The Fourth Enemy. James Cane

both active and passive consent for the regime among broad swathes of Argentine society.

      President Justo’s media strategy significantly altered the network of relationships between political power and media power that had emerged over the previous three decades. The web of economic, legal, and political threads that linked Natalio Botana and President Justo and the complex financial ties that made Ricardo Peralta Ramos dependent on the continued goodwill of administrators at the Central Bank remained at once confusing and largely opaque to the reading public.⁶⁵ This was no accident: the legitimacy and effectiveness of this new form of factional press rested precisely upon public perceptions of an autonomy that, in the final instance, proved only slightly less illusory than the democratic principles that the Concordancia repeatedly invoked but continually violated. In this, the sympathetic media apparatus assembled by General Justo—at the time unprecedented in its scale—would serve as an important precursor to a far more extensive, ambitious, centralized, and disciplined quasi-state media project that helped the consolidation of Peronism a decade later.

      State Power and the Commercial Press

      If the relationship between political factions and sectors of the Argentine commercial press changed abruptly with the military coup of September 1930, a broader transformation facilitated that shift: the expansion of the regulatory powers of the Argentine state. In its most obvious manifestation, the Uriburu regime’s invocation of extraordinary state-of-siege powers of censorship limited the actions of the commercial press on a scale not seen since the previous century. But the closure of Crítica had also inadvertently solidified the connections between General Justo and that newspaper. The subsequent creation of the Central Bank and its Instituto Movilizador, similarly, gave Justo a new and powerful mechanism for the creation and maintenance of a set of friendly newspapers.

      Uriburu’s sweeping but temporary use of state power for censorship and Justo’s surreptitious use of the Central Bank also coincided with attempts to take a series of permanent, institutional steps intended to change fundamentally the relationship between the Argentine state and the press as a whole. These moves did not always prove successful. Such initiatives do, however, reveal the increasing tensions between an ideological environment characterized by a growing consensus around the beneficial potential—even necessity—of new forms of state activity, and the operation of a commercial press whose juridical basis, professional ideology, and public legitimacy had long rested on the antistatist elements of Argentine liberalism.⁶⁶

      The first of these measures emerged precisely as public enthusiasm for the Uriburu regime began to wane. Crediting this erosion of popular support to the government’s failure to completely contain the actions of opposition newspapers, Lieutenant Colonel Emilio Kinkelín, the secretary of the presidency of the provisional government, created the “Sección Prensa” under his own authority.⁶⁷ Kinkelín defined the Sección Prensa’s overriding mission as the “channeling of public opinion toward the high purposes of [the provisional government]” by disseminating the opinion of “the people’s leaders in order to detract from all tendentious propaganda that seeks to diminish the merit of the works being done after the revolution.”⁶⁸ Rather than a mere mechanism for the enforcement of censorship, then, the new institution had multiple functions that went beyond purely negative attempts to restrict newspaper content. In effect, Kinkelín sought to make the Sección Prensa a state agency of public opinion formation, a task ostensibly reserved for—but far too important and delicate to be entrusted to—the private organs of the fourth estate.