Caribbean & Central America - March 2019

Although, strictly speaking, no country in Central America has a media monopoly in the sense of a single corporation owning all media outlets, concentration remains high. Moreover, major outlets continue to be owned by oligarchies – typically wealthy landowning elites that made their fortune during the region’s coffee boom – or by powerful Mexican media mogul Ángel González, who has been repeatedly accused of funding election campaigns throughout the region and using his media empire to squeeze out opposition voices. Media concentration in Central America continues to reduce the range of news, information, and perspectives available to citizens and thus remains one of the greatest challenges for the region’s fledgling democracies. Although new digital media outlets are increasingly challenging the power of the mainstream media, illiteracy and low Internet penetration rates continue to limit their influence.

Guatemala: González media empire funds election campaigns

For the past four decades, Guatemala has exemplified Mexican media mogul Ángel González’s political influence in Central America. The Albavisión broadcasting network, owned by González’s wife, Alba Elvira Lorenzana, controls four major television stations: El Super Canal, Televisiete, Teleonce and Trecevisión, as well as the Radio Sonora radio station.

González has a strong influence on Guatemalan politics, giving US$650,000 to the 1985 presidential campaign of former president Vinicio Cerezo (1986-1991), as well as more than US$2.6m and free airtime to former president Alfonso Portillo (2000-2004)’s 1999 campaign, according to a 2001 study by Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus, entitled ‘Stifling Dissent: the fallout from a Mexican media invasion of Central America’.

And in June 2016, the González media empire’s influence on Guatemalan politics once again came under debate after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for Lorenzana on charges that she took part in an illegal campaign finance scheme. The United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig) accuses Lorenzana of funnelling US$23m to former president Otto Pérez Molina’s (2012-2015) Partido Patriota (PP) in exchange for favouring Albavisión’s television stations with 69% of the government’s advertising from January 2012 to April 2015. Rockwell and Janus conclude that González’s ownership practices in Guatemala and Nicaragua “create an atmosphere that undercuts the development of democracy”.

Guatemala has seven daily newspapers: Diario de Centroamérica, the official government gazette, and six newspapers controlled by two family groups. Print media are dominated by the Prensa Libre and Nuestro Diario newspapers, which account for over 80% of the country’s readership. The group is owned by the Sandoval, Girón de Blank, and Zarco families, with Edgar Contreras Molina, Jorge Springmuhl Samayoa, and Gonzalo Marroquín Godoy, the current editor of Prensa Libre, as minority shareholders. A second media conglomerate, Corporación de Noticias, which owned Siglo Veintiuno and Al Día newspapers, collapsed in 2017, after a Cicig investigation exposed that former vice president Roxana Baldetti (2012-2015), who was jailed for 15 years on corruption charges in October 2018, had become a majority shareholder in order to secure a favourable coverage of the Pérez Molina administration.

The ownership of Guatemalan radio frequencies is also highly concentrated, and the market is monopolised by the Alius conglomerate, owned by Eduardo Liu, Central de Radios, which owns Radio Sonora, Grupo A, owned by the Archila Marroquín family, and the Nuevo Mundo group. Grupo A also owns the Canal Antigua and Antigua Sports cable television channels, Publinews, a free newspaper, the Diario Digital digital news site, and Contrapoder magazine. A prominent member of the Archila clan which owns Grupo A, Erick Archila Dehesa, who served as energy & mining minister under the Pérez Molina administration, is wanted by Interpol on corruption charges.

Nicaragua: Ortega government attacks the media

Nicaraguan television and radio stations are run by a duopoly: President Daniel Ortega, First Lady Rosario Murillo (Vice President since 2017), and their family on the one hand, and the Ratensa Group, owned by Angel González on the other. According to an investigation published by Nicaraguan daily newspaper La Prensa, in 2007, shortly after Ortega’s re-election, Murillo spent millions of dollars of Venezuelan aid on buying one media outlet after another.

Today, the Ortega-Murillo clan owns TV channels 4, 8, 9 and 13, as well as Radio Ya, Radio Nicaragua and Radio Sandino, state broadcaster Channel 6, and online news service El 19 Digital.

The Ratensa Group owns channels 10 and 4 with 12 as an affiliate. Following the González empire’s usual strategy, based on aligning its editorial line in each country with the interests of the incumbent government, Ratensa had a close relationship with the Ortega government and as of May 2018, all of its stations were run by Ortega’s sons and daughters.

Nicaragua’s main newspapers have come under attack from the Ortega government (which since April 2018 has been carrying out a crackdown on anti-Ortega protesters) and has ordered customs to withhold imports of paper and ink in retaliation for critical coverage since September 2018, forcing them to reduce their page count and change their format. La Prensa, Nicaragua’s oldest and most widely read newspaper generally supports free-market, liberal economics and is largely pro-US.

El Nuevo Diario, Nicaragua’s second-largest daily newspaper, had been critical of the Ortega government until it was bought by the Promerica Financial Corporation in 2011. Promerica is the majority shareholder of commercial banks in nine countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America, including Banpro, Nicaragua’s largest bank. Under Promerica’s ownership, El Nuevo Diario toed the official line, until Ortega’s onslaught on press freedom made such a stance unsustainable. “There was a very strong alliance between Ortega and the country’s main business groups and during their honeymoon period, congress passed almost 80 pro-business laws. However, this alliance has fallen apart, and the owners of El Nuevo Diario can no longer support a regime that has lost legitimacy and credibility,” says Alfonso Malespín, a media studies professor at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA).

Costa Rica: media responds to corporate interests

The González media empire’s tentacles have also spread to Costa Rica. The Repretel group, which belongs to Ángel González, controls an important percentage of the country’s radio stations as well as television channels 4, 6, and 11, while the Picado Cozza family owns the Teletica Canal 7 and Canal 33 television channels, which account for 55.4% of the country’s viewers, as well as cable channels Cable Tica and Cable Color.

The Costa Rican press is controlled by a media conglomerate that owns La Nación, the country’s most widely read newspaper, Al Día and La Teja, both tabloids, El Financiero, a business weekly, as well as a number of magazines. Another important daily, La República, is owned by a Canada-based consortium.

Javier Córdoba, chief editor of Semanario Universidad, an independent weekly, explains that there has been a long-standing alliance between La Nación and Teletica. “Anything that is published by La Nación is also published by Teletica and vice-versa, and Teletica presenter Ignacio Santos hosts a programme with Armando González from La Nación,” says Córdoba. “Media concentration imposes a well-coordinated agenda between different media outlets that responds to corporate interests. For instance, in 2007, when Costa Rica held a referendum on the free trade agreement with the US, the media clearly favoured the ‘yes’ vote.”

El Salvador: former president arrested on corruption charges controls broadcaster

The Salvadoran media is in the hands of large landowning families with huge political and economic clout. El Salvador’s most widely read newspaper, La Prensa Gráfica, is owned by the Dutriz family, which also owns several cable TV and printing companies, as well as the J. Zaldívar y Asociados law firm, while El Diario de Hoy, another widely read daily newspaper, is owned by the Altamirano family, which has strong ties to the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) party that brought disgraced former president Elías Antonio Saca (2004-2009) to power in 2004 (Saca would leave the party five years later to found the breakaway Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional [Gana] party).

In September 2018, Saca, who also owns the Grupo Samix radio conglomerate, was jailed for ten years on corruption charges. Saca has been accused of using Grupo Samix to launder the proceeds of various corruption schemes and the radio stations were among the businesses that were confiscated during the course of the investigation.

El Salvador’s main TV stations (channels 2, 4, and 6) are controlled by the Telecorporación Salvadoreña conglomerate, which also owns the Vox FM and Radio Qué Buena radio stations.

Willian Carballo, a media studies professor at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), explains that media concentration has seriously hampered Salvadoran democracy. “Democracy requires more than having political parties and elections. One of the cornerstones of democracy is having well-informed voters and citizens can’t be well-informed as long as the media is controlled by a handful of individuals who only publish what’s in the interests of the elite,” says Carballo.

Honduras: media controlled by oligarchies

Most of the country’s TV and radio stations are controlled by the Villeda Toledo, Ferrari, and Sikaffy families (the former owns the Grupo Televicentro media conglomerate), while the Honduran press is controlled by three families: Rosenthal, Canahuati, and Flores.

The Rosenthal family, owners of El Tiempo newspaper, as well as the Canal 11 and Cable Color TV channels, also owned the Banco Continental banking group, the national airport, the Grupo Cementero del Norte cement producer, sugarcane and coffee plantations, the Cervecería Hondureña beer company, the Marathon football team, insurance and telecommunications companies, and a meat exporting business. In 2014, Forbes magazine estimated that the clan’s wealth totalled US$550m.

Jaime Rosenthal, one of the clan’s most prominent members, was a founding member of the Partido Liberal, which brought former president Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009) to power. Although Zelaya, who was ousted by a coup in 2009, was critical of media concentration in Honduras, he failed to acknowledge his own ties to the Rosenthal clan (Yani Rosenthal served as Minister for the Presidency under the Zelaya administration in 2006-2007).

El Tiempo, regarded as Honduras’ most credible newspaper, suffered as a result of the Rosenthal clan’s downfall in 2015, when several of its members were arrested on money laundering charges and most of the clan’s assets were expropriated by the state. Today, only the online version of El Tiempo survives, and is run, on a shoestring, by a small team of journalists who belonged to the paper’s original newsroom.

The Canahuati family, which own La Prensa and El Heraldo newspapers, as well as Diez, a sports publication, and a number of cable TV channels, also owns the country’s main bottling plants, pharmaceutical companies and fast food franchises such as Pizza Hut and KFC. The Flores clan, of which former president Carlos Roberto Flores (1998-2002) was a prominent member, owns La Tribuna newspaper as well as a cable TV channel.

La Prensa, El Heraldo, and La Tribuna are conservative and pro-business and their political coverage has consistently favoured the status quo. “If a bill contrary to business interests – a pro-nationalisation or anti-free market law – is proposed in congress, the media starts to campaign against it,” says journalist Manuel Torres Calderón, co-author of the book ‘Poderes Fácticos y Sistema Político en Honduras’ (‘Factic Powers and the Honduran Political System’).

He adds, that when covering issues such as immigration, the Honduran media systematically protects the status quo by failing to address underlying social and political issues such as poverty, inequality and the concentration of wealth. “Honduras is a very divided and conflictive country, but you’d never guess that by glancing at the country’s newspapers and TV channels,” says Torres.

Torres explains that the 2009 coup had a negative impact on the credibility of the Honduran press, which, with the exception of El Tiempo, staunchly supported Zelaya’s ousting. “Honduran society realised that the Honduran media’s stance in favour of the coup was too arbitrary, and this had an impact on its credibility. In the aftermath of the coup, Honduras never managed to develop an independent press that would give a voice to the opposition,” says Torres.

Panama: Martinelli attempts to control the media

As occurs throughout Central America, the Panamanian media is largely controlled by the country’s oligarchy. “The development of the Panamanian economy has been strongly linked to a small group of families (…). The media is no exception. In fact, most media outlets belong to these families,” writes researcher Rolando Rodriguez in a 2009 report published by the Trust for the Americas and Instituto Prensa y Sociedad.

The print media is controlled by three publishers: La Prensa, which publishes a daily newspaper of the same name, Geomedia, which publishes El Siglo and La Estrella newspapers, and Grupo Epasa. Former president Ricardo Martinelli (2009-2014), who was arrested in the US on corruption and illegal wiretapping charges and extradited to Panama in June 2018, became a major shareholder of the TVN television network, and his family owns the Grupo Epasa conglomerate, which publishes Panamá América, Crítica, and Día a Día newspapers.

An article published by La Prensa newspaper in May 2013 referred to these media outlets as “parastatal media”, as “they are run by private shareholders but serve the interests of certain administrations”.