of the press in its positive and universal sense: as a freedom for the expression of thought through the press, ostensibly open to use by all inhabitants of the republic regardless of citizenship, political affiliation, ethnicity, or gender. Article 32, added in 1860 as the province of Buenos Aires rejoined the Confederation, reinforced the terms of the earlier article by declaring that “the Federal Congress will not dictate laws that restrict the freedom of the press, nor establish federal jurisdiction over that freedom.”22 Born as a concession to inhabitants of the rebellious province who feared President Urquiza’s attempts to stifle the opposition press, article 32 defined press freedom in its negative form: as freedom from the dictates of state authorities. The Constitution of 1853 thus effectively placed press freedom in the realm of natural rights, both universally valid and prior to the constitution itself, while at the same time explicitly limiting the actions of the federal government with regard to the functioning of the press.
Still, while establishing the right of private individuals to exercise freedom of expression through the press, both articles contained ambiguities that helped shape the particular environment in which the Buenos Aires commercial press would grow. First, though article 14 declared the right to publish without prior censorship, it did so only “in conformity with the laws that regulate [its] exercise,” despite Alberdi’s more unequivocally antistatist inclinations.23 Until the 1930s, for the most part, these laws remained restricted primarily to offenses stipulated in the Argentine Penal Code that might be committed through the press: calumnia (libel), injuria (insult), and desacato (contempt of a public official).24 By holding the authors of published works answerable for offenses as subjective and murky as injuria and desacato, the qualifications drafted into article 14 thus established the possibility that press activity could, in fact, remain subject to legitimate state penal action despite constitutional prohibitions against prior censorship. As a result, the federal legal and legislative battles surrounding the press prior to the 1930s centered primarily upon the proper definitions and limits of violations of the Penal Code committed through the press.25 The possibility of litigation for these offenses—and the concrete cases of such litigation—marked a clear and constant limit to the role of the press within the emerging Argentine public sphere.
Second, article 14 did not guarantee freedom of expression, but rather a more limited right to publish “through the press” without prior censorship. Article 32 would reinforce this by focusing explicitly on libertad de imprenta, perhaps most accurately translated as the medium-specific “freedom of print” or “freedom of the printing press.” The national constitution, then, did not endorse a blanket right of Argentines to express themselves by any means, and in this Argentine constitutional law remained consonant with that of countries like Chile, Switzerland, and Belgium.26 Nor did the 1853 constitution establish the right of libertad de prensa (freedom of the press), with its institutional and ill-defined quasi-corporate connotations, even if that expression did come into common usage at least by the late nineteenth century. These issues transcended simple semantics and left newer media like radio, audio recording, and film in an indeterminate position vis-à-vis constitutional law by the time of their growing importance in the 1920s.27
This qualification of the right of expression by means of the press, finally, reinforced a corollary to article 32: if the federal Congress could not dictate laws preempting the exercise of expression through the medium of print, provincial legislatures remained bound only by the provisions of article 14. The subsequent federalization of the Argentine capital in 1880, then, effectively established multiple juridical universes for the national press: one in each of the Argentine provinces, where article 14 and the various press laws of provincial legislatures held sway; and another in the sparsely populated, peripheral National Territories together with the densely populated Federal Capital (the city of Buenos Aires proper), which fell under the administration of the federal government. In the city of Buenos Aires, then, any moves toward state regulation of the press would effectively clash with the constitutional constraints of article 32, and restrictions on the press remained far more controversial and difficult to establish—provided that the affected parties and their allies were powerful enough to mount a legal challenge. As a result, provincial journalists often found opposition to the actions of local officials much more problematic than did journalists in the city of Buenos Aires, even in periods of “intervention,” or direct rule by the federal government. Small, usually Left and labor publications of the Argentine capital, on the other hand, often did not have the means for legal defense against closures and harassment of dubious constitutionality, nor could they easily recover economically from quasi-legal police-imposed suspensions.28
The 1880 federalization of the city of Buenos Aires, by separating the nation’s most prosperous and populous city from the country’s most powerful province, effectively resolved many of the more contentious issues facing the federal nature and geographical balance of powers of the Argentine national state. With the relative subsiding of large-scale social conflict that the measure secured, the most pressing impediment to the rapid expansion of the Argentine economy receded. The subsequent economic boom, and the generation of unprecedented prosperity for many in the port city, provided an environment in which commercial newspapers could serve at once as catalysts and beneficiaries of an increasingly vibrant national economy.
At the same time, the creation of the Federal Capital also established a juridically and economically privileged territory for the emergence of the commercial press. The emergence and spectacular expansion of the Buenos Aires newspaper industry thus owes as much to a growing acceptance of the antistatist elements of Argentina’s liberal Constitution of 1853 as to the federalization of the national capital. This combination, coupled with the subsequent rise in the public influence of newspaper owners that it helped engender, allowed the negative interpretation of press freedom—as freedom from state regulation—to emerge as dominant, while the positive right of publication became increasingly displaced from private individuals to become a broader, quasi-corporatist, institutional right of “the press.” In the process, Buenos Aires newspapers themselves became integral elements of the liberal institutional and ideological hegemony that played such a crucial role in their emergence.29 Indeed, it is the rupture of that hegemony in 1930, with the military coup of September serving as both catalyst and symptom, that would ultimately undermine the broad consensus that had developed regarding the ideal character of the Argentine press.
The Structural Transformation of the Argentine Press
The rapid expansion of the press in the final decades of the nineteenth century, in fact, came coupled with a marked change in the practical character of journalism practice and the nature of newspaper institutions. If the explicitly political and bitterly polemical writing of the anti-Rosista exiles served as the foundation for Argentine journalism in the wake of Caseros, it is this latter tradition of periodismo faccioso (factional journalism) that would eventually give birth to the nation’s modern commercial press.30 Yet the dramatic economic and demographic changes of the Argentine fin de siècle entailed a quantitative and qualitative transformation of the Buenos Aires press that differentiated the twentieth-century commercial newspapers far more starkly from their predecessors. By the 1920s, a nineteenth-century press focused on partisan militancy had become Latin America’s largest commercial newspaper industry.
Indeed, the Argentine press in the years between the fall of Rosas in 1852 and the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 formed an integral part of the often violent confrontations over the final character of the Argentine state.31 More than a simple extension of political activity, the practice of journalism was intrinsically political, with the separation between time dedicated to writing and time dedicated to state activities determined less by individual interest than by fluctuations in a given faction’s access to state power. Thus, journalist-politicians like José Hernández viewed newspapers like El Nacional Argentino together with the ballot box as a single “battlefield,” and competition for readership as an appeal to the mobilizing potential of ideas. For Hernández, journalists simultaneously gave voice to and guided public opinion, while the journalist himself served as a kind
