The First District Judge of Commercial Bankruptcies in Mexico City, Tessy del Rocío Covarrubias Torres, declared TV Azteca in commercial bankruptcy on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, after determining that the company had incurred in widespread non-compliance with its obligations. The resolution formally initiates a process that the television station itself had anticipated since February, when it announced that it would voluntarily resort to this legal mechanism as part of its corporate, operational, and financial reorganization strategy.
The case file documents 1,970 debts totaling 23,345 million pesos. From the publication of the judgment in the Official Gazette of the Federation, TV Azteca has up to 365 days to negotiate an agreement with its creditors and restructure its obligations. If, at the end of that period, there is no agreement, the procedure can advance to the bankruptcy stage.
It is important to clarify what this process implies and what it does not. Commercial bankruptcy is not bankruptcy nor does it imply the immediate closure of the company or the automatic suspension of its broadcasts. It is a judicially supervised insolvency mechanism that seeks to buy time to negotiate with creditors and reorganize payment obligations. During the conciliation stage, the judgment halts payments of previous debts and suspends embargoes and executions against TV Azteca's assets. The Federal Institute of Specialists in Commercial Bankruptcies will appoint a conciliator within a maximum of five days to accompany the process.
A technical element with relevant implications: the judge confirmed that the television concession does not belong to TV Azteca SAB, the company that entered into commercial bankruptcy, but to other social entities of the group. This means that the protection of the process does not automatically extend to the subsidiaries or to the companies that are the formal holders of the broadcasting frequencies. This point is especially relevant on the international front, where creditors led by The Bank of New York Mellon maintain a lawsuit in the Southern District Court of New York linked to a 2017 bond issue for 400 million dollars, and have indicated that key assets, including the broadcasting license, could have been transferred to TVA III, a subsidiary created by the group.
The process that led to this declaration is lengthy. TV Azteca argued that since 2021 it had been working on the reorganization of its financial commitments, indicating that it faced an adverse environment due to transformations in the television and advertising industry, the payment of more than 3,800 million pesos for spectrum licenses in 2018, and the effects of the pandemic on advertising investment. The formal filing of the commercial bankruptcy occurred at the beginning of March 2026, after the company lost a long judicial battle in fiscal matters.