On November 21, 1964, the office of the Secretary of Communications and Transportation (SCT) granted a 25-year concession to CIRT (unrelated to the Cámara Nacional de la Industria de Radio y Televisión, the Mexican broadcasters' association, which is also abbreviated CIRT) and to its controlling shareholder, Roberto Nájera Martínez, for a television station UHF channel 16, to be designated XHTC-TV.
[1] As of July 1989, the station had not been built, mainly due to lack of funds, and Nájera transferred his shares to Raúl Aréchiga Espinoza, with the intent that Aréchiga would “manage the bond and/or funding for the installation and operation of the channel.”[1][2] Aréchiga, from Baja California Sur, had interests in radio and a concession to operate a cable TV system in Baja California Sur, and was also owner of the airline Aero California; from 1994 to 1996, he would become director of the Cámara Nacional de la Industria de Radio y Televisión (CIRT), Mexico's association of broadcasters.
With this renewal of the concession, the station was moved from channel 16 to 28 due to a reallocation of television spectrum; it also took on the callsign XHRAE-TV, giving it his initials.
[3] Roberto Nájera Martínez, who had transferred his shares ten years earlier, claimed that he had merely rented the award of the concession to Aréchiga.
Aréchiga sued, and in a September 2002, letter to Mexican president Vicente Fox, accused current and former members of the SCT of plundering the station.
[5] Finally, in January 2005, a judge ruled that Aréchiga did not violate the terms of the concession, and ordered the SCT to endorse the renewal immediately.
[1][6] Even before the renewal had been granted, rumors began to flow that Aréchiga's victory was intentional, in order to clear the station for sale, either to Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of TV Azteca, who had lost control of channel 40 in the dispute with CNI, or to Olegario Vazquez Raña, a newcomer to the broadcast industry but an associate of Marta Sahagún de Fox, wife of President Vicente Fox.
On April 2, the SCT, which at the time not only oversaw broadcasting but also aviation, declared Aréchiga's airline, Aero California, unfit to fly and grounded the entire fleet of airplanes.
[9] With his time, money and attention fully devoted to saving Aero California, and with the concession of XHRAE-TV coming up for renewal at the end of May 2006, Aréchiga could not run both enterprises and was forced to seek a buyer for the television station.
However, in a move that took audiences by storm, Grupo Imagen decided to take Cadena Tres off the air on October 26, 2015, and replace it with Excélsior TV.