The Fourth Enemy. James Cane

      JAMES CANE

      The Fourth Enemy

      Journalism and Power in the Making of Peronist Argentina, 1930–1955

      THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

      UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

      Library of Congress

      Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Cane, James, 1968–

      The fourth enemy : journalism and power in the making of Peronist Argentina, 1930–1955 / James Cane.

      p. cm.

      Summary: “An interdisciplinary study examining the newspaper industry in Argentina during the regime of Juan Domingo Perón. Traces how Perón managed to integrate almost the entire Argentine press into a state-dominated media empire”—Provided by publisher.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-271-04876-5

      1. Government and the press—Argentina—History—20th century.

      2. Press and politics—Argentina—History—20th century.

      3. Censorship—Argentina—History—20th century.

      4. Perón, Juan Domingo, 1895–1974.

      5. Argentina—Politics and government—1943–.

      I. Title.

      PN4748.A7C36 2012

      302.230982'0904—dc23

      2011026168

      Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University

      All rights reserved

      Contents

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

      Introduction: From Fourth Estate to Fourth Enemy

      Part 1

      1: The Fourth Estate

      2: Journalism and Power in the Impossible Republic

      Part 2

      3: The Triumph of Silence

      4: Journalism as Labor Power

      5: Scenes from the Press Wars

      Part 3

      6: The Die Is Cast

      7: The Fourth Enemy

      Conclusion: Journalism and Power in the New Argentina

      NOTES

      BIBLIOGRAPHY

      INDEX

      Illustrations

       All images courtesy of Ministerio del Interior, Archivo General de la Nación.

      1: Perón addresses public in the Teatro Colón opera house, March 8, 1947

      2: The La Prensa offices, 1938

      3: Statue to be placed atop La Prensa offices

      4: Printer at a Hoe printing press, November 1941

      5: Printers at work in La Prensa, October 1924

      6: News vendors prepare El Mundo for distribution, mid-1930s

      7: Octavio Palazzolo addresses the founding meeting of the Federación Argentina de Periodistas, Córdoba, 1938

      8: Perón addresses the Fifth Congress of the Federación Argentina de Periodistas, Buenos Aires, October 20, 1944

      9: Public gathering in front of the Casa Rosada, October 17, 1945

      10: Perón signs the Estatuto del Periodista Profesional, December 24, 1946

      11: Eva Perón meets representatives of the Sindicato de Vendedores de Diarios, Revistas y Afines, December 2, 1949

      12: Eva Perón distributes funds from the Fundación Eva Perón to the staff of La Prensa, June 11, 1951

      13: Eva Perón with the staff of La Prensa, May 23, 1951

      14: Edificio ALAS, location of the offices of Editorial ALEA

      Preface and Acknowledgments

      The research and writing of this book are bracketed by two events, one in Argentina, the other in Venezuela. While neither is directly related to the history of journalism in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, both bear upon my own approach to the topic in ways that deserve to be made explicit. This is more than an affirmation of the Crocean dictum that “all history is contemporary history”; it is also a confession of just how much the ghosts of the past haunt my understanding of the present.

      At about the same time that I boarded a plane in San Francisco to return to Buenos Aires and begin my initial research on the Argentine press, hired gunmen stopped a small car on a highway near the resort town of Pinamar in the province of Buenos Aires and brutally assassinated its driver. For the next two years, monthly marches denouncing that January 1997 murder brought tens of thousands of Argentines into the already chaotic streets of Buenos Aires. Public outrage only increased as forensic teams performed first one and then another autopsy, while indications that the police of the province of Buenos Aires had destroyed crucial evidence at the crime scene drew public suspicion to the very organization in charge of the investigation.

      At first, a simple black-and-white photograph of the victim found its way into every public corner of the city; within months, the eyes alone had become ubiquitous. The little-known José Luís Cabezas, handcuffed to the steering column of his car and shot twice before his assassins doused him with gasoline and set fire to his corpse, became a powerful and immediately recognizable symbol of both the disturbingly enduring legacy of state terrorism and the total impunity that powerful criminal interests seemed to enjoy in President Carlos Menem’s Argentina.

      Yet this still contentious case has an added element which, unlike the arguably even more serious crimes that jolted the country in those years, assured sustained media attention: Cabezas, a photojournalist, was clearly killed for exercising his profession. For the nation’s media workers, this was more than the murder of a man obviously dearly loved by his family, friends, and coworkers. The assassination of a colleague “in the line of duty” was compounded by a level of symbolic violence against Cabezas clearly intended to silence not just him, but all Argentine journalists.