During the May Day celebrations two weeks later, Perón presented the union leaders who had organized the Teatro Colón gathering with the ultimate trophy: the newly expropriated La Prensa. A startlingly different newspaper soon hit the streets. Now property of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT)—the core of the Peronist movement—the new La Prensa had “ceased to be the capitalist instrument of a small group of proprietors to become the patriotic dominion of five million Argentine workers.”6 Just as the workers had occupied the space of elite culture on the night of March 7, 1947, they now ostensibly controlled what only months before had been the most powerful voice of that elite within the Argentine public sphere. From the Peronists’ “fourth enemy,” La Prensa had become, in the words of Perón himself, the “symbol of the New Press of the New Argentina.”7
Peronism and the Transformation of the Argentine Press
The expropriation of the newspaper produced shock waves felt well beyond Argentina. Yet, as momentous as the Peronist seizure of La Prensa proved in itself, it also marked the culmination of an even more dramatic transformation of the entire Argentine newspaper industry. With the addition of the morning paper, Perón and his associates now controlled eight newspapers in the city of Buenos Aires alone, including what had been not just Argentina’s, but Latin America’s, five largest dailies at the time of Perón’s election in February 1946.8 Through a series of violent confrontations, backroom deals, economic pressures, and legal actions between 1946 and 1951, Juan Domingo Perón had managed to fashion the vast majority of one of the world’s more extensive and developed newspaper industries into an enormous quasi-state media empire.
The present study traces this unparalleled transformation of the Argentine press from the crises of the 1930s to the height and dissolution of the region’s archetypal populist experiment in the mid-1950s. This book is as much a history of the disputes that permeated the Argentine commercial press in the years 1930 to 1955 as it is a study of a key aspect of the growth and consolidation of Peronism as the focal point of Argentine political life. It is the story of the nation’s major newspaper institutions, their proprietors, and the newsworkers who daily created the media in the midst of a series of often debilitating ideological, economic, and political crises. At the same time, it is an account of the conflict-ridden emergence of the Argentine military, Juan Domingo Perón, and the urban working class as the major protagonists of a social transformation more profound than even its architects imagined.
The press conflicts of these years have largely escaped careful scrutiny by scholars of modern Argentina, despite the wealth of literature on Argentine populism and the great significance that Peronists themselves placed on control of the press. Though passing reference to conflicts with La Prensa are frequent in histories of Peronism, modern Argentina, and Latin American journalism, scholars have tended to overlook the experiences of other major Argentine newspapers and have left the narrative put forth in the wake of Perón’s overthrow in 1955 largely unchallenged.9 In this view, the history of the press in the Peronist years has become little more than a manifestation of Juan Domingo Perón’s authoritarian, unerring, relatively effortless, and perhaps inevitable subjugation of the whole range of institutions of Argentine civil society. In turn, those who have more directly engaged the question of populism and the Argentine media, as well as those scholars with a more nuanced understanding of Peronism’s complexity, have either left the specific process by which Peronists came to control the commercial press underexplored or strayed little from that same interpretive framework.10 For scholars of Peronism, then, the evolution of the movement’s relationship with the press has tended to serve primarily as an illustrative anecdote that has little to do with the historical development of the Argentine press and everything to do with the widening sphere of Peronist power; scholars of the media—far fewer in number—have tended to view the Peronist transformation of the press essentially as an aberration imposed from without, a sudden authoritarian intromission into the otherwise progressive development of an internally coherent, autonomous press.11
Without doubt, the history of the Argentine press in the Peronist years is inseparable from the authoritarian tendencies of Perón, Eva Perón, and sectors of the Peronist movement. The military regime from which Perón emerged systematically silenced sectors of the press through strict censorship, the detention of journalists, and the withholding of government advertising. On several occasions, Peronist crowds violently attacked newspapers like La Prensa, Crítica, and El Mundo—most notably on the evening of October 17–18, 1945, the very night that gave birth to Peronism proper. Later, while eschewing overt censorship, the democratically elected Peronist government seized control of newsprint distribution and used bureaucratic measures to pressure the opposition press. State-run and sympathetic media mounted relentless propaganda campaigns to discredit opposing media. Even the decisive conflict between news vendors and the owners of La Prensa received open encouragement not just from broad sectors of the Peronist movement, but from President Perón and Eva Perón themselves. Finally, the practical consequences of the Peronist transformation of the press bore little resemblance to the rhetoric invoked for that transformation: it neither democratized the Argentine public sphere, nor did it create a newspaper industry that effectively served as a vehicle for the exercise of working-class citizenship. As Cristián Buchrucker has signaled, for all their differences, Perón’s creation of a large propaganda apparatus stands as one of the more striking similarities between Peronism and the European fascisms.12
To ascribe the dramatic transformation of the Argentine press in the years 1946 to 1951 solely to Peronist authoritarianism, however, leaves several crucial questions unanswered and many of the specific moments of what was in fact a complex set of conflicts difficult to comprehend. Given the great power that Perón wielded and the enormous popular support he enjoyed, why did the process take so long? Why did Perón and his associates opt for the creation of a private media holding company, Editorial ALEA, to run much of the commercial press, rather than simply closing or nationalizing opposition papers? Why did many newsworkers endorse specific actions that set the stage for the transformation of the newspaper industry, and why did many journalists join the ranks of Peronism? If “the press” was under threat, what prevented commercial newspaper proprietors from forming a common front against first the military and then the Peronist governments? Why did Peronists put such intense and prolonged effort into articulating a coherent discourse of journalism and the press when, on the one hand, they had little hope of convincing the opposition of the validity of government press policies, and, on the other, Perón loyalists ostensibly needed no such persuasion? Finally, what does the nature of the multiple disputes surrounding the press—and even the fact of their existence—tell us about the ideological climate, the bases of press legitimacy, and the character of political conflict in mid-twentieth-century Argentina?
The approach to these questions that I adopt here owes much to the origins of this study and the particular path that this project took. Few books spring fully formed, like Minerva, from the foreheads of their authors; the present study is not one of these. This book began as an investigation of Argentine political ideology in the wake of the military coup of September 1930, the country’s first unequivocal interruption of constitutional rule in the twentieth century. Like many other scholars, I turned to the press as both mirror and repository of a fairly broad segment of opinion and as a window into political, cultural, and social history.13 Yet, as I examined the concrete manifestations