Enrique Mendez
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, February 4, 2026, p. 8
Master of generations of press journalists from his time as a police reporter and later on radio and television, Rodolfo passed away on Monday The Black Guzmán García, on the eve of his 79th birthday. His loved ones broke the cake yesterday at a funeral home on Sullivan Street where he was watched.
Reporter at the Excelsior of Julio Scherer, where the substitutes who were making their first steps called him “godfather” and he returned an affectionate “godson”, he started as an announcer in Tapachula, Chiapas, and, as he said, “after writing in the newspapers of my town I arrived in Mexico in the great snowfall of ’67.” A born talker, always cheerful, he said that the CIA tempted him to be a spy.
With a reporting talent recognized by all, The Black Guzmán – as he was known – had an extensive career in journalism and as a press coordinator in different federal agencies.
He was head of news at the defunct channel 8 Televisión Independiente de México before the merger to form Televisa, as well as at Canal Once; creator of the concept of Detrás de la Noticia, he was head of information at that agency and director of the now-defunct newspaper Summa.
He was also director of social communication in the Chamber of Deputies – a source that he also covered -, spokesperson for the defunct Secretariat of Social Development, with Josefina Vázquez Mota, and in his last years of active life he collaborated in the civil group Citizen Action Against Poverty.
Throughout his career, reporters remember him for his audacity and his journalistic blows. He began his career in 1972 on channel 8. He told journalist Wilbert Torre that they wanted to fire him because, “a guy they called The Gringo “He asked me if I had a degree and if I spoke English.”
Then he was commissioned to interview the then-leader of the United States Senate, visiting Mexico. If he got the exclusive, he stayed.
“I asked a colleague and another guy, who was a great reporter, to accompany me and I went to the María Isabel (hotel).” With the ruse that she was from a civil society, they obtained the congressman’s room number, “and we went upstairs; he opened the door, I put my foot in and the microphone. I asked in Spanish and my friend translated in English. I stayed and became one of the spoiled ones.”
An old guard reporter, Guzmán García called María Isabel “the place of my successes.” There, too, he told Torre, he went into Joan Manuel Serrat’s room, who had made him wait two hours for an interview: “I went up, I played and he was in his underwear.” ‘It’s an intrusion!’ he told me.”
With his journalistic tables he traveled with Ricardo Rocha to Acteal, in December 1997, 10 days before the massacre of 45 Tzotziles displaced from the Las Abejas organization.
The reporters report that, at one point in the television report that showed images of hungry, barefoot children in the rain, Rocha asked him “Blackyou are from Chiapas, what do you think about this?” Guzmán, they said, had his voice breaking when he responded: “We have failed our indigenous people.”
