IN 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, scandalized Mexico by describing the country as “the perfect dictatorship”. He was referring to the decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that, in keeping with its Orwellian name, had co-opted most of the country’s institutions, including business, the unions, peasants, intellectuals and the media. All the more delightful, Mr Vargas Llosa made his impromptu remarks whilst on air on Televisa, back then a broadcasting near-monopoly that prided itself on being a “soldier of the PRI”.
Almost 25 years later Luis Estrada has directed a political spoof, “La Dictadura Perfecta” (The Perfect Dictatorship), which brings Mr Vargas Llosa’s slur up to date. This time the dictator is television itself, which controls the president, the political system (not just the PRI), and society. It is, Mr Estrada admits, an over-simplification, but it certainly makes for a neat satire. “This is the first time in Mexican history a sitting president has been satirized in film,” he says. Whether that’s true or not, Mexico’s high-and-mighty generally enjoy undeserved immunity from lampoon; this film makes a boisterous attempt to redress the balance.
From the opening disclaimer—“In this story all the names are fictitious…[but] any similarity with reality is not mere coincidence”—to the final shot of a president brought to power by television, with a soap-opera star on his arm, it is clear that President Enrique Peña Nieto (whose wife, Angélica Rivera, is an ex-Televisa star) is one of the butts of the joke. His successful run for the presidency in 2012 was greatly helped by Televisa’s favourable coverage. “Television already put one president in place…Will it do it again?” is the film’s cheeky tagline.
But besides the personal digs, Mr Estrada says the serious point is that television manipulates reality in Mexico. (Comparisons to the Berlusconi and Murdoch empires elsewhere in the world are surely inevitable.) This power to distort is vividly mocked in an abundance of scenes borrowed from recent events in which reality was transfigured by the media circus into a mixture of tragedy and farce. These events include the disappearance and accidental death of a four-year-old girl on the edge of Mexico City in 2010, whose mother was later unfairly pilloried in the press; and a staged-for-TV arrest of alleged kidnappers in Mexico City in 2005 that ended with a French woman wrongly jailed for seven years.
Some of this is now, hopefully, past its sell-by date. Mr Peña has orchestrated reforms supposedly to curb Televisa’s power, and digital media is emerging as a potentially independent competitor. Though Televisa huffily pulled its backing from the project, the film grossed a healthy 50m pesos ($3.7m) on its opening weekend. That suggests there are limits to the power of both the broadcaster, and the irate film authorities that supported Mr Estrada´s production with public funds without realising the full extent of its satire.
It is to be hoped that the message this film contains are not simply laughed off. Currently, television is awash with soppy soap operas, slapstick and tedious punditry all designed to make the poor (by far the largest viewing segment) forget their troubles rather than overcome them. There is no popular equivalent of “Saturday Night Live”, “The Daily Show” or “Not the Nine O’Clock News”. Newspaper cartoons are tolerated, but few people read them. In private it is a different story: Mexican cantinas (bars) ring with black humour, much of it directed at the government. But if Mexico cannot handle public mockery of its government institutions, it is a sign of how fragile the edifice of state really is. If "The Perfect Dictatorship" vindicates the role of satire in Mexican public life it will have made a valuable contribution.
