Manuel Buendía

Manuel Buendía Tellezgirón was born in Zitácuaro, Michoacán, Mexico on 24 March 1926.[2] He was the third child of José Buendía Gálvez (father) and Josefina Tellezgirón Tinoco (mother), both from the State of Mexico.[3] Buendía attended a religious elementary school located in front of Teatro Juárez de Zitácuaro, a former theatre in his hometown. At the age of 12, his parents moved to Morelia, Michoacán and enrolled him at Seminario Menor, where he studied for three years. As a teenager, Buendía contributed to La Nación, a magazine of the National Action Party (PAN).[4]

Though he sympathized with the PAN during his early life, Buendía later lost interest in the party. His mother died of natural causes on 21 June 1941, and Buendía returned to Zitácuaro. After a few years, he was awarded a scholarship at Instituto Patria, a Jesuit high school in Mexico City. Upon graduation he attended the Escuela Libre de Derecho, a private Law school in Mexico City, but dropped out to take care of his family following the death of his father in 1945.[5]

From 1949 to 1953, Buendía worked for La Nación and met the magazine's secretary Dolores Abalos Lebrija, whom he married on 19 January 1955. Though he first wrote for La Nación, his professional journalistic career began at the newspaper La Prensa in 1953. He worked as an editor, crime reporter, and political columnist for the newspaper until he became the editor-in-chief in January 1960.[6] Around that time Buendía started his daily column Red Privada ("Private Network"), where he wrote about the alleged collusion of organized crime in Mexico's political system.[7] In 1963, he left to work at the newspaper El Día and wrote at the political column Para Control de Usted ("For You to Control") under the penname "J.M. Tellezgirón". From 1964 to 1965, Buendía directed the weekly Crucero and wrote the column Concierto Político ("Political Concert") under the penname "D. I. Ogenes".[6]

On 1 January 1971, he was appointed as the head of the Press and Public Relations of Mexico City alongside Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. However, Buendía turned down the position in June following the massacre of student demonstrators. A year later, Buendía worked as an advisor to Guillermo Martínez Domínguez, the former head of Nacional Financiera, a bank of Mexico's Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP). In Nacional Financiera, Buendía befriended Gerardo Bueno Zirón, who shortly after being appointed as director of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) offered him a position as director of the institution's Press and Public Relations department in 1973. That year, Henrique González Casanova, the former head of the Political Science department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), invited Buendía to work as a part-time professor, a job that the journalist held until his death in 1984.[3]

In December 1976 Buendía left his post in CONACYT to become a full-time columnist. He then worked at El Sol de México, a newspaper owned by Organizacion Editorial Mexicana. After facing some differences with the owners of the print media company, Buendía left on 17 August 1978 to work at El Universal, a newspaper based in Mexico City. Only lasting until December of that year, he left to work at Excélsior, a daily newspaper with one of the largest circulations in Mexico City. At this newspaper, Buendía wrote for the column Red Privada, which was distributed and read in over 200 newspaper across Mexico.[3][8] In his column he wrote about the covert operations of the CIA in Mexico during the Cold War, ultra-rightwing groups, crooked businessmen, and corrupt government officials involved in drug trafficking.[9]

His investigations angered many in Mexico's political elite and made him a frequent target of death threats. Buendía took the death threats he received very seriously and thereby carried a pistol, either on his belt or in a leather pocket. Prior to his death, Buendía wrote extensively on the alleged corruption within Mexico's Petroleum Workers Union; the allegations of wrongdoings of Jorge Díaz Serrano, former leader of Pemex, the national oil company; and Arturo Durazo Moreno, the former head of Mexico City's police force. Buendía also criticized the role of the U.S. government and the CIA in Mexico, and often published names of American officials involved in secret operations. Although he was quick to publish controversial reports, Buendía's direct reporting was respected and generally considered reliable given his access to top Mexican officials.[10] He was the most-read journalist in Mexico's print media,[11] and is often cited by newspapers and journalists as the most influential political columnist in Mexico of the second half of the 20th century.[12][13][14]

On Wednesday, 30 May 1984, Buendía left his offices in Colonia Juárez at around 6:30 p.m. and headed towards his car in a parking lot near Insurgentes Avenue at the Zona Rosa neighborhood in Mexico City.[15] As he got closer to his car, a tall man wearing jeans, a black jacket, and a baseball cap approached him from behind and violently grabbed his coat before shooting him four times with a .38 Super. Buendía was carrying a handgun on his waist but he was not able to defend himself at the moment of his death. After killing him, the assailant fled on a motorcycle with another man.[9][16]

There were several bystanders who witnessed the murder and managed to see the faces of the assassins, including Juan Manuel Bautista, a colleague of Buendía; Rogelio Barrera Galindo, a man who had parked his vehicle close to the journalist's; and Felipe Flores Fernández, a bus driver.[17] Among the first to arrive at the murder scene was José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, then-head of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, and one of Buendía's main sources for his political publications.[16] Photos of Buendía's corpse circulated across Mexico and the rest of the world.[18]

Suspicions first fell on Los Tecos ("The Owls"), an ultra-rightwing group of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara who were largely criticized by Buendía for terrorizing their campus.[19][20] However, suspicions turned to drug traffickers and high-level government officials, specifically those of the DFS. According to local media reports, once Buendía was killed, DFS agents went into the columnist's office and stole several files.[19][21]

• La Santa Muerta ("Saint Death", 1967)[34]
• La CIA en México ("The CIA in Mexico", 1984)[35]
• La Ultraderecha en México ("The Far-Right in Mexico", 1984)[36]
• Ejercicio Periodístico ("Journalistic Exercise", 1985)[37]
• Los Petroleros ("The Oil Dealers", 1985)[38]
• El Humor ("The Humor", 1986)[39]
• Los Empresarios ("The Businessmen", 1986)[40]
• Pensamiento y acción de la derecha poblana ("Thinking and action of the right in Puebla", 1987)[41]
• El Oficio de Informar ("The Job of Informing", 1988)[42]

• Mexican Drug War
• List of journalists killed in Mexico

• (in Spanish) Fundación Manuel Buendía
• (in Spanish) (Video) Reportaje sobre el periodista Manuel Buendía, by NoticiasTVCn