The new Official Advertising report 2024prepared by ARTICLE 19 and Política Colectiva, reveals a structural change in the way the budget allocated to social communication is spent. Meanwhile, the concentration of spending on a few media outlets, without clear allocation criteria, continues to be a constant.
Between 2018 and 2024, total spending — federal and state — fell 45 percent, but changed hands. In fact, state governments concentrate more than 70 percent of all public resources allocated to official advertising during the last six-year term. What was once a media control system led by the Federal Government has now been decentralized to the states, where the lack of clear rules and transparency allows old indirect censorship practices to fester.
In 2018, the Federal Government spent more than the 32 entities combined; Six years later, four out of every five pesos in social communication come from the states. The phenomenon has profound implications, since while the federation operates under certain surveillance and with publicly available data, opacity reigns in the states.
The report documents that 24 state governments spent more than they had authorized in their expenditure budgets. Some, such as Puebla, Veracruz or the State of Mexico, exceeded the originally approved figures by more than a thousand percent. In 2024, Guanajuato, Quintana Roo, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo León topped the national ranking, accumulating more than three thousand 300 million pesos, that is, more than a third of the country’s total spending.
At the federal level, the austerity discourse has served to reduce, but not transform, spending on official advertising. During the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the budget in this area fell 70 percent compared to that of Enrique Peña Nieto.
However, the cut was not accompanied by a policy that guaranteed equity or plurality. On the contrary, the concentration persists. Between 2009 and 2024, the 10 media outlets that received the most concentrated 46 percent of the spending, while the remaining 1,003 received 54 percent. Among the four most benefited media outlets (Televisa, La Jornada, TV Azteca and Medios Masivos Mexicanos) they received more than 33 percent of total spending between 2019 and 2024. That is, less money, but in the same hands.
On the other hand, it is striking that in 2024, an election year, federal spending rose 40 percent compared to the previous year. This indicates that official advertising continues to be an instrument of control of the political narrative, a flexible tool that expands or retracts depending on the situation.
The report clearly shows that transparency is uneven. While Coahuila, Querétaro or Chihuahua publish the majority of their contracts, others such as Quintana Roo and San Luis Potosí barely made 2 percent or less of the reported expenditure transparent. In Mexico City, only 44 percent of the amounts appear in accessible contracts. Transparency in official advertising is not a minor issue, it is the minimum condition to prevent public money from becoming censorship at the expense of the treasury.
This pattern of discretionary use of official advertising persists despite the fact that The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation declared in 2021 – when resolving an Article 19 protection – that the General Law of Social Communication is unconstitutional because it does not establish clear criteria or limits on spending. He ordered Congress to reform it before September 2024, but that urgent reform does not occur.
Congress continues to ignore and maintains in force a law that allows discretion, encourages self-censorship and undermines information plurality. Today, furthermore, with the majority of local governments in the hands of the same party, the reproduction of a system of media control from the state is evident.
Official advertising is not just another expense, but a form of soft power. Whoever controls the media budget controls the flow of public information. Unfortunately in Mexico, social media money is used under the premise of “I don’t pay to be hit.” That is why a new law is urgently needed that puts an end to discretion, establishes objective allocation criteria, guarantees total transparency of contracts and sanctions the use of these resources to reward or punish critical voices.
Mexican democracy is not measured only in votes, but in the capacity of the press to speak without fear and without dependence on formal and factual powers. As long as governments continue to buy silence with public money, freedom of expression will continue to be, as now, an expensive privilege.
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