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Global Media Registry

Individual Owners

10 of the 26 most important Mexican media owners analyzed by MOM are families. In two cases, a single family even owns two different media groups each: the Azcárraga family (Emilio Azcárraga Jean and Rogerio Azcárraga Madero) and the Vázquez family (Vázquez Raña and Vázquez Ramos).

9 of these 10 families operate in the media market already for two or three generations.

In Mexico, almost all conglomerates and media companies are owned and managed by men, inherited from their fathers or grandfathers who founded them. In many cases these leaders even have the same name if they come from one family. For example, there are three Emilio Azcárraga (Grupo Televisa), three Francisco Aguirre (Grupo Radio Centro), three Joaquín Vargas (MVS Comunicaciones), two Francisco González (Grupo Multimedios) and two Francisco Ibarra (Grupo Acir).

Among the identified individual owners there is only one woman: the journalist Carmen Aristegui. Other three women stand out because of their role in their family businesses: Paquita Vázquez Ramos, president of Organización Editorial Mexicana and the widow of its founder; Ninfa Salinas Pliego is one of the vice presidents of the Executive Committee of Grupo Salinas and daughter of the founder; and María Adriana Aguirre Gómez, vice president of the Managing Board of Grupo Radio Centro and the founder’s daughter.

From the 26 identified owners by MOM Mexico, in 15 of the cases the owner is the male head of the family. In six cases, the entrance in the media market has been preceded by other very lucrative businesses in different sectors, such as: fixed line telephony services, retail sales on financial services, restaurant chains, hospitals and the mining sector.

Other 7 owners are businessmen: one was former sales manager in a newspaper company; three have a background in journalism; one is active in the oil industry (Ramiro Garza Cantú); one in the telecommunications sector (Manuel Arroyo) and one is a former government contractor (Jorge Kahwagi Gastine). The final 3 owners are the Mexican government itself, one workers’ cooperative and one managing board of individuals.

22 out of the 26 owners have family, personal or business relations with politicians. Among them are the father of a Republican Senator, the godfather of the daughter of a Governor, or the father-in-law of one former Undersecretary at the Secretariat of Economy. Several of them have been contracted by the government for public works projects.

According to the 2018 Forbes ranking list, three of the individual owners are among the ten richest people in the country: Carlos Slim Helú, Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Emilio Azcárraga Jean

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