De Panzazo Analysis

It is thus not surprising that Rulfo’s most recent documentary De panzazo (Barely Passing the Grade, 2012) was codirected by Televisa newscaster Carlos Loret de Mola (1976-), one of López Obrador’s most notorious public enemies in the media, or that the film’s attack on the deficiencies of Mexico’s educational system in general, and on the teachers’ unions in particular, aligns with the educational reform that then-candidate Enrique Peña Nieto was beginning to float and that became law a year later. Unlike Luis Mandoki or Carlos Mendoza, Rulfo cannot be pigeonholed within any particular political ideology or party line, and his documentaries achieve a considerable degree of media exposure and audience access precisely because their ideological
González, son of the former president of Mexico’s Chamber of Commerce and current chairman of the Board of Directors of Kimberly-Clark, Mexico; he was also president of the Televisa Foundation and has been involved in major initiatives of both that media conglomerate and the PRI. Furthermore, the director of Mexicanos Primero is David Calderón Martín del Campo, a leading educational reformer who strongly advocates for the ENLACE test, a teacher evaluation tool staunchly opposed by the unions. The documentary strongly pushes the evaluation and negatively presents the unions’ opposition to it. Loret de Mola is known for his contentious interview with former union leader and politician Elba Esther Gordillo, whose arrest in 2013 for embezzlement and other crimes allowed for the Peña Nieto government’s education reform to pass in that same year. De panzazo does have an editorial voice and is not as ambiguous in its politics as En el hoyo. Nevertheless, it capitalizes on the generalized opposition that many people in Mexico, both of the left and the right, felt for the notoriously corrupt. The film also enjoyed considerable media exposure due to Loret de Mola’s standing as the host of Televisa’s morning news show and of a popular radio show on Radio Fórmula. This exposure led to box-office receipts of 3.6 million