Francisco Garfias

Francisco Garfias was born on 7 August 1951. He studied journalism at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In his youth he travelled in Europe and lived in Paris, experiences that Excélsior said marked his view of the world and his later work as a reporter.

Garfias started in journalism as a junior newsroom assistant, known in the slang of the time as a "hueso", at the daily unomásuno under director Manuel Becerra Acosta. He then worked at Pemex and as a news writer at Radio Educación.

From 1983 to 1989 he was a freelance correspondent for Excélsior in France, covering European politics, the Mitterrand years and the foreign debt question. On returning to Mexico in 1989 he covered the Chamber of Deputies and then the Senate, and reported on election campaigns including Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas's 1994 presidential campaign.

In 2000 he moved to Milenio, where he began his work as a political columnist, and later wrote for La Crónica de Hoy under Pablo Hiriart. He then returned to Excélsior, where he wrote the political column "Arsenal" on government, parties and Congress. He directed the digital outlet El Arsenal, appeared as an analyst on radio and television, and hosted the YouTube programme La Manzana de la Discordia. His last Excélsior column appeared on 26 September 2026.

Colleagues remembered Garfias for his warmth and sense of humour. In a farewell reported by La Silla Rota, his former Excélsior colleague Ethel Riquelme sent condolences to his children, Renata and Panchito, and to his granddaughter.

Francisco Garfias died between midnight and 12:10 am on Sunday 11 October 2026, aged 75, from complications after surgery. According to Excélsior, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer less than two weeks earlier and had an operation the previous Monday, after which his condition worsened. The leadership of the Mexican Senate expressed its condolences, as did journalist Sergio Sarmiento, federal deputy Margarita Zavala, Senate Morena coordinator Ignacio Mier Velasco and former foreign minister José Antonio Meade. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Garfias is remembered as one of the reference voices of Mexican political journalism and of parliamentary reporting in particular. Colleagues described a reporter who sought out his own information every day at the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, and whose columns documented Mexican politics from inside its institutions across several decades of change.