Grupo Radio Centro SAB de C.V.

Mexican conglomerate with more than 45 years in the broadcasting sector in different cities of the Republic, such as: Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, among others, besides Los Angeles in the United States. Its principal activity is production and distribution of programmes with informational and entertaining character.

In 1998, Grupo Radio Centro (GRC) made an alliance with the newscasts Monitor - news produced by the journalist and businessman José Gutiérrez Vivó. This aliance was broken because of a trade dispute between the owner of GRC - Francisco Aguirre and Gutiérrez Vivó. The latter in addition accused the federal government for intervening in the case in order to help out the Aguirre family and in turn they would change the editorial policy critical towards the Mexican president Felipe Calderón.

This was not the only case of censorship in Grupo Radio Centro: in 2013, the Group canceled the programme Religiones del Mundo, run by the sociologist Bernardo Barranco, for commercial purposes. However, Barranco said that him going off-air is due to the pressure from the powerful religious group Los Legionarios de Cristo, whose leaders were upset because of the high news coverage for the cases with child sexual abuse within the circles of the catholic congregation.

In 2014, the commentator Toño Esquinca went suddenly off-air while he was criticizing the Mexican chancellor Luis Videgaray for not being harsh enough when the current President of the United States was insulting Mexican immigrants.

There has been censorship in GRC even in the music stations: in 2002, musical producers accused that various musicians were taken off the reproduction lists because of their songs' lyrics.

In March 2015, in an interview with the daily El País, the telecommunications expert Gabriel Sosa Platas described GRC as “conservative, catholic media, which promotes family values but in certain cases acts in favour of the economic and political interests of some people instead of the society”. Their closeness with the political party Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) is widely known. Recently, the Supreme Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal of Justice of the Mexican Federation (TEPJF) confirmed the sentence that sanctions this party and Grupo Radio Centro for the illicit acquisition of time slots on the radio, used for diffusion of electoral propaganda.

In 1968 the then President and founder of Organización Impulsora de Radio (today network operated by Grupo Radio Centro), Francisco Aguirre Jiménez, won the concession for the band XHDF-TV Canal 13, which he ceded to the Mexican state four years later, during the government of Luis Echeverría. The Group tried to get back on the small screens in 2015 by winning the concession to operate an open-TV channel. However, the company couldn't pay the price of 3.058 millions of Mexican pesos to the Federal Institute for Telecommunications and had to retreat the offer. As penalty, the Institute kept 415 millions that the Group paid as a guarantee to participate in the public tender.

In 2015 Grupo Radio Centro merged with two of its subsidiaires, Controladora Radio México, S.A.P.I. de C.V. and GRM Radiodifusión, S.A. de C.V. This move helped it improve economically, but also to turn into a concessionary, operator of more than 200 radio stations with presence in cities with the highest number of Spanish-speaking people: Mexico City, Los Angeles, Monterrey and Guadalajara.