On November 22, the decree that establishes that the Headquarters of the Presidence Office will now have a spokesman was published in the Official Gazette. Eduardo Sánchez, who acted as spokesman of the security cabinet in the Secretariat of Governance, will now be in charge of “coordinating the areas of social communication of dependencies and states of the Federal Public Administration, with the aim of providing coherence for the information disseminated by the Mexican Government to the general population”. This duty implies, by definition, to control and centralize the government message. It might create, without going further into the intentionality of the action, the establishment of limits for public officers that have now enjoyed more freedom and standing within the public sphere. The question is if in the context of an administration that has just completed its first year in office and uses a rhetoric based on reforms as its flagship – although most of these issues have yet to reach a conclusion – is the consolidation of such an office a correct strategic decision and which are its inherent risks.
Historically, a Spokesman Office has not been a used tool in Mexican governments, although the previous three administrations employed it with different purposes, issues and timings. The planned ambiguity in government communication as well as the lack of accountability explains why in most occasions, this office, or the election of a specific profile, answered the need of addressing a single issue (insecurity, during the tenure of President Calderón) or the “audacity” of President Fox, rather than a proactive strategy.
In the current scenario, the Spokesman Office aims to control the administration message in a moment when the opportunity of the reform rhetoric of the first year in office starts fading away, the reality cease to be responsibility of the past tenure, the possibility of making mistakes in rhetoric increases and the goal of heads of offices, particularly Finances and Governance, becomes less sustainable and increasingly riskier. An effective Spokesman Office would seek to effectively fill information voids, traits of a public opinion with a greater access to information and an Executive Power less accessible and responsive towards media, with the aim of preserving the rhetoric of success. In addition, in the face of bad habits of a significant part of the national press where a large percentage of “news” are only official statements, a spokesman enormously eases the job (complete Presidential bullets that automatically fill newspaper pages). Following this logic, it seems a well sustained decision.
A Presidency spokesman is also a fundamental resource in the strategy of communicating crisis. After an unexpected event of any sort (meteorological phenomenon, political scandal, etc.) the answer would be in the hands of the spokesman – his reaction carries the weight of the official answer. The benefit from that is formalizing the message even more so and, although risk can be an unfortunate statement, the blame can be put on him, and just like it has happened in infamous cases, letting him go would be the perfect solution to clean the President’s image. The risk is taken by the spokesman and the benefit is taken by the Executive Power.
Under the perspective of a centralizing tactic, the official appointment of a spokesman within the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto is perfectly coherent with the efforts that his government has put in place (election issues, security, budgetary matters). In a government with a special talent and a large deal of effort put into sustaining an image of success and transformation, concentrating all information into one microphone is not a minor detail.
CIDAC
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