The Fourth Enemy. James Cane

Archivo General de la Nación AGN-AJ Archivo General de la Nación—Archivo Justo AdeP Archivo de Prensa ALN Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista AP Associated Press APBA Asociación de Periodistas de Buenos Aires ASNE American Society of Newspaper Editors CADEPSA Compañía Argentina de Ediciones y Publicidad, Sociedad Anónima CGT Confederación General de Trabajo FAP Federación Argentina de Periodistas FATI Federación Argentina de Trabajadores de la Imprenta FGB Federación Gráfica Bonaerense FORJA Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Juventud Argentina GOU Grupo de Oficiales Unidos IAPA Inter American Press Association IAPI Instituto Argentino de Promoción e Intercambio PC Partido Comunista PE Poder Ejecutivo PL Partido Laborista PP Partido Peronista PS Partido Socialista PSI Partido Socialista Independiente SIP Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa STP Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión SVDRA Sindicato de Vendedores de Diarios, Revistas y Afines UCR Unión Cívica Radical UD Unión Democrática UP United Press

      INTRODUCTION:

      FROM FOURTH ESTATE TO FOURTH ENEMY

      The history of the Argentine people is the history of their liberties. The history of Argentine liberties is the history of the national press.

      —La Prensa, November 11, 1943

      When Juan Domingo Perón announced his new government’s economic agenda from the stage of the Teatro Colón, the working men and women sitting in the posh seats of the famed Buenos Aires opera house could not miss the symbolic importance of the act. Not only was the Argentine president directly addressing Argentine workers “as compañero to compañero,” he was doing so from the cultural bastion of a national elite in clear retreat. Declaring his government “an extension of the working class in the Government House,” Perón warned the audience that their newfound political power stood imperiled by a host of serious enemies. As he listed these enemies, the audience erupted in acclamation at mention of the fourth: the press. In the midst of the sweeping social transformation underway, at that March 1947 meeting the once powerful “fourth estate” of the old order formally became the besieged “fourth enemy” of the Peronist “New Argentina.”¹

      If those involved in the events of that evening grasped the inversion of the social hierarchy implicit in the workers’ symbolic occupation of the cultural sanctum of the oligarchy, they also understood that in decrying la prensa—the press in general—Perón was, in fact, railing against a specific newspaper: La Prensa, Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily. Only the collective refusal of Argentine workers to buy or advertise in the paper, Perón insisted, could halt its repeated “lies” and continuous “betrayal” of the national interest.² Even as he spoke, government employees were already hard at work to drive home the severity of the threat posed by this “fourth enemy,” as well as to remove any doubt as to precisely which member of the press stood as the greatest menace. When the crowd poured out of the Teatro Colón and into the streets, they found the walls of downtown Buenos Aires freshly plastered with transcripts of the latest government radio commentary denouncing La Prensa as fundamentally anti-Argentine as well as ideologically, culturally, politically, and economically beholden to foreign interests.³

       Fig. 1

      Perón addresses public in the Teatro Colón