Manuel Buendía Tellezgirón (24 May 1926 – 30 May 1984) was a Mexican journalist and political columnist who last worked for the daily Excélsior, one of the most-read newspapers in Mexico City.

His direct reporting style in his column Red Privada ("Private Network"), which publicly exposed government and law enforcement corruption, organized crime, and drug trafficking, was distributed and read in over 200 newspapers across Mexico.

Upon graduation he attended the Escuela Libre de Derecho, a private Law school in Mexico City, but dropped out to take care of his family following the death of his father in 1945.

[6] Around that time Buendía started his daily column Red Privada ("Private Network"), where he wrote about the alleged collusion of organized crime in Mexico's political system.

A year later, Buendía worked as an advisor to Guillermo Martínez Domínguez, the former head of Nacional Financiera, a bank of Mexico's Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP).

That year, Henrique González Casanova, the former head of the Political Science department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), invited Buendía to work as a part-time professor, a job that the journalist held until his death in 1984.

After facing some differences with the owners of the print media company, Buendía left on 17 August 1978 to work at El Universal, a newspaper based in Mexico City.

[3][8] In his column he wrote about the covert operations of the CIA in Mexico during the Cold War, ultra-rightwing groups, crooked businessmen, and corrupt government officials involved in drug trafficking.

[12][13][14] On Wednesday, 30 May 1984, Buendía left his offices in Colonia Juárez at around 6:30 p.m. and headed towards his car in a parking lot near Insurgentes Avenue at the Zona Rosa neighborhood in Mexico City.

[15] As he got closer to his car, a tall man wearing jeans, a black jacket, and a baseball cap approached him from behind and violently grabbed his coat before shooting him four times with a .38 Super.

[9][16] There were several bystanders who witnessed the murder and managed to see the faces of the assassins, including Juan Manuel Bautista, a colleague of Buendía; Rogelio Barrera Galindo, a man who had parked his vehicle close to the journalist's; and Felipe Flores Fernández, a bus driver.

[17] Among the first to arrive at the murder scene was José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, then-head of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Mexico's equivalent of the FBI, and one of Buendía's main sources for his political publications.

[18] Suspicions first fell on Los Tecos ("The Owls"), an ultra-rightwing group of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara who were largely criticized by Buendía for terrorizing their campus.

On 10 September 2013, Zorrilla was released from prison after a Mexico City judge granted him the opportunity to fulfill the remaining years of his sentence at his residence due to unstable health conditions.