In 1976, when ruling party leaders secretly campaigned to oust Julio Scherer Garcia, hard-hitting editor of Excelsior, then Mexico's premier daily, some 230 of the country's most distinguished journalists resigned from the paper and went with him (see "The Coup at Excelsior," CJR, September/October 1976). They have since dispersed to found a variety of publications that have largely broken free of Mexico's tradition of government influence over the press.

Mexico City is the hub of virtually all political and intellectual life in Mexico. Nearly thirty daily newspapers are produced there, most of them beholden to the government through its distribution of subsidized newsprint and its control of advertising from government-owned industries.

But Excelsior's offspring have learned to survive on their own. Here is the family tree:

* Proceso, founded in 1976 by Excelsior's former editor, is a national newsmagazine that retains many of the writers who protested Scherer's forced exit. In 1982 it lost its government advertising and nearly went under, but it learned to thrive without it. Proceso sometimes veers into yellow journalism, sometimes sounds a trumpet for social change. Its preeminence among the nation's newsmagazines is attributed to a regular menu of exposes on such topics as nepotism, fraud,and incompetence. And Proceso is not afraid to blast the competition, running cover stories on the "media for sale."

* Nexos and Vuelta, Mexico City's leading cultural and literary magazines, also operate under the direction of former Excelsior journalists, the most famous of whom is Mexico's Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who heads Vuelta. Nexos focuses less on literature than on issues, providing a socialist critique of society.

* El Financiero, a ten-year-old moderate newspaper, has drawn prominent journalists from the original Excelsior clan, from the Proceso clique, from the disillusioned ranks of other papers, and from a generation of younger, American-educated intellectuals bent on exposing electoral fraud and on discouraging hasty concessions in free trade negotiations with the U.S. Edited for the business community and liberal intellectuals, El Financiero draws a large audience -- and thrives without government subsidies.

* Este Pais, a maverick new magazine of the younger intellectual generation, is devoted to scientific measurements of public opinion. In one of its earliest issues the magazine, using questionnaires and statistical analysis, concluded that the ruling PRI, or Revolutionary Institutional Party, had used fraud to win a controversial 1990 election. The magazine's own polling data showed much stronger support for the leftist opposition party than official voting tallies had reported. Este Pais's editorial coalition of prominent intellectuals public figures, and academics lends legitimacy to its usually controversial findings.

* El Norte, published some 450 miles north of Mexico City in Monterrey, is not linked to veterans of Excelsior, it its fierce independence makes it a spiritual cousin to the Excelsior family. The most technologically advanced paper in the country, El Norte is pro-business and conservative. It often runs hard, investigative pieces, most recently on some of the government's ill-conceived preparations for the free trade accord.

Regardless of political and editorial differences, this extended family of independent publications is providing the government and the monolithic PRI with serious scrutiny. And their example has encouraged other journalists to follow their lead.

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