The course of these disputes reveals the incoherence and internal contradictions of “Peronist ideology” as flexibility and strength. I make no claim that Peronists convinced the unconvinced by repeatedly formulating their approach to the press in terms of the highest values of what Mariano Plotkin has called the liberal “unifying myth” of the opposition. The great energy that Peronists nonetheless put into justifying their press policies less as negation than as practical realization of liberal abstractions, however, suggests that many Peronist leaders believed that appeals to notions of “rights,” “democracy,” and “freedom”—regardless of the equivocal and instrumental manner in which Peronists invoked them—constituted an important component if not of public support for the regime, then at least of public acquiescence to specific state actions. Similarly, by repeatedly proclaiming the construction of a truly open, democratic, and representative public sphere as the goal of government media policies, Perón and his allies could undermine the most salient element of opposition discourse. In this light, the objections of newspaper owners like La Prensa’s Alberto Gainza Paz not only ran counter to Peronist notions of “social justice” and “national sovereignty,” but formed part of long-running attempts to subvert even the egalitarian political impulses of traditional liberalism itself. In turn, controversial state acts like the manipulation of newsprint distribution became set within the context of struggles for the creation of a “New Argentina” that would embody the whole range of utopian aspirations—liberal and illiberal alike—articulated by the Peronist movement.
The Limits of This Study
Readers will no doubt quickly become aware that this work, like most scholarship, leaves out more than it explicitly includes. First, my intention is not to determine whether Argentines in this period abided by a statically conceived “freedom of the press”—the ideological and juridical cornerstone of the modern media. I instead explore the ways in which the nature of the press as well as the ideological foundations upon which its legitimacy rests are not only historically contingent, but constitute key elements in broader social contests. This study serves as a caution that, when we are approaching the media, concretely historicizing competing discourses of “freedom,” “class,” “citizenship,” “democracy,” “rights,” and even “the press” itself are of fundamental importance, especially when analyzing moments of rapid social and political change. I do not, however, deny qualitative distinctions in the functioning of the media under different political regimes; my use of such distinctions will become apparent throughout the course of this work.
Second, this is a study not of explicitly partisan periodicals, but of the commercial newspaper industry. This is not because the partisan press had become wholly irrelevant; in fact, the most widely read of these periodicals, the Argentine Socialist Party’s La Vanguardia, had by 1945 achieved a circulation level equal to that of the largest newspapers of both Colombia and Chile.35 Yet even La Vanguardia operated on a small scale compared to commercial dailies like La Prensa, La Nación, El Mundo, and Crítica. By the onset of the crises of the 1930s, explicitly partisan writing had become a subset of an increasingly broad array of journalism practices. More obviously, the so-called political press formed part of explicitly partisan conflicts that did not necessarily carry direct consequences for commercial newspapers; disputes involving the commercial press, on the other hand, tended to quickly encompass the press as a whole. Partisan media did play an important role in the period that I examine here, and formed part of the wave of press-related conflicts of the Peronist years. The more far-reaching struggles surrounding the press, however, played themselves out more dramatically and revealingly in the context of the major commercial newspapers.
Similarly, my focus does not extend beyond the federal territory of the city of Buenos Aires.36 Not only did Buenos Aires hold what were without question Argentina’s—and even Latin America’s—largest newspapers, but the 1880 federalization of the city created a separate juridical universe for publishers in the new Federal Capital. Newspapers in the Argentine capital thus fell under the legal domain of a federal government whose Congress, unlike provincial legislatures, remained constitutionally prohibited from dictating “laws that restrict the freedom of the press, or establish federal jurisdiction over that freedom.” As a result, legal measures affecting the Buenos Aires press also encompassed the provincial press; regulations of provincial newspapers, however, had no legal effect on the press of the capital. As with the partisan press, then, I have not incorporated a systematic discussion of provincial periodicals in this period, even as I hope that my own work opens avenues of exploration for both topics.37
Finally, the history of radio and other newer media falls beyond the scope of this book, even as I recognize the growing need for further research into this area. The Argentine Constitution of 1853 recognized not a general freedom of expression, but the more specific libertad de imprenta—perhaps most accurately translated as “freedom of the printing press”—leaving the constitutional guarantees for radio on much more ambiguous terrain.38 In addition, prior to the Perón era many important radio stations operated as extensions of commercial newspaper organizations like El Mundo and La Razón. As a result, disputes around the Peronist appropriation of Latin America’s largest private radio network took place in a legal gray area and remained to some degree subsumed in the more central debates surrounding the newspaper industry.39 As with the partisan and provincial presses, the inclusion of these elements here would have proven unwieldy, while centering this study on commercial print journalism more accurately captures the contours of the multiple disputes surrounding the press in this period.
Journalism and Power in the Making of Peronist Argentina
The following chapters uncover the mid-twentieth-century contests to define the social role of the Argentine press both as it should be and as it was in practice, tracing the ways in which these disputes became instrumentalized in the struggle for hegemony within and over the Argentine newspaper industry. Drawing upon and advancing fundamental changes in conceptions of the social aspects of citizenship and the proper relationship between civil society and the state, Peronists adeptly inserted themselves into the institutional and ideological fissures that had begun to emerge within the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Their success in this struggle rested at once on the ability of Peronists to present the “resolution” of particular press-related conflicts as consonant with the creation of a socially just “New Argentina” as well as with the unrealized egalitarian promises of Argentine liberalism. This book is an examination of the competing claims to resolve the tensions between the twentieth-century commercial press and the ideals proclaimed by those nineteenth-century liberals who had established the ideological and juridical foundations of Argentine journalism practice. It is also the story, however, of how the volatile historical processes that had at once given birth to Peronism and undermined the legitimacy of the newspaper industry status quo ultimately militated against the realization of utopian media projects—Peronist and non-Peronist alike—in anything but an authoritarian simulacrum for the duration of the subsequent decade.
In addressing the multiple conflicts within and surrounding the Argentine newspaper industry, Peronists fashioned a discourse of the social role of journalism that posited the state not as a threat to the functioning of the press, but as a defender: of the “true press” from the corrupting influence of commerce; of public opinion from the distorting effects of powerful private interests; of newsworkers from newspaper proprietors; of smaller news organizations from more powerful ones; and of the newspaper industry as a whole from very real external economic shocks and internal production bottlenecks. Perón and his allies, with the balance of state power in their hands, portrayed their actions as falling within the bounds of this discourse, combining their arguments with a capacity for concrete action that outstripped, delegitimized, and divided the opposition. That the confiscation of La Prensa took place through formally legal channels and under conditions of constitutional normality reveals more than the extent to which Peronists had come to dominate Argentine political life. It also reveals the degree to which opponents of Perón failed to