Enrique Krauze Kleinbort (born 16 September 1947) is a Mexican historian, essayist, editor, and entrepreneur. He has written more than twenty books, some of which are: Mexico: Biography of Power, Redeemers, and El pueblo soy yo (I am the people). He has also produced more than 500 television programs and documentaries about Mexico's history. His biographical, historical works, and his political and literary essays, which have reached a broad audience, have made him famous.
Life and career
He received his bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1965-1969). He received a Doctorate in History from the Center of Historical Studies in El Colegio de México (1969-1974). He is a member of the Mexican Academy of History and the Mexican National College (El Colegio Nacional). He is also director of the publishing house Clío and director of Letras Libres, a cultural magazine. The Engineering Faculty shortly before the start of Mexican Movement of 1968 elected him university councillor. In 1979 he obtained the Guggenheim Fellowship.
He has been a professor and researcher for El Colegio de México in 1977; guest professor at St Antony's College, Oxford, from October to December in 1981 and 1983; guest professor at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, from October to December 1987. Similarly, he was visiting professor at Princeton University’s Program in Latin American Studies in the autumn of 2013.
At 24 years old, he obtained his first publication in Siempre! magazine, titled: “La saña y el terror” (“The viciousness and terror”), which tells of the Corpus Christi Thursday Massacre (which he witnessed). A year later he started to collaborate at Plural, Excélsior’s monthly cultural magazine. He started working at Vuelta in 1977, invited by Octavio Paz. He collaborated at Vuelta for more than 20 years, first as an editorial secretary from 1977 to 1981 and then as deputy director from 1981 to 1996.
In 1991 he launched the publishing house and television producer Clío, of which he is the director. Since 1999, after Octavio Paz’s death, he has directed Vuelta’s cultural heir: Letras Libres, with editions in Mexico, Spain, and online. Since 1985 he has been an editorial writer for The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, El País, and Reforma.
In 1990 he was elected member at the Mexican Academy of History and since 2005 he is a member of the Colegio Nacional in Mexico. Among other tasks, he has been a member of the board of directors at the Instituto Cervantes. Likewise, he has held various positions on the boards of directors of other companies and institutions.
Works Books Caudillos culturales en la Revolución mexicana (1976), Siglo XXI Editores. Historia de la Revolución Mexicana. La reconstrucción económica. 1924-1928 (1977), El Colegio de México. Daniel Cosío Villegas: una biografía intelectual (1980), Joaquín Mortiz. Caras de la historia (1983), Joaquín Mortiz. Por una democracia sin adjetivos (1986), Joaquín Mortiz-Planeta. Biografía del poder, eight volumes: I. “Porfirio Díaz. Místico de la autoridad”; II. “Francisco I. Madero. Místico de la libertad”; III. “Emiliano Zapata. El amor a la tierra”; IV. “Francisco Villa. Entre el ángel y el fierro”; V. “Venustiano Carranza. Puente entre siglos”; VI. “Álvaro Obregón. El vértigo de la victoria”; VII. “Plutarco Elías Calles. Reformar desde el origen”; VIII. “Lázaro Cárdenas. General misionero” (1987), Fondo de Cultura Económica. Personas e ideas (1989), Vuelta. América Latina: el otro milagro (1991), Fundes. Textos heréticos (1992), Grijalbo. Siglo de caudillos: Biografía Política de México (1810-1910), (1994), Tusquets. Tiempo contado (1996), Océano. Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996 (1997), HarperCollins Publishers. La presidencia imperial (1997), Tusquets. La Historia cuenta (1998), Tusquets. Mexicanos eminentes (1999), Tusquets. Tarea política (2000), Tusquets. Travesía liberal (2003), Tusquets. La presencia del pasado (2005), Tusquets. Para salir de Babel (2006), Tusquets. Retratos personales (2007), Tusquets. El poder y el delirio (2008), Tusquets. De héroes y mitos (2010), Tusquets. Redeemers: Ideas and power in Latin America (2011), HarperCollins. Redentores: Ideas y poder en América Latina (2011), Random House. El arte de la biografía (2012), Random House. Octavio Paz. El poeta y la revolución (2014), Random House. Personas e ideas. Conversaciones sobre historia y literatura (2015), Debate. Caras de la historia I (2015), Debate. El nacimiento de las instituciones (2015), Tusquets. Por una democracia sin adjetivos, 1982-1996 (2016), Debate. Del desencanto al mesianismo, 1996-2006 (2016), Debate. Democracia en construcción, 2006-2016 (2016), Debate Caras de la historia II (2016), Debate. México: Biografía del poder (2017), Tusquets. El pueblo soy yo (2018), Debate.
His essays have been collected by the Debate label of Penguin Random House Editorial Group in the Liberal Essayist collection, while his historical works are part of Enrique Krauze’s Historical Library series by Tusquets Editores.
Television
In his article titled "La misión de la televisión" (“Television’s mission”), published in 2013 in Reforma, Krauze quotes his stance on this media that he has been tied to for three decades: He debuted on television in 1987 as the author of the series Biografía del Poder (Biography of Power), produced by the Film Production Center, and transmitted through the state’s network Imevisión. The following year he served as an advisor for the series Mexico, produced by Public Broadcasting Service (WGBH) in association with Blackwell Corporation from Boston.
Along with Fausto Zerón-Medina in 1994, he wrote a soap opera titled El vuelo del águila (The Eagle's Flight) based on Porfirio Díaz’s life, produced by Ernesto Alonso for Televisa, starring Fabián Robles (young Porfirio Díaz), Humberto Zurita (Porfirio Díaz), and Manuel Ojeda (old Porfirio Díaz). Krauze is a producer of documental series México siglo XX, México nuevo siglo y Clío TV presenta since 1998, broadcast weekly on open television through Televisa’s network.
Film
Along with Alvin H. Perlmutter, Krauze produced Beyond Borders, Undocumented Mexican Americans (2016) directed by Micah Fink, co-produced by The Independent Production Fund (US), Clío (Mexico), and La Fábrica de Cine (Mexico). He is also the executive producer of the documentary El pueblo soy yo, Venezuela en populismo by director Carlos Oteyza (2018).
Clío Editorial Clío, Libros y Videos, S.A. de C.V., was born in 1991 by the initiative of Emilio Azcárraga Milmo and Enrique Krauze as a project aimed at disseminating the past and present of Mexico that, in its name, pays tribute to the muse of history.
Originally conceived as a publishing house, since 1998 it began the production of documentaries that through its series Clío TV presenta and Hazaña, el deporte vive, reach hundreds of thousands of homes weekly through open broadcasting throughout the country and other national and international media.
Throughout its history, Clío has published nearly 200 printed titles and has broadcast more than 500 documentaries.
Vuelta
Enrique Krauze published his first article in Vuelta magazine, directed by the poet Octavio Paz, in its first issue corresponding to December 1976 ("Cosío Villegas and Excélsior"). In 1977, starting from the fourth issue, Krauze was hired as the editorial secretary. From 1981 to 1996 he held the position of deputy director, his participation being indispensable from an operative point of view since he dedicated most of his time to moving Vuelta forward as a company, which allowed it to reach a long existence by giving it continuity and economic independence. In Vuelta more than 60 articles saw the light throughout twenty years, among them the controversial “Por una democracia sin adjetivos” ("For a Democracy without Adjectives") and “La comedia mexicana de Carlos Fuentes” (Carlos Fuentes’ Mexican Comedy), which discussed Mexican democracy and literature.
Letras Libres
After Octavio Paz’s death, on April 19, 1998, Vuelta ended its cycle and Enrique Krauze undertook the organization of its successor: the monthly magazine Letras Libres, which published its first issue in January 1999. Two years later, in October 2001, he added a Spanish edition (that received the National Prize for Promoting Reading in Spain in 2014) to the Mexican edition.
Letras Libres has published 254 issues up to February 2020 (221 in the Spanish edition), which according to the magazine, “calls the brightest minds to tackle, in its pages, urgent and necessary subjects of global debate, and at the same time offers readers samples of the best prose and poetry.”
Critical Review of Power
Enrique Krauze has named himself a critic of power, of presidential power to be precise, that has been exercised itself in Mexico as authoritarian throughout decades. His historical works Siglo de caudillos, Biografía del poder, and, especially, La presidencia imperial (The Imperial Presidency) can be interpreted as a critical review of power and its exploits, since the War of Independence until Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s government.
His essay “El timón y la tormenta” (“The Rudder and the Storm”), published by Vuelta in October 1982, alluded to the president José López Portillo’s phrase when Mexico fell into a deep financial crisis: “I am responsible for the rudder, not the storm”. In it, he criticized the current six-year term’s abuses, its rash economic policies, its irresponsibility by not admitting its part in the shipwreck, the “oil pharaonism”, the generalized corruption, and the lack of leadership during the crisis, marking Mexico’s only historical option to “respect and exercise political liberty, rights, and above all, democracy”.
Following that text he published “Por una democracia sin adjetivos” (“For a Democracy without Adjectives”) (Vuelta 86, January 1984), during the president Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado’s term, where he proposed that democracy was a simulation in the country:
“For a Democracy without Adjectives’” received a rebuttal from the government through Manuel Camacho Solís (who published on Vuelta’s 90th issue in May 1984: “The Democratic Battle”), and produced a controversy with other intellectuals like Rolando Cordera, Carlos Bazdresch, Rafael Segovia, Manuel Aguilar Mora, and Eduardo Valle.
About Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s government, in his article “Neoconservatives” (Reforma, April 21st, 1996), Krauze said that “the privatizations and the North American Free Trade Agreement where coherent measures in the world we live in”, an open and modern world. But he points out that Salinas “implemented a lot of [those measures] in a vertical, despotic, discretional, and capricious manner”. Krauze saw “those reforms’ purpose” as “the only possible at the end of the XX Century”, in front of the socialist project, that had already crumbled. The approval of these economic policies, however, was not the same in the political landscape:
Controversies
Criticism towards Krauze has its origin in different aspects of his work. One of them is a reproach to the Academy for its theory of history, exacerbation, self-referential quotes, the majestic “us”, and his elaborate style (as seen in “UNAM and Bicentenary. Historic Delirium”, Letras Libres 108, December 2007).) Similarly, his interest in historic essays and divulgation of history through more accessible formats, like illustrated books and television documentaries. Another is his liberal conviction, which he tackled since the 1980s not only with the PRI regime’s officialdom but with ample left-wing sectors that didn’t commune with his vision of democracy. About the subject, Gabriel Zaid wrote:
About Krauze’s popularity, literary critic Christopher Domínguez Michael has written: