Alarma!: Tabloid to the Masses

Alarma, 12 August, 1992 (Muerte 12)

The dead.  Faces mutilated, bodies contorted, limbs severed.  These are the images that weekly confronted readers of the Mexican tabloid Alarma.  Published from 1963 to 2014, with a brief period of censorship from 1986-1991, Alarma was a weekly chronicle of crime and murder in Mexico, offering shocking photos to a public desiring sensational crime stories.  Despite its emphasis on the barbarism of crime, the magazine became a conservative moral force in Mexican print culture, often ignoring police corruption in favor of simple crime narratives that reinforced the ruling class and ideology.  With the increased attention paid to tabloid-style journalism in the 1990s, Alarma became the prototype for a new form of on-demand content-driven publication.  Despite its death in 2014 due to economic and circulation issues, the magazine stands today as a testament to a popular culture desensitized to violence and one which seeks in the 21^st century to address ongoing issues of sexuality, political and economic power, and class struggle.

Contents:

A.    Alarma!: A History

B.     Form, Content, Style

C.     Audience and Influence

D.    Social and Political Influence

A.    Alarma!: A History

In the decade that saw the first issue of Alarma, photojournalism underwent a shift in style and focus.  Throughout the 1960s, Mexico saw the start of several nota roja (red journalism) publications.  Alarma, like Alerta and other imitators, were called “red” journalism because of their intense interest in bloodshed and the dead, thus following American “yellow journalism” and narrowing its sensationalism to graphic images of both criminal perpetrators and victims.  Alarma was started by Carlos Samayoa Lizarraga, aka Don Carlitos, and launched by Publicaciones Llegro, which was owned by a major figure in Mexican journalism, Regino Hernandez Llegro.  Prior to the founding of Alarma, Hernandez Llegro founded the right-wing political magazine Impacto, which today continues to have influence in Mexican politics.  

 

Top: Alarma, 31 March, 1964. Bottom: Alarma, 17, April, 1963 (Muerte 39)

The first issue of Alarma was published on April 17, 1963, and featured the then well-known star, Aida, who was imprisoned for alleged fraud.  The cover featured a contrasting set of photos, with one reading “ayer” (“yesterday”) featuring a glamorously-posed Aida, while the contrasting photo read “hoy” (“today”), featuring an implied mugshot of the fallen star (Vargas Cervantes 128).  Within its first year, Alarma’s popularity grew and its print run increased from 300,000 weekly copies to more than half a million (Vargas Cervantes 132).  Its popularity increased quickly in part due to its coverage of the Poquianchis story, where three sisters killed approximately 28 of their maids.  The sisters were interviewed in person by an Alarma journalist, which ran for weeks and offered the public sensational details about their crimes.  The photos printed with the interview included those of the victims, perpetrators, judges, and many staged pictures for cinematic effect.  Alarma continued its attention to popular public crimes throughout the decade.  Most notably, in 1968 it published graphic images of the Tlatelolco massacre from October 2^nd of that year.  The publications of these photos was one of the few instances where the magazine implicated the state in violence and corruption.  It would be the general practice of Alarma over the course of its life to ignore or dismiss police complicity in crime and corruption (see section D below for further discussion).

Throughout the following decades, circulation was steady, with an average of 600,000 issues sold weekly in the 1970s and 1980s (according to figures printed on Alarma’s front pages from these years).  Perhaps their most notable issue in 1980s was published on October 2^nd, 1985, which featured many of the most devastating photos from the September 19^th, 1985 Mexico City earthquake.  With this edition and subsequent others to cover the damage, sales reached nearly 2 million copies per week (Vargas Cervantes 137).  Beginning in 1986, however, Alarma was censored and closed for five years during the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado.  One possible cause for the censorship was likely political, as Alarma’s parent company, the political magazine Impacto, had published anti-government articles against the Madrid Hurtado administration.  Additionally, it is likely that, as host of the 1986 World Cup, Mexico City sought to withdraw its circulation along with 60 other magazines for content deemed scandalous or pornographic (Vargas Cervantes 146).  

Alarma, 12 November, 1991 (Muerte 3)

Alarma returned five years later, and its new iteration was launched in 1991 as El Nuevo Alarma.  The “new” Alarma mostly resembled the old Alarma, though now smaller with added pages and bloodier images.  New, more graphic photos showcased in the magazine reflected a change in emphasis from individual crimes of passion to now the criminal enterprises of the narcos, marked especially by horrific mutilated bodies of the dead.  The emphasis on these shock photos was likely a response to similar photos from competing publications.  As Will Straw notes, until the time of the new Alarma, “treatments of crime in newspapers and magazines had at least occasional recourse to versions of la mondaine or the social fantastic, which set crime in titillating nighttime worlds of moral transgression and experimentation.  The domination of crime coverage in recent years by photographs of dead bodies, typically on daytime streets or fields, has closed off these lines of association” (59).  Competition over the next few decades was fierce, but with changes in media and technology, the magazine entered its last years of circulation.  On February 17, 2014, Alarma printed its last edition, discontinued due to financial and circulation issues.  Tragically, its director, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Vázquez, died of a heart attack a month later on March 16, 2014.  Though no longer published, Alarma lives today wherever graphic journalism is present in print, online, and TV, still telling the stories of the dead.

Alarma, 15 June, 1963 (Muerte 38)

B.     Form, Content, Style

Alarma’s distinctive style has subsequently been imitated by many of its competitors likely due to the success of its simple, distinguishable format and aesthetic.  Its style follows in the tradition of comic books and photo novelas, sometimes even featuring pictures with accompanying word balloons.  Of course, what is most remarkable about Alarma is its photographic content.  Grotesque pictures accompanied by arresting headlines combine to make Alarma a unique journalistic experience.  Not all of its photos featured the deceased; one of Alarma’s trademarks features a picture of the suspected criminal recreating the crime scene, often shown with the weapon (or approximate to the alleged weapon) used in the crime.  Photographs used especially in the first few decades of Alarma were noted for their high quality and skillful use of the close-up.  Later issues, by contrast, appeared less sophisticated and used the graphic nature of the images to mask the loss of quality.  Beyond pictures, Alarma featured a variety of stories on sports, religion, and the paranormal.  In addition to these features, there was often included a usually naked (or near nude) woman as centerfold.  Reader’s letters and Hollywood-style gossip columns were also included, offering some balance to the horrific stories of death and murder.

  

Alarma also featured a distinct verbal style in its headlines and title page.  Most obviously, the title of the publication lacks the initial exclamation mark of typical Spanish grammar.  Though the reasons are not clear, it is possible that its one-exclamation form gives the readers a hurried, freshly-printed feel, as if the stories were so new the editors could not correct the grammatical error in time.  Underneath the title is printed “Unicamente la verdad!” or “only the truth.”  This subtitle establishes the publication as a guardian of truth for the public, a sentiment repeated throughout Alarma in both its form and criticism-free content of the police and ruling elite.  The letters themselves in the title are given the appearance of painted blood, though the color scheme does not use red but rather black and yellow.  Either this was chosen in reference to yellow journalism or, more likely, were chosen because they are the cheapest colors to use.  Alarma’s story headlines are often told in catchy, sometimes-clichéd few word sentences, frequently featuring humorous Spanish puns “adding the reflexive pronoun or article as a suffix to the conjugated verb instead of placing it before the verb,” which is the grammatically correct construction in Spanish (Vargas Cervantes 139).  These formal elements cemented a style that became iconic, and still exists today in print tabloid forms.

C.    Audience and Influence

During its time of publication, Alarma reached a wide audience in Mexico, though it was more heavily read in Mexico City and near the U.S./Mexican border.  Competition quickly emerged, with many imitating its style and content, and thus increasing the market size of tabloid publications in Mexico.  One of its primary competitors, Alerta, was first published on July 12, 1965.  As is evident from the name, Alerta was a close copy of Alarma in both aesthetic and content.  Such was the success of Alarma that many of its own journalists went on to found their own publications, including El Metro and Extra Popular.  With the increased market for tabloid journalism came also a stigma regarding its readers, who were often associated with the poor and uneducated class in part due to Alarma’s lower cost and simple journalistic style.  As discussed below (Section D), Alarma might ironically said to be the mouthpiece of the middle class, expressing conservative values while ignoring the plight of the poor and marginalized.  
 

Alarma, 2 March, 2000 (Muerte 54)

Nota Roja style journalism has, in the last half of the 20^th century and into the 21^st, influenced multiple media forms and proliferated its style to numerous artistic and journalistic venues.  Reality-based exploitation films, as David Wilt suggests, often stylistically paid tribute to publications like Alarma including their tabloid-style art and catchphrases (160).  In 1984, the film “Lo negro del Negro” was produced and codirected by Benjamin Escamilla Espinoza, who was then publisher of Alarma.  The film was based on a book by Jose Gonzalez Gonzalez, a former member of Mexico’s secret police, and detailed the corrupt Mexican City police from 1976-1982.  With the birth of the new Alarma in the 1990s, its style become more ubiquitous in the television tabloid style of news.   Currently, a new reader emerges for nota roja: “an upper middle class Mexican and global consumer fascinated by what Alarma has come to represent in relation to Mexican society” (Vargas Cervantes 138).  Yet, to what extent these publications reaffirm versus question political ideology remains unanswered.

Alarma, 26 January, 1993 (Muerte 80)

D.    Social and Political Influence

Alarma’s publication of the victims and perpetrators of crime exists against a backdrop of a host of social and political issues prominent in Mexican culture.  Perhaps one of the simplest and most important questions that can be asked is: what sustained its publication for nearly half a century? Cuauhtemoc Medina raises a similar question when he writes, “Why the Alarma!? To show the fate of moral delinquents; to prove that death, rape, child abuse, robbery, suicide drug addiction are nurtured within deviant family life.  To help by example, that is the objective of Alarma!” (42). He adds that crime in the magazine is always “the product of an individual’s deviation, an attack of depraved instincts…against the bastion of Catholic morality” (51).  Perhaps the reason that Alarma was such a potent cultural force stems from its deeply situated position regarding traditional representations of the self and the family.  The publication existed to constantly call the culture back to an ideal, where deviance could be pointed out and quickly rejected as anathema to the goals of the community. The magazine often implied that it was playing some kind of official role with the police, helping them on a particular case and thus sharing in the moral good of all.  Yet, rarely if ever did Alarma question the police, and little attention was ever paid to police corruption.  This deference for authority is also situated within the context of Roman Catholicism.  As Stafford suggests (5), the fascination with dead bodies evokes complex Mexican cultural markers, including the Day of the Dead and the Catholic emphasis on martyrs and saints.  Catholic iconography especially may have contributed to an ongoing interest in the magazine’s subjects.

Alarma also implicitly, in its defense of traditional family life, sought to reinforce gender norms and stereotypes through its criticism of sexual deviance.  Much attention was paid to the fractured family structure, especially the ways in which families suffered under the weight and pressure of sexual transgressions.  Susana Vargas Cervantes’ dissertation examines how the photos in Alarma! “inform and participate in the larger national imaginary in relation to peripheral sexualities in Mexico” and she argues that “these photographs work as a site of resistance to and a subversion of many different forms of violence in Mexico”(6).  The images from Alarma are often obsessed with female sexuality and subjectivity. They are both alluring and threatening, where powerful female criminals are fascinating to the reader but equally represent the apex of deviancy.  
 

Alarma, 21 July, 1995 (Muerte 65)

With the onset of the new Alarma in the 1990s and 2000s, new issues arise regarding popular journalism and political and economic changes in Mexico.  Beginning in the 1990s, Mexico saw a surge in la nota roja publications.  This rise has been tied to two historical phenomena: democratization and commercialization (Hallin 267).  This period saw the slow loss of power for Mexico’s ruling party, while it simultaneously transitioned from state-directed capitalism to more neoliberal forms.  The increased journalistic and economic freedom has led to a greater emphasis on popular interests directing news media.  Some criticism, as Daniel Hallin notes (271), has been aimed at upper class citizens who profit from poor communities whose real problems are little known because the tabloids pay little attention to them.  Indeed, the 1990s saw a dramatic increase in Mexican crime stories reported in the tabloids, while reporting on political stories dropped dramatically (see Hallin 273 for figures).  This market-driven journalism may ultimately benefit more democratic goals, but it remains to be seen whether that will simply reinforce the values of the middle class.  Nota Roja, after all, is largely played towards the fears of middle-class families about the deviancy of lower-class criminals.  That it has yet to find greater success in telling the stories of the marginalized is troubling, but with greater flourishing of the press there always remains at least the possibility of crime from the perspective of the victimized, and not simply the capitalization upon fear. 

Alarma, 22 September, 1992 (Muerte 3)

All Alarma pictures and covers were found in: 
Muerte! Death in Mexican Popular Culture. Ed. Harvey Bennett Stafford. Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000.  Print.

Bibliography

Hallin, Daniel C. “La Nota Roja: Popular Journalism and the Transition to Democracy in Mexico.” Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards. Eds. Colin Sparks and John Tulloch. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000. 267-284. Print.

Medina, Cuauhtemoc. “Tabloid Crime.” Muerte! Death in Mexican Popular Culture. Ed. Harvey Bennett Stafford. Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000.  39-55. Print.

Stafford, Harvey Bennett.  “Mayhem Vendors.” Muerte! Death in Mexican Popular Culture. Ed. Harvey Bennett Stafford. Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000.  1-32. Print.

Straw, Will. "Nota Roja and Journaux Jaunes: Popular Crime Periodicals in Quebec and Mexico." Eds. Graciela Martínez-Zalce, Will Straw, and Susana Vargas Cervantes. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011. 53-67. ProQuest. Web. 3 Oct. 2015.

Vargas Cervantes, Susana. “Alarma!: Mujercitos Performing Gender in a Pigmentocratic Sociocultural System.” Diss. McGill University, 2013. Print.

Wilt, David. “Based on a True Story: Reality-Based Exploitation Cinema in Mexico.” Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America. Eds. Victoria Ruetalo and Dolores Tierney. New York: Routledge, 2009.  158-170. Print.