Chapter 3 examines initial regime attempts to bring the Argentine press into line with the dictates of military authoritarianism by means of increasingly bureaucratic—and ultimately counterproductive—forms of censorship. Chapter 4 uncovers the process behind the extension of collective bargaining rights to journalists and the multiple conflicts that this move engendered. Chapter 5 analyzes the changing relations between the military regime, the press, and the public in the midst of the stark political polarization of 1945. Ironically, the circumstances surrounding the foundational moment for Peronism also revealed that the emulation of the methods of press cooptation that had served Augustín P. Justo so well for nearly a decade quickly ended in disaster for Perón, in no small measure due to the unexpected depth of the social transformation that the military had only tentatively unleashed. The vivid contradiction between the press’s ideal role as the voice of “public opinion,” expanding conceptions of citizenship, and the Buenos Aires commercial newspapers’ overwhelming rejection of the clearly popular Juan Domingo Perón in his moment of crisis, I argue, forms the basis of the most violent episode of the mass mobilizations that gave formal birth to the Peronist movement on October 17, 1945: the sustained and deadly attack on the offices of the newspaper Crítica.
Part 3 explores the transformation of the Buenos Aires commercial press from the Perón’s February 1946 electoral victory through the consolidation of the Peronist media apparatus in 1951. The failure of Perón’s carefully cultivated ties to powerful newspaper owners like Crítica’s Raúl Damonte Taborda to provide him any support during his fall from grace in mid-1945 signaled to the newly elected president that alliances with figures possessing an autonomous capacity for political mobilization were simply too dangerous. The creation of a “New Argentina” called for a significantly more thorough reworking of the relationships between state, press, and public in ways that might address the growing political and cultural protagonism of Argentine workers; it also meant that the Peronist government would seek to avoid the tactical mistakes of the past and seek to build a media apparatus that might both generate consensus around the regime and make betrayal by newspaper owners impossible. Still, the creation of a properly Peronist communications conglomerate owes much to the particularly dire economic circumstances that most Argentine newspapers faced after the war. These conditions not only aggravated the existing fissures within the newspaper industry, but set the stage for the expropriation of Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily by the Argentine Congress.
Chapter 6 traces the intricate process by which Perón replaced his set of alliances with powerful but unreliable newspaper owners in favor of hidden direct control of the majority of the Buenos Aires commercial press through the private holding company Editorial ALEA and the Undersecretariat of Information and the Press. Chapter 7 examines the complex legal, ideological, economic, and workplace conflicts that culminated in the Argentine Congress’s expropriation of Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily, La Prensa. I argue that the newspaper passed to Peronist hands not simply due to the authoritarian tendencies of Peronism, but also because Peronists managed to articulate relatively coherent solutions to the set of increasingly acute crises that had surrounded and permeated the Argentine newspaper industry since the 1930s. In doing so less by denying liberal claims of the press’s proper role as a vehicle of expression open to all citizens than by asserting that La Prensa self-evidently and repeatedly failed to embody that lofty ideal in practice, they added a layer of ambiguity to opposition invocations of traditional liberal notions of “freedom of the press.” Ironically, in consolidating a media apparatus that acted less as a forum of public expression—working-class or otherwise—than as a stage for the regime’s public acclamation, the expropriation of La Prensa served to generate only an illusory unanimity and a silenced but increasingly desperate opposition.
In this study’s conclusion, I briefly trace the history of the Argentine newspaper industry in the wake of the fall of Perón. It would become clear to a subsequent generation of Peronists that the movement’s leader had proven unwilling and unable to move beyond a clearly authoritarian, sublimating “resolution” of the tensions within the Argentine press. Similarly, the bureaucratization of the newspaper industry had betrayed fundamental promises that the Peronist press might serve as a more open vehicle for citizen rights of collective and individual expression. For a more radical group of influential Peronist intellectuals, I argue, these failures called into question not only the possibility that any compromises with capitalist forms of media ownership might allow for a truly free and representative press, but also nothing less than the emancipatory potential of Peronism itself. Finally, I briefly place the Argentine press conflicts of the period 1930 to 1955 in their transnational context. Despite their uniqueness, these conflicts are not isolated phenomena; they form part of the perpetual, contentious negotiation of the relationship between state and civil society, the power of journalism and commercial media in the age of mass politics, and the nature of citizenship and democracy in capitalist societies.
Part 1
1
THE FOURTH ESTATE
Buenos Aires. Callao and Rivadavia: “Noticias Gráficas!” “Crítica!”
And the whirlwind of the newsboy’s cries —dark, dark—,
that opens like a fan and invades the streets of the city:
Like a lance.
Like an arrow.
—José Portogalo, 1935
Nothing moves in a civilized nation if the printed press does not work. … The highest ideals, the most honorable aspirations for the common good have been sown, cultivated, and harvested through the columns of newspapers.
—La Nación, September 1, 1935
Disconcertingly well-stocked periodical kiosks crowded the sidewalks of mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, stuffed with the enormous variety of the morning’s fruits—the afternoon’s detritus—of Latin America’s largest publishing industry. With over seven hundred different Spanish-language newspapers and magazines together with sixty-seven dailies and periodicals in Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Armenian, Greek, German, and a host of other languages, all competing for readers’ attention, the sheer volume and variety of publications could easily overwhelm any curious pedestrian.1 As two foreign journalists working at the English-language Buenos Aires Herald in the 1940s remarked, “the newsstands of Buenos Aires have for years offered a bewildering assortment of newspapers printed locally in such a babel of languages that I never did learn to recognize more than a third of them, let alone read them.”2 Earlier visitors to the city like Georges Clemenceau and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez highlighted the technological complexity and wealth of the periodical press, proclaiming newspaper institutions like La Prensa and La Nación the embodiment of an obviously vibrant and optimistic Argentine modernity.3
The rise of the Buenos Aires press in the first decades of the twentieth century marks more than a simple quantitative expansion of publishing capacity. In Argentina, as in many other parts of the world, newspapers underwent a dramatic transformation from their roots in the partisan publications of the mid–nineteenth century to emerge as a qualitatively distinct new means of social communication. The twentieth-century press, though forged in the heat of the previous century’s political agitation, was shaped less by formal partisan disputes than by a rapidly expanding market of readers and advertisers. In this new world of commercial journalism, explicit identification with a specific, politically inscribed circle of readers acted less to guarantee an audience than to constrain a newspaper’s potential market. Overt partisan militancy increasingly ceded to “general interest” reporting and class-based cultural appeals in the ceaseless effort to attract what appeared an ever-expanding readership.
This transformation implied an important refashioning of the whole network of relationships that constituted the Buenos Aires press. Where partisan political engagement and journalism practice had been intimately intertwined in the nineteenth century, the proprietors and journalists of the new press professed their autonomy from the vagaries of explicit partisan interests and—most emphatically—state power. Drawing on the rapidly expanding