The chiquihuitazo
On December 27, 2002, TV Azteca used armed guards to take over the station and its transmitting facilities at Cerro del Chiquihuite. At 2 a.m., 20 people wearing hoods and ski masks entered the facilities, covering the faces of the workers on site, forcing them to sign a document, and making them leave.[19] At 6 a.m., the CNI signal was switched to a simulcast of Azteca 13, and at 6:30 p.m., the CNI signal on DirecTV Mexico, which was not obtained over the air, began to display a message informing satellite viewers of the transmitter takeover.[20] It used two legal rulings, including one ambiguous judgment from the International Court of Arbitration in Paris, that declared the CNI-Azteca contract valid as justification.[21] CNI, in the meantime, was flooded with phone calls to its headquarters on the 40th floor of the World Trade Center Mexico City; its engineers on another level of the building were astonished as they watched monitors in the facility showing Azteca 13's signal in place of their own. WTC security guards told a TV Azteca reporter filing a story from the facility that he could not record a report there. A producer exclaimed, "This is like September 11!" as he ran across the facility with copies of statements to be released to the media.
XHTVM continued to simulcast Azteca 13 for several days, eventually gaining its own program schedule on December 31. Azteca even aired one edition of Informativo 40, a news program hosted by Sergio Sarmiento, in an attempt to give the reclaimed channel 40 some continuity and normalcy; unaware of the legal battle surrounding the channel, the country's Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía even placed advertising on the newscast.[22] Jorge Fernández Menéndez, a journalist who had worked for CNI said that Azteca had planned this move, noting that he, along with Maerker, Gómez Leyva and others, were offered jobs at TV Azteca in the run-up to the forced takeover; all three of them rejected the offers.[23] Azteca also placed ads in some of Mexico's major daily newspapers soliciting former CNI workers to join Azteca's operation; they declined, countering with their own print ad the next day.[11]
The Mexican government was extremely slow to react. Owing to the timing of the events around the Christmas holiday, neither the RTC (General Directorate of Radio, Television and Film) nor the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation did anything, despite petitions from CNI and Azteca alike for the federal government to take a position on the takeover. On January 6, during a visit to the remodeled press room at Los Pinos, CNI subdirector of news Roberto López Agustín approached President Vicente Fox and demanded that he take a stand on the issue. On his way to the presidential plane, other reporters asked questions about the XHTVM situation. Fox, however, merely said, "¿Y yo por qué?" ("And why me?"), leading to one of his greatest political blunders in his tenure as president.[24]
After the end of holiday celebrations, the RTC and SCT took the matter into their own hands. On January 6, in an 11 pm press conference, the SCT announced that if no settlement between Azteca and CNI were to be reached, the government would seize control of the station. (The SCT also considered solving another problem, a dispute over XHRAE channel 28, by giving TV Azteca that frequency and leaving CNI as the sole operator of channel 40).[25]
At Cerro del Chiquihuite, a negotiating session with Moreno Valle, TV Azteca head Ricardo Salinas Pliego and mediators including the Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Communications and Transportation began at midnight; at this point, XHTVM immediately began to broadcast color bars. A three-day negotiation period began, and on the evening of January 9, at the start of newscasts on both Azteca and Televisa, it was announced that no agreement had been reached and that the government would seize all XHTVM installations, including the transmitter site; later, it was stated that this was done because an entity (TV Azteca) that was not the concessionaire (Televisora del Valle de México) was operating the station. On the 27th,[12] five days after the Mexican Congress passed a resolution calling for the restoration of channel 40 to CNI, CNI resumed control of the channel and of its transmission facilities. The events related to the transmitter site became popularly known as the chiquihuitazo. Meanwhile, CNI and TV Azteca continued to negotiate in hopes of reaching a deal; even though CNI offered to pay Azteca US$25,000,000 ($ in dollars),[26] Azteca rejected CNI's offer.
Azteca was fined 210,000 pesos (roughly US$25,000 in 2013 dollars) by the SCT after the incident.
