By Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley*
Private Network: Who Killed Manuel Buendía / Red Privada is a documentary about the life, journalistic profession and assassination of renowned Mexican columnist Manuel Buendía (1926-1984), together with the related subsequent murder of US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique (“Kiki”) Camarena Salazar.
It is a richly complex documentary that transports viewers of the current digital age back into the mechanical age of newspaper printing, takes you through key stages of 20th-century Mexican history, contextualizes Buendía’s life within that history, and establishes the historical role of the United States in shaping Mexico’s political reality down to the present.
The first two thirds of the film focus on official efforts to cover up the actual perpetrators of the Buendía assassination. Key members of the Mexican press, as well as informed foreign observers, suspected from the outset that those involved were high Mexican officials together with US intelligence operatives seeking to block Buendía’s revelation of official covert relations with drug cartels in support of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government. The official resolution of the case in 1989 charged former Federal Security Directorate (DFS) director José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez as the assassination’s intellectual author, and DFS agent Juan Rafael Moro Ávila Camacho as the assassin.
The final third of the documentary focuses on the kidnapping, torture interrogation and murder of “Kiki” Camarena, who had been in contact with Buendía and also discovered CIA involvement in that case. This part of the film draws on the 2015 University of Wisconsin Press book, Eclipse of the Assassins. The CIA, Imperial Politics, and the Slaying of Mexican Journalist Manuel Buendía, by Russell and Sylvia Bartley, a detailed account of their thirty-year investigation of the Buendía case.
Revelatory interviews with two former senior Mexican officials are also shown, plus photographs of and excerpts from a recorded interview with a former deep-cover, Mexico-based, CIA agent, and on-camera charges of US involvement by the now retired DEA officer who oversaw the official investigation of the Camarena murder. English subtitles help non-Spanish speakers understand what is being said.
Private Network: Who Killed Manuel Buendía is now streaming on Netflix.
Russell H. Bartley, who is featured in the film is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and Sylvia Erickson Bartley is a historian and photographer.
