When it comes to guerrillas, the twenty-seven-year-old Mexican reporter Razhy Gonzolez has shown an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.

In 1994, when masked rebels from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) launched an uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, Gonzolez landed an interview with its elusive leader, Subcommander Marcos. A year later, Gonzolez was the first to confirm that armed rebels were organizing in the neighboring state of Oaxaca, where he is based. In 1996, when the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) launched its first major attack in the Pacific Coast town of Huatulco, Gonzolez was one of only six journalists there to witness the combat.

The director of a small weekly newspaper called Contrapunto, Gonzolez scored another journalistic coup when he was one of only nine reporters invited to a clandestine EPR press conference in the mountains of Oaxaca on September 13.

Three days after returning safely from his rendezvous, however, Gonzolez discovered the downside of his journalistic success. He found himself face down, bound and blindfolded, after being forced into a car by four gunmen as he was leaving his office in downtown Oaxaca. "They accused me of being a spy for the EPR posing as a journalist," said Gonzolez, as he nursed a deep gash across his nose where the blindfold had rubbed away his skin.

Gonzolez alleges that the men who kidnapped and interrogated him for forty-five hours were not some outlaw force, but government agents, and he makes a convincing case. Many observers, in fact, see the kidnapping as another troubling sign of the government's reaction to a newly aggressive Mexican press.

Oaxaca governor Di--doro Carrasco Altamirano's comment on the kidnapping episode was not reassuring to those observers. "Now is not the moment to play around with critical journalism," he said in a radio address shortly after Gonzolez was released.

It's hardly surprising that the government has been taken aback by the radical and rapid transformation of the Mexican press. For decades - until four years ago - the government controlled all television news. It also used intimidation and corruption to muzzle the written press.

It was under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, now in self-imposed exile in Ireland after being excoriated in the press for bringing Mexico to the brink of bankruptcy, that the mechanisms of media control began to break down. In an effort to sell the virtues of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to a skeptical American public, Salinas began to woo the foreign press corps in Mexico City. And with the domestic press, he relied more on his considerable charm than on cruder means of control to generate positive stories.

In accordance with his economic liberalization program, Salinas also allowed the importation of newsprint, previously controlled by the government, and sold off a government-owned television station, inaugurating a new era of TV news competition. TV Azteca, the upstart station, has quickly gained a 40 percent prime-time audience share.

But there was a danger in unleashing the press, as Salinas discovered when the Zapatista rebels Gonzolez covered so eventfully made their first move on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect. The story had instant appeal, and the left-leaning Mexico City daily La Jornada gave special emphasis to its coverage of the conflict. Marcos in return made La Jornada his newspaper of choice, granting numerous interviews to its correspondents.

"Circulation doubled from 60,000 to 120,000," said Pedro Miguel, editorial coordinator at La Jornada, "and some days we sold 200,000 papers."

The lesson was clear: Readers would respond to aggressive coverage. Over the next two years, as Mexico was convulsed by the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); the murder of another high-ranking PRI official; the subsequent arrest of President Salinas's older brother on murder and corruption charges; and a massive devaluation of the peso, Mexico's newspapers went head to head.

Even this new independence has its limits. Almost all major newspapers, including La Jornada, accept payment to publish government press releases disguised as news articles, called gacetillas. La Jornada also allows its reporters to accept free transportation, meals, and accommodations from the government.

One newspaper that set out to break the mold was Reforma. Bankrolled by a wealthy Monterrey family, Reforma and El Norte, its sister paper in the northern industrial city, could afford to re-define the rules of the government/media relationship. Reforma imports its own newsprint rather than buying it from the government; it prohibits its reporters from accepting so much as a soft drink from public officials.

In the provinces, however, the old practices continue. With the exception of a few regional newspapers - Siglo 21 in Guadalajara, El Imparcial in Hermosillo, and the muckraking newsweekly Zeta in Tijuana - the regional press largely reproduces press releases from the state governments.

In Oaxaca, Razhy Gonzolez's effort to establish an independent voice has met with limited success. Contrapunto's weekly circulation is only 1,500 and the paper, unable to attract advertisers, has been bleeding its backers' money. But Gonzolez believes his paper will ultimately find a readership. Picking up a copy of the mainstream Oaxaca daily Noticias he explains why. A banner headline reads, "The Government Has the Support of the People"; another shouts, "Iron Hand Against Corruption."

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