Vittorio Comisso

Ron Jensen: "They had never seen anything come out so strong.”

Now Ron Jensen knows what it’s like to run a newspaper south of the border. He learned his lesson last summer, when a Rosarito Beach businessman named Hugo Torres hired him to start the Baja Times. For a few short weeks, Ron sat in a sun-bathed office just a few steps from the sparkling surf and presided over a team of bilingual reporters. He tasted the frustration of driving for hours through Tijuana’s back streets trying to find a competent printer, and he savored the excitement of seeing his name top the staff box. He says he learned that newspapers in Mexico are chiefly weapons in a never-ending political battle. And he learned that corruption stains their pages more darkly than the thickest printer’s ink.

"It was costing Torres about $2000 a week to get the paper out.”

Vittorio Comisso

A quixotic streak runs through Jensen, and the seamy revelations disturbed him. So after three months, he walked away front the Baja Times. Yet bitterness doesn’t dominate his recollections now and he even says he’d like to start another paper some day which would fulfill the dream he once had for the Times. Then Jensen shakes his broad shoulders and a wry look crosses his face.

Torres made the newspaper staff use a phone located in the Rosarito Beach Hotel. Jensen says he insisted that Torres install phones in the newspaper office.

If anyone could succeed with such a paper, Jensen would seem a likely candidate. He has a chameleon's talent for blending into various landscapes. He has a snapshot of himself from the days when he worked as a Southern California lifeguard, and in it he looks clean-cut and brisk, archetypical Muscle Beach. A later photo from his years in Hawaii, where he worked as a paramedic and free-lance writer, shows his face grinning like a native’s above a flowered shirt. The same magic worked when he settled into Mexico, and everyone began to mistake him for a Mexican. There, the Baja sun helped tan his skin to the copper glow of Tijuana leather, and even his black hair and beard somehow assumed a Latin gleam. At almost thirty-five, his solid body remains trim, disciplined into hardness by the ocean.

It was the sea that first lured Jensen to Baja. Born in Los Angeles, he had hopped through a checkerboard career as a lifeguard, paramedic, student, and journalist—and escaped to Mexico only periodically. Then in the summer of 1975, the director of the Rosarito Red Cross implored him to start up a lifeguard service there. Jensen complied, and then he returned to Hawaii in the fall, but the next year the frantic fire chief of Tijuana called him. Enticed by the promise of a good salary, Jensen flew back to Baja and agreed to take on the lifeguard responsibility full time.

He says the salary and other benefits never materialized ("They gave me medals instead”), but he stayed. He lived with his parents in San Antonio Del Mar (the American colony about fifteen miles south of Tijuana) and turned again to free-lance journalism, mailing out newspaper articles datelined “Rosarito” and “Tijuana.’’One day he visited the offices of ABC newspaper in Tijuana in search of office space. The reporters there greeted him like a brother and shared with him a spare desk and a phone. Soon they also began giving him his first glimpse of Mexican-style journalism.

“They were telling me that everything was bought, that all the papers were bought off by the government.” Jensen recalls. He learned that since the Mexican politicians control the entire supply of newsprint, no newspaper can step too far out of line without losing its vital quota. Other tales of corruption reached his ears. The public relations director of a bank in Tijuana confided that to obtain front-page coverage in the government-owned El Mexicano, all he had to do was to pick up the phone and agree with the editor on a price. Jensen heard that at the afternoon daily, Baja California. the reporter assigned to cover Rosarito Beach charged local officials and groups such as the Rotary Club from twenty to forty dollars to mention their names and activities in his column. The reporters at ABC told him their personal stories, too; most had quit Noticias in Tijuana en masse to start the rebel ABC.

While the ABC staff impressed Jensen as being honest and hard-working, even some of their behavior left him dubious. “They do not get their facts straight before they publish, and they don’t make an attempt to get another point of view,” he complains. “They publish for effect. They’re a very sensational paper. ’* One example which he remembers is ABC's stories about the San Diego Union’s former Mexico reporter, Vi Murphy. "They accused her of being on the payroll of Milton Castellanos [the former Baja governor]. They didn’t say that in print, but if you read between the lines, Vi Murphy came off looking very unfavorable—as if there were some conspiratorial link between her and the governor. ” Jensen says he even looked up Murphy ’s number at the Redding newspaper to which she had moved. “I gave them the number. I said, ‘If you’re going to say things like this about her, wouldn’t it be best to at least call her and ask her, to get her point of view?’ But they never did.”

If his distrust of Mexican journalism deepened, however, so did his disdain for American coverage of Mexico. "The more I observed the way the Mexican press operated and the way the U.S. press operated, the more I became shocked at the lack of communication. They were both looking at the same world and the same events, but they were both perceiving those events so differently.” He recalls lurid stories about Mexican banditry well publicized on the northern side of the border. ‘‘The mentality of the gringo was that if he came down here, somebody with a machete was going to leap out of the bush. In reality the crime rate was very, very low compared with things over there. But here were two or three people murdered in Sinaloa, in Mazatlan, and the Automobile Club, for Chrissakes, broadcasts a nationwide warning about Mexico. There were banner headlines in the Union .... And boy, the Mexicans were mad, and rightly so. The influential Mexicans, the politicians, read that San Diego Union daily. And they were very hurt.” And so the idea began to emerge. Why couldn’t he run a new paper which might cross that cultural gap? Today when Jensen tries to evoke those early dreams, the words come fast and steadily, and they shine with a teenager’s idealism. “I was thinking of a paper that would defend the truth, that would go into these controversial situations and sort them out.”

That goal seemed almost within Jensen’s grasp when a wealthy American who was living in San Antonio Del Mar approached the lifeguard with the idea of starting a paper. Ron eagerly discussed it, but nothing ever came from this contact. Then one sunny day last spring at the Quinta Del Mar shopping center in the center of Rosarito, opportunity seemed to fall into the aspiring editor’s lap.

Jensen had gotten together with Rosarito businessmen Carlos Teran, Hugo Torres, and a few other influentials to interview them about plans for a proposed new harbor for Rosarito. As they were adjourning, Torres (who owns a prosperous investment firm, a travel agency, and who manages the popular Hotel Rosarito), took Jensen to one side. ‘‘He said, ‘By the way. I’m starting a newspaper, and I’d like you to contribute if you’d be interested.’ ” Jensen’s dark eyes lit up.

Today Jensen readily admits that he and Torres began with very different conceptions. Jensen says Torres wanted a small, local paper, written in English and aimed at the tourist trade. Jensen had bigger ideas. He envisioned a bilingual journal, aimed at both the American community in Baja, and at the Mexican individual who was heading to San Diego for recreation. “So I began meeting with him and expanding his perspective on this thing.” Jensen says Torres already had hired a staff, including an inexperienced sixteen-year-old girl as a reporter, and a bartender (with no journalism background) as editor. The American took over as editor of the English section, and he says before long his vision overrode the general disorganization. “I just kept centering in on the idea of the kind of paper I really wanted, and those guys just faded away.”

To replace them, Jensen brought in a recent San Diego State University graduate named Dennis Wagner (as managing editor), plus he asked the director of ABC about available Baja journalists. On his recommendations, Jensen hired a university professor from the University of Baja at Tijuana named Patricio Bayardo, and another Mexican university-trained journalist named Jesus Cueva Pelayo. By this point, Jensen figured he had changed Torres’s mind; he says he was sure that he and Torres understood each other. “I was confident that he was fully prepared to support the Baja Times as an independent paper. ”

At first, the operation seemed utopian. Torres housed his fledgling biweekly paper in the empty clubhouse of the Rosarito Shores, a pleasant building which was even equipped with a swimming pool. Jensen says the reporters earned “more than one hundred dollars a week,” compared to the normal Mexican journalist’s pay of about sixty dollars, and Torres paid the editor about $250 a week. Jensen says story ideas rolled in like the big waves, and his staff rode them enthusiastically. The editor could see his dream shaping up before his eyes.

A few minor irritations surfaced. Jensen says at first Torres made the newspaper staff use a phone located in the Rosarito Beach Hotel, and one time the desk clerk there refused to permit Jensen to place a call. The editor got mad and called the publisher at home, “and he was incensed. He was furious with me for calling him at home. We almost called the whole thing off over a silly little phone call.” Finally, Jensen says he insisted that Torres install phones in the newspaper office, and the hotel manager eventually assented. “Except it was on an extension with someone else who would pick it up in Spanish and answer and then slam it down when they found out the call was for us!”

Jensen says the Mexican staff writers also initially bridled when the editors reviewed and changed their writing. “Mexican journalists send their stuff in and they print it as is or they don’t print it. They don’t edit; they don’t revise; they don’t change. ” Tempers flared, but the Mexicans gradually began to tolerate the different approach. Problems with getting the first edition printed added a dozen more gray hairs to Jensen’s head, but the issue finally emerged, dated “Junio 9-16.”

Twenty pages thick, the tabloid contained an interesting mix of stories: an interview with a Baja-based whaling expert who espoused the killing of gray whales for human food, a story about the West Coast paper shortage, an account of the imminent Baja 500 off-road race. An editorial detailed the obstacles which the staff had encountered in producing the paper (“Translations ran amuck; American journalists groped their way through an alien world of potholes . . . Missing photos and missing people plagued us; printers ran out of paper”), but also bragged, “This is the start of a new era of journalism for Baja California.” Jensen says Torres printed 5000 copies and distributed them free from Tecate down to Ensenada, then showered the staff with praise at the paper’s reception. "We had a party in the Hotel Rosarito. Everyone made speeches; the politicians were there. We all got rip-roaring drunk, passed around our business cards, all that bullshit.”

Trouble didn’t really begin to simmer until the second edition rolled off the presses. On the cover ran a story about the damnificados, flood victims who had been camping outside Tijuana City Hall equipped with placards and blankets, and Jensen says he got an immediate negative reaction to the criticism of the authorities contained in the article. Another story written by Jensen about the problems which he’d had getting the first edition of the Baja Times printed touched a sore spot. “The printers in Tijuana got furious,” he recalls.'( After futilely searching Tijuana for a printer, Jensen took his business to Chula Vista.)

“What I started finding out at this point was that the Mexicans are an extremely thin-skinned race. They do not take criticism well. Criticism is perceived as an attack; it is not perceived as constructive. And that comes from their perception of how journalism in Mexico is used. It's an attack. It’s used as a weapon. It’s used as an instrument of personal power, to get revenge. They have press wars. ABC will run one story criticizing somebody, and another paper will run an opposite story the next day. It’s like being in the wild west, only instead of shooting with six-shooters, they shoot at each other with front-page headlines.”

Jensen says Torres didn’t then order a halt to the controversial stories, but he began talking about wanting a front page which would more likely attract tourism. And Jensen says he and managing editor Wagner went along with the idea, only it was too late to change the upcoming third edition. So it appeared as scheduled, and the reaction to it stunned the editor.

Dominating the top of its front page ran a story which drew outrage from an unexpected quarter: Hugo Torres’s wife. The story discussed the effect of women’s liberation on Mexican women, and indicated that change was only cutting timidly into the male-dominated social fabric. Jensen says Torres’s wife complained that the story didn’t adequately discuss the growing liberation of upper-class Mexican women. (“But we never distinguished between upper and lower classes,” Jensen recalls. “I didn’t believe in that.”) Her protests paled next to the consternation which greeted the story that ran beneath the article on women. “Children in Jail Need Brighter Future,” declared the headline over its English-language version.

One of two articles about children confined to jail because of their parents’ misdeeds, the front-page piece ironically was written by Jaime Miranda Y Soto, the managing editor of the government-owned El Mexicano, who had provided the story for the Baja Times on a free-lance basis. Straightforward and unemotional, it told of a new program which aimed at providing homes for the fifty-three children ranging in age from three months to eleven years, who were then serving time with their parents at the Baja California state penitentiary in La Mesa. Far more inflammatory was an editorial-page commentary written by staff writer Cueva Pelayo. “The shrill cries of children and the weeping of their mothers echoed against the prison walls and mixed with the rattle of gunfire and shouting men to produce an infernal din,” an opening passage thundered. "Perhaps if the children could see and feel a more positive lifestyle, the seed of freedom and dignity might grow in their minds,” it recommended.

The paper’s biggest advertiser canceled three months of half-page ads. Jensen says Jorge Dabo, the owner of several Baja dailies, commented that he liked the paper but it was the kind which could disappear overnight. Jensen heard from other Mexican journalists who were shocked by the Times's outspokenness. “They had never seen anything like this. They said this is as strong as Siempre, the strongest magazine in Mexico. They had never seen anything come out so strong.”

Torres began to get nervous. Jensen says, “He puts on the appearance of being very well-to-do, but we found out he was starting to have financial problems ’cause it was costing him about $2000 a week to get the paper out.” The tensions came to a head at a series of Tijuana luncheons, which included Jensen, Torres, the paper’s lawyers, and a few others. The Mexicans started talking about getting a government subsidy and Jensen instantly balked at the idea.

By this point, he had learned more than enough about government control of the press. “Reporters are not overtly censored,” he says. “But someone—either from the government or some vested interest that wants a voice—will come along and say, ‘We notice that you have a hole in your pants and your shoes are worn, and wouldn’t it be nice if you had a nice office and you could eat well?’ So they buy their voice. And in return for your cooperation, you get a stipend. This is the way the government has done it. They have a whole string of reporters down at city hall on government stipends. And they think that everybody’s like that. They’re shocked when I’m coming up with ‘No, we’re not going to do it this way.’ ”

Along with the idea of getting government support, another suggestion surfaced—that the paper sell to businesses ads disguised as stories. "The idea was that we could send a reporter down to some place that wanted to advertise and we could do a big full-page spread on it. Then they would buy a little tiny ad and stick it in the paper somewhere and it wouldn’t be obvious.”

The American flatly refused, “and I knew the end was near.” His recollection still rings with indignation. “I said, 'If you’re going to insist on doing these things, I want to know now, because I’m not going to go any further with this paper. If you let this thing in here it’s a poison and it’s going to infect the whole thing. It’s going to kill it.’ ’’ Silence settled down upon the table; in a moment, the conversation shifted.

But Jensen’s premonition turned out to be right. Morbid jokes filled the little clubhouse as the fourth edition went to press, and Jensen says he intentionally ran on the cover the most neutral photo he could find—a cactus—next to a story about the automobile trip between Ensenada and San Felipe. The fourth edition generated little controversy, but a subtle change had transpired and before the fifth edition appeared, Torres called Jensen into his office.

For the first time, the publisher demanded to know what would appear in his paper. Paging through the dummy sheets, he spotted a story about pollution in Ensenada Bay. “He said, ‘I don’t want any more of those kind of stories in my paper.’ ” The ultimatum was the coup de grace for Jensen, who quit on the spot. He says he went out to lunch and when he returned, he found the newspaper office doors chained shut. All but one other member of this staff quit shortly thereafter.

Their departure didn’t put an end to the BajaTimes. After a month-long gap, Torres hired a new staff, and since then the paper has appeared more or less regularly. The format has changed; most of the stories run just in English, rather than in both languages, and the content now mostly centers on tourist concerns. One of the major news distributors in Rosarito says that circulation seems to have dropped precipitously, but Torres still sounds proud of the paper and he says he expects it will succeed financially.

Surprisingly, Torres’s recollection of Jensen’s tenure as editor only differs from Jensen’s in one major respect: Torres says Jensen’s biggest fault was that “he had no regard for economics." The publisher says Jensen spent too much money and paid too much out in salaries, to the paper’s overall financial detriment. “I wanted it to be profitable and I wanted to promote business in this area. But all he had in mind was to be a newspaper in terms of excellence.’’

Torres confirms that he censored the story on pollution in Ensenada Bay. “I thought the story was too premature,’’ he explains. “He [Jensen] had simply copied a story from El Mexicano, and the way they presented it, it was only an early report.” Torres confirms that he worried when the controversial stories upset advertisers. "Some of the pictures were not the prettiest of all, and I told him [Jensen ] there was no need to run them. They’re true, but you don’t have to print them on the front page of a newspaper. ’' Does Torres now agree with Jensen that Mexican and American journalism differ radically? The publisher says merely that he has no idea.

Jensen still broods over those differences. But sitting in a little cafe on the main street in Rosarito, wolfing down a plate of huevos rancheros, he doesn’t blame Torres too harshly. In addition to the hassles from advertisers, Jensen says he knows that Torres feared having the government cancel the licenses for his businesses. The American notes that danger when he thinks about returning some day to start another newspaper; he figures the only way to avoid it might be to set up headquarters on the U.S. side of the border. “You have to have a large enough advertising area so that when you’re boycotted in one area, you’re not dead. Everybody knows everybody. One word from somebody who owes someone a favor, and whether the guy likes it or not he cooperates.”

A more maddening question gnaws at Jensen: he wonders whether the Mexican people even want an unbiased press. One moment he looks hopeless, and then he laughs wickedly. “The Mexicans that I know claim that Americans are brainwashed by the media. They say the television and the newspapers influence too much of what’s going on, and that that can’t happen here in Mexico because the media has such a bad reputation that nobody pays any attention anyway!”

Then the pristine norteamericano sensibilities and the romanticism struggle to the surface again. “I’m an idealist,” Jensen declares flatly, “and I’m seeing it through my eyes. And I can’t see how they wouldn’t want unbiased newspapers. I think it would be so important to them. Imagine if you suddenly had a paper that you could turn to where you knew they were seeing straight, that if you read it there was a good chance of it being true. I would think that would be a tremendously valuable thing.”