Guillermo M. speaking:

This t-shirt is the one that they offered to us when I worked for the channel 40 of the city of Mexico, very close from here, a few blocks. It was a news channel; they were doing basic news. It was a very new channel, very small; it was nothing more than a large floor, a penthouse. They were in charge of doing the news, and in this time it was interesting because the president of the new political party, which was Fox, has just arrived. We had been for 70 years with the PRI, with the same party and it was the first time that a new political party was coming. There was a lot of hope throughout the country that the information would be more democratic. This was a new approach in the news media. There was hope that there would be more information and more democracy.

It was the first professional job that I had. I had been living in Canada for a year and an half, I came back to Mexico, and I was looking for a job and this was the first job I had inside a company. It was a formal job for me after having studying and working on various independent projects. It was like my initiation in that world. The station always had financial problems. The owner was in debt with the owner of another bigger channel, TV Azteca, who was called Salinas Pliego. He owed him something like 40 million dollars from a lent he had given him. They had an argument, they went to court, and they spent many years fighting in court and nothing came out of it.

One day, they called to go to the station because some people had hijacked the antenna of the station. What they did- it seems- was that Salinas Pliego, the owner of the other station, hired a paramilitary group and they broke into the station at night. They tied up the security guards and too the power of the antenna. But they had said that it had been an official operation, that the Channel 40 had invented the hijack. I went to the station and I could see the guards coming out. They still had marks from being attached by the wrists, and they had lots of money, they had bundle of 500 pesos that were given to them so that they would keep silent and leave. They were scared, they didn’t want to put themselves into problems, so they turned the money to the officials.

I continued to edit the news and we were like one month without signal, we were on cable, but not the public signal that was free. This was in Christmas time. They did that on purpose on Christmas day, because no one could react, people were all on vacations. The president didn’t say anything, and didn’t show up for something like a week. The secretary of the government didn’t say anything either. When the president came back and they asked him his point of view about the hijack of the antenna, he answered his famous quote: “And why do you ask me?”

It was a great disappointment because there was always hope that with the change of government this kind of thing were not going to happen, and it didn’t seem so sure anymore, because these things were still happening.

I continued to work and I really only worked for a year there. It was a very intense year in which I learned to edit. There were also internal problem, etc. I also got into arguments. They were not paying us, they were late of 3 or 4 months in paying us. They didn’t have the money to pay us but the worse was that the owner had his yacht and house in France, this is something that often happens in this country. This is the great difference between the ones that do the work and the leaders of the media.

It was a great experience to live through this, the country’s moment of transition.

And I kept this t-shirt as a souvenir. I used it to sleep. And one day it happened that I was wearing it in a supermarket, I was buying things and I was wearing it and one of the people who were working there asked me if I had worked for the Channel 40. I told him that I did and I asked why. And he said “it’s because I would like to thank you for what you have done for us. We know what happened and the situation there”. They felt like we were the very few media that tried to be objective, that didn’t have agenda or alliances with no one. It was a big surprise for me because I wasn’t expecting it. It was nice. This t-shirt was like a flag, but I think that there are other things now in my life. I can detach myself from it now.