EL NUEVO ALARMA! IS MEXICO'S BEST CRIME TABLOID, AND MIGUEL ANGEL RODRIGUEZ VAZQUEZ IS ITS EDITOR - PART 1

INTERVIEWED BY SANTIAGO STELLEY
PHOTO BY TOMAS MORALES

Alarma! is the oldest of Mexico’s prensa roja (red press) tabloids. It is mostly made up of gruesome news stories, photos of mutilated corpses, and headlines that contain 1960s-Borscht-Belt-comedian-worthy puns about death and pain. We recently spoke with Miguel Angel Rodriguez Vazquez, the magazine’s editor.


Vice: How’d you become director of Alarma!?

Miguel Angel Rodriguez Vazquez: I started in the mailroom back in 1981 and eventually learned to do the layouts. Then I started writing and taking pictures for the magazine and, years after that, I became the assistant to the director. He passed away four years ago, and that’s how I became the director.

And what does the job entail?

Basically, I go through all the material that comes to my desk, pick the stories I like, write the headlines, and edit the stories.

Sounds easy enough. Alarma! was the first paper of its kind, right? The first presna roja tabloid?

Yeah, Alarma! was first published in 1963. What happened was a newspaper man by the name of Don Carlos Amayo Lizarraga had the idea to start a magazine that would deal exclusively with crime.

The magazine really took off in 1964 with the story of Las Poquianchis, who were three women who ran an infamous prostitution ring in Guanajuato. They were accused of committing 28 homicides. All of their victims were young girls that worked for them as prostitutes, and all of their bodies were found buried in Las Poquianchis’s backyard.



And Alarma! covered the story in full, gory detail, I assume?

The magazine followed the story for over eight months. One of our reporters, Jesus Sanchez Hermosillo, went up to Guanajuato and became good friends with Ms. Delfina and Ms. Maria de Jesus, the two first Poquianchis who were detained. They shared their stories with him, and they talked about how they had been paying off all the local officials like the police and the municipal presidents…

Scoop!

Las Poquianchis became a sort of foto novela, or magazine soap opera, for our readers, but it was even better because it was a true story complete with murdered women, buried fetuses, girls forced into prostitution, humans bought and sold…

We have over 2,000 photographs from just that one story. We published their love letters, their family albums, absolutely everything. The story really grabbed Mexico’s attention, and that was when the magazine had its first boom.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Mexico City earthquake issue.

The Mexico City earthquake in 1985 was also a huge story for us. Our print run in the first week was over 2.5 million. The next week it went down to 2 million, but it was still extraordinary. We covered every possible angle during the earthquake.



What’s your favorite story from that issue?

I remember one story about a kid called Monchito. He was a young boy that was supposed to be buried under a house that had fallen in the earthquake. Everyone in Mexico was worried about Monchito and praying for Monchito. They brought in all these experts to figure out how to rescue him. At the end it turned out that Monchito didn’t even exist. The owners of the house had made him up because they wanted to rescue a safe box that had been buried with their house.

Soon after the huge boost we received from the earthquake, Alarma! was shut down by the government.

Why did that happen?

In 1986 Mexico was hosting the World Cup, and the government decided to close down all the pornographic magazines in the country. Alarma! didn’t feature any naked girls or anything like that, but according to the government commission, we had committed some technical fouls, things like not printing the appropriate “adult only” warnings on the cover or selling the magazine in plastic bags. We were given a lot of excuses, but the truth was simply that one of our sister publications, a magazine called Impacto, was very critical of the government then. So we were punished for political reasons. At the time, other publications—which for the most part considered our magazine to be vulgar and trashy or what have you—came to our defense. Everybody knew what was happening but nobody could stop it. Alarma! was shut down for almost five years.

When we finally re-launched in ’91 we had to change our name and became El Nuevo Alarma!. As soon as we hit the newsstands, we got back all of our readers and put all the other crime magazines that had popped up in the intervening years out of business.


TO BE CONTINUED
EL NUEVO ALARMA! IS MEXICO’S BEST CRIME TABLOID... | 1 | 2 |

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