Criminals’ life stories did not necessarily involve, asin Crıtica, in Buenos Aires, the use of psychological explanations: Saıtta, Regueros detinta, 205–6.

75 La Prensa, 25 Apr. 1934, 3.76 La Prensa, 29 Apr. 1934, 6.77 La Voz de Sinaloa, 3 July 1963, 1; La Prensa, 15 Mar. 1955, 20, 38; La Prensa,

12 Mar. 1957, 9.


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denouement had already occurred, at least in the most satisfyingstories, in the confession that came before the prison doorsslammed shut.

Some of these features are little different from the crime news ofother countries, from yellow journalism and tabloids in theEnglish-speaking world, to the fait divers in France and noticiaspoliciales in Argentina. However, scepticism towards the judiciaryand police investigations defines the context of the nota roja andunderlies its engaging narratives. The judiciary and the policelacked authority when it came to producing a full and definitiveaccount of the causes of and culpability for a crime. Victims ortheir kin denounced the impunity of criminals, and saw delaysand uncertainty water down any vindication a sentence mighteventually provide. Impunity was systemic: in cases of murderthroughout the country between 1926 and 1952, only 38 percent of the indicted were found guilty.78 Against this backdropit is not surprising that, for Mexican citizens, justice was onlytangentially associated with the law.

It seems paradoxical, then, to find that La Prensa and other notaroja publications constantly, and unsuccessfully, editorialized infavour of the reinstatement of the death penalty.79 In their cover-age of some famous cases, these publications implied that theextrajudicial execution of suspects or convicts by the police,in the form of ley fuga, was a more satisfactory alternative thanimprisonment dictated by judges. A guard shot Gallegos ashe was reaching for the typewriter above his seat while on thetrain to the penal colony of Islas Marıas, and then his bodywas taken out of the train to stage an ‘attempted escape’,as would be recorded in the official account. Rodrıguez Silva,the Tacubaya murderer, suffered the ley fuga during a reconstruc-tion of events at the barber’s shop. The police claimed hegrabbed a razor and attacked the officers.80 The practice ofthe ley fuga continued into the 1940s, most famously used

78 Pablo Piccato, ‘Estadısticas del crimen en Mexico: series historicas, 1901–2001’,at 5http://www.columbia.edu/�pp143/estadisticascrimen/EstadisticasSigloXX.htm4.

79 Meade, ‘Anatomies of Justice and Chaos’; Patrick Timmons and Ethan Blue(eds.), Punishment and Death, special issue of Radical History Review, xcvi (2006).

80 La Prensa, 19 Mar. 1932, 3; La Prensa, 3 May 1934, 1; Tellez Vargas andGarmabella, Reportero de policıa!, 25; Meade, ‘La ley fuga y la tribuna improvisada’.


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against the alleged assassins of Senator Mauro Angulo, in 1948,during a stop in the road to Veracruz while they were being trans-ported by police agents to identify other accomplices. Authoritiesin all these cases offered denials and rather perfunctory explan-ations. Newspapers reproduced them but these seemed in-tended to maintain appearances for the sake of an outcomethat had yielded a form of justice which the papers foundacceptable. Although the authorities never claimed responsibilityfor ordering application of the ley fuga, the ambivalence ofnewspaper accounts implied such events were not just theproduct of police ineptitude.81

The ley fuga seemed to undermine the public search forthe truth, and it was predicated on the lack of transparencyand scepticism described above. Yet it also validated views ofthe truth as the product of public debate. Nobody won theprize offered by La Prensa in the case of Tacubaya becauseRodrıguez Silva never fully confessed. He had promised todo so but then changed his story and claimed self-defence.Gallegos similarly had refused to recognize his own writtenconfession. In these cases, newspapers’ support of extrajudicialexecutions came after they had published interviews withsuspects and had reached a conclusion about their guilt andmotives. The death of the criminal was a fitting end for a trialthat had already taken place in front of public opinion.Extrajudicial violence sealed the validity of citizens’ participa-tion via the nota roja. As opposed to the mob spontaneity ofrural lynching, ley fuga, performed by agents of the state,seemed rational and modern.82

V

It was not the judge or the police detective, but rather journalisticcoverage that provided the most authoritative account of the truthbehind a crime. It produced narratives that were all the more

81 AHDF, JP, ISSS, box 10, exp. 65, 1948, asesinato Senador Mauro AnguloHernandez. Editorials on ley fuga in ‘Ojo por ojo y diente por diente’, La Prensa, 28Apr. 1934, 10, and ‘El que a hierro mata . . . [a hierro muere]’, ibid., 18–20.

82 On the political and communicative uses of lynching, see Daniel M. Goldstein,The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Durham, NC, 2004);Christopher Krupa, ‘Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador’,American Ethnologist, xxxvi (2009).


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convincing because they were the product of debates aboutmotives and actions which involved multiple voices. The opinionsexpressed in those debates could appeal to violence withoutundermining their open and rational nature. In contrast tothe opacity of the state, the public denouement of these narra-tives, including the ley fuga, was compatible with an engagedcitizenship. Thus, even though its prestige, autonomy and near-hegemony over the reading public had waned by the 1970s,nota roja laid the ground for the critical journalism that emergedin the last decades of the century. Claims about human rightsabuses by the police in the 1980s, coupled with notorious ex-amples of the complicity between officials and drug traffickers,transformed the political meaning of police journalism — whichnow also included publications such as Unomasuno that avoidedthe trappings of nota roja.83

The nota roja was not just a collection of histories and imagesbut a terrain on which multiple actors argued about the places,characters, motives and outcomes of a public event. In so doing,they produced the truth. The responsibility, means and motiv-ations of the crime, as established by police and judicial investi-gations according to the penal code, constituted the legaltruth. This truth could overlap with the one constructed bynota roja narratives, but lacked its authority in the publicsphere. Although ley fuga, torture of suspects and the silence ofvictims could undermine the validity of those narratives, theywere pieces of a story which readers assembled in order toanswer the evasive questions behind a crime. There was noultimate arbiter for the process, and the voice of the criminalwas as compelling as any other, if not more so. For writersand readers of the nota roja, for relatives of murder victims, andsometimes even for the authorities, truth could only be found onthis terrain. In spite of its cacophonous combination of emo-tion, deduction, intuition and random evidence (or preciselybecause of it), the nota roja’s version of justice could be brutal,but it was more convincing than the justice that emerged fromthe state: it could at least claim to have a stronger connectionto the truth.

83 See Carlos Monsivais, Los mil y un velorios: cronica de la nota roja, revised edn(Mexico City, 2009), 112; Lerner, Shock of Modernity; John Mraz, Nacho Lopez,Mexican Photographer (Minneapolis, 2003). On the loss of autonomy of reporters,see Tellez Vargas and Garmabella, Reportero de policıa!, 34.


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The nota roja’s view of justice did not serve any narrowlyconstrued political purpose, either in support of or oppositionto the state: its critique was political in a broader sense, by chan-nelling citizen participation. Scandalous cases provided manyreaders with the information and perspective that were otherwisemissing from the routine journalistic coverage of political life.The nota roja might not make for an edifying chapter in the historyof Mexican democratization, but neither was it a wellspringof irrational or dehumanizing violence. The ley fuga occurredin a small number of cases, and lynching, albeit demandedby crowds such as the one outside the Tacubaya barber’sshop, also remained rare. Yet both practices had great impactas markers of the extreme limits of social calls for truth and just-ice — not as a pathology of lo mexicano, but as the interventionof rational publics that tolerated violence. Nota roja readers, ascitizens, saw justice as a right pragmatically associated withthe truth, a constantly renewed claim rather than a privilege ofmodern life.84

This ambivalence towards punishment and the law has left aheavy legacy in contemporary Mexico, where violence hasreached an intensity that seems to have overcome the capacityof the state to contain it and the ability of readers to make senseof it. The use of extrajudicial violence is increasingly, thoughmost often implicitly, endorsed by sectors of the state and civilsociety.85 At the same time, however, a growing resistance tothe dehumanization of criminals and victims is emerging as anexpression of citizens’ engagements with justice. To put this

84 Stanley Cohen, ‘Crime and Politics: Spot the Difference’, British Journal ofSociology, xlvii (1996); James T. Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today (Durham, NC, 1998). On the efforts of the emerging nationalstate to impose monismo jurıdico in Mexico, see Elisa Speckman Guerra, ‘Los jueces,el honor y la muerte: un analisis de la justicia (Ciudad de Mexico, 1871–1931)’,Historia Mexicana, lv (2005–6), 1435. Engagement with justice has not been part ofstudies of citizenship in Mexico. Contrast with the literature on transitional justice inArgentina and Chile, for example, where the crimes committed by military regimesoffered a more identifiable target and the opportunity to tailor institutions to thesearch for the truth: Hugo Vezzetti, Pasado y presente: guerra, dictadura y sociedad enla Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2002), 21–2; Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial(New Haven, 1996). A successful example of the coupling of justice and publicity canbe found in the documentary Presunto culpable (2008), directed by Roberto Hernandezand Geoffrey Smith.

85 See Knight, ‘Habitus and Homicide’, 110. On contemporary violence, AlvaroDelgado, ‘Asoman los paramilitares’, Proceso, 26 Sept. 2011,5http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p¼2824994.


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contemporary dilemma in the historical perspective of the notaroja is to recognize how the right to the truth became separatedfrom the right to justice. Although justice has always been a cen-tral theme in Mexican public life, the right to the truth, theoret-ically and legally formulated elsewhere in the context of transitionaway from regimes with massive human rights abuses, is onlygradually becoming a political issue in Mexico, owing to theincreasing number of disappearances and abuses linked to drugenforcement.86 Before truth and justice became political rights,social claims to knowledge were already latent in the discussionsof criminal stories in mid twentieth-century Mexico. If nothingelse, the history of the nota roja reminds us of our obligation tocontinue a careful examination of the images and words aboutcrime on which both citizens’ views of justice and retaliatoryviolence rest.

Columbia University Pablo Piccato

86 On the effects of fear, see Rossana Reguillo, ‘The Oracle in the City: Beliefs,Practices, and Symbolic Geographies’, Social Text, xxii (2004); on the links betweensocial and civil rights and the risks of the denial of justice, Guillermo O’Donnell,‘Reflections on Contemporary South American Democracies’, Journal of LatinAmerican Studies, xxxiii (2001). See also Lean, Public Passions, 139, 174. For the jur-idical formulation of the right to truth by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,see Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, ‘La Lutte contre l’impunite dans le systeme inter-americain des droits de l’homme’, in Juan Soroeta Liceras (ed.), Cursos de derechoshumanos de Donostia-San Sebastian, x, Los derechos humanos frente a la impunidad(Bilbao, 2009); Nino, Radical Evil on Trial. The UN International Convention forthe Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (signed in New York,20 Dec. 2006) states in article 24 that ‘Each victim has the right to know the truthregarding the circumstances of the enforced disappearance, the progress and re-sults of the investigation and the fate of the disappeared person. Each State Partyshall take appropriate measures in this regard’. See International Convention forthe Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, at Office of the UnitedNations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 5http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/CED/Pages/ConventionCED.aspx4. For the contemporary Mexicancontext, see efforts co-ordinated in the website ‘Nuestra aparente rendicion’,5http://www.nuestraaparenterendicion.com/index.php4.


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Murders of Nota Roja: Truth and Justice in Mexican Crime News

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