published its first issue under the direction of Mariano Moreno on June 7, 1811. Though the junta explicitly created the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres not as a vehicle of private expression but as the mouthpiece of a still fragile provisional government in the midst of the violently contentious process of breaking the colonial link and fashioning a new state, Argentine journalists have long held the paper’s appearance as the birth of the national press and Moreno as the nation’s first journalist.9 Invocations of Moreno as the archetype of the Argentine journalist thus carry with them a legacy with an equivocal relationship to the antistatist conceptions of journalism practice that would become hegemonic later in the century.
The junta decree that laid the juridical basis for national press law similarly maintained a degree of ambivalence between the realm of private prerogative and the public tasks of state formation. Still, well into the twentieth century newspaper editors would point to the first two articles of the junta decree of April 22, 1811, as establishing the press as outside the realm of legitimate state regulation:
Article 1. All bodies [organizations] and private persons of whatever condition and state they might be, have the freedom to write, print, and publish their political ideas, without need for any license, revision, or approval prior to publication, under the restrictions and responsibilities expressed in the present decree.
Article 2. All present press courts, as well as the censorship of political works prior to their publication, are hereby abolished.10
The decree declared the individual action of publishing at once a “barrier against arbitrary actions by those who govern,” a source of public education, and “the only path to arrive at knowledge of true public opinion.” In this way, the junta decree established a latitude of publishing freedom that broke the restrictions enforced by the Bourbon colonial regime and promoted a significant democratization of public debate regarding the formation of what would become the postcolonial state.
However, the same decree restricted in important ways this freedom of private citizens to publish. If the decree did not require authors to sign their articles, it did insist that publishers record the authors’ identity so they could be held accountable in case of denunciations for acts of libel and licentiousness, writings that contradicted “public decency and good customs,” and any other “abuse of freedom of the press.” Similarly, article 6 asserted the necessity of prior censorship by ecclesiastical authorities with regard to writings on religious topics, while other articles of the decree loosely prohibited the “abuse of freedom of the press” and the publication of writing that was libelous, licentious, or contrary to public decency. To enforce these elements, a “Supreme Junta of Censorship” with ecclesiastical participation, established by article 13 of the decree, stood ready to “assure freedom of the press and contain at the same time its abuse.”11 Deán Gregorio Funes, author of the decree, justified these measures before the junta, explaining that “the liberty [libertad] to which the press has a right is not in favor of licentiousness [libertinaje] of thought.”12
Initial formulations of the juridical norms surrounding the Argentine press, then, embodied a blend of interpretations on the parameters of the press and the realm of state competence with regard to the circulation of information and opinion. On the one hand, the decree legally recognized the existence of a print public sphere, at once open to the participation of all residents of the rebellious territories and free from prior censorship.13 At the same time, however, the decree limited legitimate debate to “political ideas,” leaving discussion of questions of public morality open to official censorship and effectively ceding control over legal print debate on religious matters to the clergy precisely because of its vested interest in upholding certain aspects of Catholic doctrine. This latter element of the decree was hardly inconsequential, especially in an environment in which struggles over the nature and form of political authority as well as the rights and limits of republican citizenship—and thus also of the relationship between state and church—were becoming increasingly contentious.14 Essentially, even as the junta set the basis for a political press that could serve as a forum of political debate among an emerging political elite, it also retained the monitoring and regulation of the press within the legitimate realm of state and church activity. Not until 1821 and 1822, a decade after the junta’s initial decree, did authorities in the province of Buenos Aires enlarge the realm of the rights of private citizens to publish by enacting a set of laws affecting both the press and the process of secularization.15 The decree of April 1811 and its subsequent revisions thus stood together with the junta’s creation of the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres as an amalgam of disparate influences: the statist and Catholic legacy of Spanish colonial rule; emerging bourgeois conceptions of the separation of public and private rights; and the practical demands of erecting a new political order in the ashes of the old.16
If continued revisions of the April 1811 press decree reflected, for the most part, a trend toward expanding the legal latitude allowed in the press, they also represented a more pragmatic attempt to create a legal framework that authorities could actually enforce. This liberalization, however, proved short-lived. In May 1828, the Manuel Dorrego regime in the province of Buenos Aires sharply curtailed the right to “attack state religion” through the press and prohibited the use of satire to criticize the public actions and private “defects” of “any individual” under penalty of heavy fines.17 The rise of Juan Manuel de Rosas as governor of the province of Buenos Aires—with vast authority over both the province as well as the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata as a whole—only strengthened restrictions on the press. Indeed, while the Rosas dictatorship continued to allow some semblance of a public sphere, publishing became subject to increasingly tighter legal and de facto state and quasi-state control.18 The most vibrant press opposition to the Rosas regime, in fact, came from the journalism practice of writers who, like Domingo Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre, attacked the government from beyond the reach of the rosista state while in exile in Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia.19
Only the Unitario victory over Rosas at the battle of Caseros in 1852, together with the broader ascendancy of a more coherent political liberalism in the Río de la Plata and beyond, allowed a new and ultimately more stable juridical framework for the operation of the Argentine press. Delineating the relationship between state and press in a far clearer fashion than previous attempts, Argentine lawmakers devoted article 14 of the 1853 constitution to the question of public expression through the press, while the subsequent addition of article 32 in 1860 further limited the capacity of the federal government to impose restrictions on publishing activities. Together, articles 14 and 32 of the constitution addressed the positive and negative aspects of the ideal press-state relationship: article 14 stood as a positive definition of citizen rights with regard to publishing, while article 32 embodied a conception of the role of the press as necessarily free of state restriction.
Yet the drafters of the new constitution also attempted to reconcile a basic contradiction that Sarmiento himself had asserted plagued the functioning of the press in any republic: “without complete freedom of the press there can be neither liberty nor progress. But with it one can barely maintain public order.”20 To address this, not only did the drafters of the constitution allow provincial authorities significant latitude in determining local press law, but in doing so they also unlinked the rights of individuals to publish from the broader laws restricting libel and other aspects of the content of expression. In drawing a distinction between the private prerogative of citizens to publish and the public right of individuals to be protected from certain kinds of written attacks, the drafters of the new constitution sought to strike a new balance between the operation of a highly politicized press and broader political stability.
Article 14 of the 1853 constitution established that “all inhabitants of the Confederation enjoy the following rights in conformity with the laws that regulate their exercise; that is: … to publish ideas through the press without prior censorship.”21 Based on the draft constitution of liberal ideologue Juan Bautista Alberdi in his Bases y puntos de partida para la organización
