The Fourth Enemy. James Cane

with the broader structures of power in Argentine society meant, quite simply, that the newspaper industry formed an integral part of the social and political order whose crises in the 1930s gave way to the unexpectedly profound transformations of the Peronist years. In its institutional character, the mid-twentieth-century commercial press was ambiguous and internally contradictory: at once political-cultural forum and commercial enterprise; indispensable medium of public opinion and source of private profit; channel of dissent and bolster of the social order. Similarly, with its thousands of newsworkers, high-tech capital goods, and extensive material inputs, the newspaper industry was an important element not just of the political and cultural spheres of Argentine society, but of the economic realm as well. Given its hybrid nature, the rapidly shifting distribution of power and accompanying political conflicts in Argentine society had inescapable consequences for the commercial press, and made it both weapon and prize.

      Well before the emergence of Perón as a significant national figure, disputes surrounding the status of journalists’ rights in the workplace and the social meaning of journalism practice had begun to expose the growing discrepancy between the ideological and juridical foundations of the press in nineteenth-century liberalism and the commercial practices of the twentieth-century newspaper industry. As a result, Perón-era conflicts for control of the press as an instrument of social power remained intimately linked to long-running struggles over the balance of class power within the newspaper industry. The attention I pay to working journalists in this study, then, stems less from a desire to restore newsworkers to the historiography of the press than from a recognition of the pivotal role that newsworkers played in the broader debates over the meaning of journalism, the clear impact of union militancy on the juridical standing of press institutions, and the importance of class cleavages within the newspaper industry for the reshaping of state-press relations in the 1930s and 1940s.²⁸ Similarly, I explore the links between changing relations of production in the newsroom, emerging notions of social citizenship, and the practical consequences of the profound economic and ideological crises that racked the country. In examining the transformation of the Argentine commercial press, I also point beyond the state-press conflicts of Peronist Argentina to the inherent volatility of relationships between state, market, public, and crucial institutions of civil society in the age of mass politics.

      In engaging the press, Perón and the Peronists thus faced a powerful set of institutions permeated by the same set of profound crises that would give rise to Peronism. The increasingly strained relations between journalists and proprietors within an economically complex and capital-intensive newspaper industry, the consequences of the commercial press’s legal and ideological dependence upon a faltering constitutional liberalism, and the growing legitimacy of state interventionism all shaped press development in the 1930s. Conflicts surrounding these processes did more than provide convenient excuses for authoritarian intromission in the Argentine press in the following decade. Though they certainly did that as well, more significantly, it was in no small measure the aggravation of these same crises in even more rapidly changing circumstances that determined at once the opportunities and limits—the realm of the possible—not just for Perón in his approach to the press, but for the shifting distribution of power between newsworkers, newspaper proprietors, the state, and the reading public in the Peronist years.

      For this reason, the emphasis that I place on the evolution of state-press relations in both the 1930s and under the military regime of 1943 to 1946 responds to more than a desire to avoid condemning these years to the status of “prelude” to the Peronist heyday. Like other scholars, I consider the profound changes of the 1930s key to understanding not just the conditions that made Peronism possible, but also the social and political forces whose conflicts called the movement into existence.²⁹ The surprisingly sophisticated forms of media management developed by the Augustín P. Justo regime in the 1930s have remained virtually unexplored by scholars, despite their importance as crucial points of inflection in both the development of the Argentine press and the course of Argentine political history.³⁰ From 1943 to 1945, Perón and his military allies drew from these precedents when formulating their own media strategies; the nearly disastrous consequences of those strategies had important implications for the press following Perón’s election to the presidency in 1946. Perón’s heavy-handed press policies of the years 1947 to 1955, I argue, did not follow strictly from the demands of a scripted, preconceived totalitarian media project, nor were they merely a local adaptation of foreign media models. Instead, they responded as much to Perón’s spectacular initial failures in engaging the press as to his unexpectedly resounding success in mobilizing public support in the crisis of October 1945—support that came, significantly, despite the unanimous opposition of “public opinion” as expressed in the pages of the nation’s major newspapers.

      Rather than unidirectional phenomena in which the press repeatedly stood as a simple target of Peronist action, the conflicts surrounding the newspaper industry that I examine here left not just the press transformed, but Peronism as well. Indeed, the public and private disputes for influence over—or outright control of—the Argentine press formed an integral part of the process through which Peronists forged the legitimacy of their project while simultaneously undermining that of their opponents. Long-running struggles over the institutional, political, and economic aspects of journalism practice played a crucial role in helping shape Peronism’s passage from its roots in a military regime seeking civilian support in 1944 to a loose and contradictory reformist movement born of an abrupt democratic opening and unprecedented working-class mobilization in 1945 to 1947. These same disputes—and the seismic shift in the media landscape that they produced—also helped determine the Peronist government’s consolidation by the early 1950s as an increasingly bureaucratic regime invoking formulaic and ritualized public acclamation.³¹

      Thus, to view the “Peronization” of the Argentine press as an essentially linear process or as the preordained result of an unequivocal, fascist-inspired authoritarianism is to underestimate at once the gravity and consequences of Perón’s miscalculations upon his entrance into national politics, the strength of the broader historical precedents and constraints within which Perón and the Peronists operated, and the shifting nature of Peronism over its first decade of existence. Similarly, to imagine “the press” as a coherent, passive, or helpless object of state intromission fails to account for the importance of deep, ongoing conflicts surrounding a socially powerful, institutionally diverse, internally fractured, and rapidly changing newspaper industry. The commonplace reduction of the Peronist transformation of the press to a manifestation of Perón and Eva Perón’s personal aspirations to power, finally, neglects what was both a crucial element in this particular process as well as a fundamental component in the broader unfolding of Argentine history in the second half of the twentieth century: the utopian appeal of Peronism as a force seemingly capable of resolving acute social contradictions, realizing long-neglected egalitarian promises of citizenship, and empowering Argentine workers in unprecedented—though ultimately ambiguous—ways.³²

      This book shares with other recent studies an emphasis on the articulation of a more heterogeneous “Peronist ideology” rooted not exclusively in the authoritarian Right but in the pragmatic incorporation of a broader array of political philosophy.³³ Looking at the articulation of that ideology in relation to the press, however, brings me to place even greater emphasis on the ambiguous persistence of fragmented liberal currents in Peronist discourse.³⁴ In its self-portrayal as at once revolutionary rupture with Argentina’s liberal past and final realization of the unfulfilled emancipatory promises of that same past, Peronism came to occupy a vast ideological spectrum. This study helps to show that the movement’s ability to manage the ambiguity of this stance owes much to an overarching set of contradictions in mid-twentieth-century Argentine political life. Well before the military coup of 1943, the nation’s established liberal political forces had long proven themselves either unable or unwilling to bridge the gap between the promises of egalitarian political citizenship that they repeatedly invoked and the increasingly stark reality of political and social exclusion. That they had also become entangled in the degeneration of even the most basic of formal democratic practices in the course of the 1930s only served to make that abstract crisis of legitimacy all the more specific and real. By late 1945, those same contradictions had also engulfed the Argentine commercial press, making it a powerful set of institutions whose primary