power stood imperiled by a host of serious enemies. As he listed these enemies, the audience erupted in acclamation at mention of the fourth: the press. In the midst of the sweeping social transformation underway, at that March 1947 meeting the once powerful “fourth estate” of the old order formally became the besieged “fourth enemy” of the Peronist “New Argentina.”1
If those involved in the events of that evening grasped the inversion of the social hierarchy implicit in the workers’ symbolic occupation of the cultural sanctum of the oligarchy, they also understood that in decrying la prensa—the press in general—Perón was, in fact, railing against a specific newspaper: La Prensa, Latin America’s most powerful commercial daily. Only the collective refusal of Argentine workers to buy or advertise in the paper, Perón insisted, could halt its repeated “lies” and continuous “betrayal” of the national interest.2 Even as he spoke, government employees were already hard at work to drive home the severity of the threat posed by this “fourth enemy,” as well as to remove any doubt as to precisely which member of the press stood as the greatest menace. When the crowd poured out of the Teatro Colón and into the streets, they found the walls of downtown Buenos Aires freshly plastered with transcripts of the latest government radio commentary denouncing La Prensa as fundamentally anti-Argentine as well as ideologically, culturally, politically, and economically beholden to foreign interests.3
Fig. 1
Perón addresses public in the Teatro Colón opera house, March 8, 1947.
The boycott had little impact, despite Perón’s personal appeal. Still, tensions between the owners of La Prensa and the Peronist movement grew to fever pitch, while Argentines became yet more polarized and the economic situation of the press as a whole rapidly deteriorated. Finally, nearly four years after the Teatro Colón meeting, Peronist news vendors mounted a total strike against the paper. When one newsworker died and fourteen were wounded in the ensuing violence, the minister of the interior intervened, formally declaring La Prensa’s closure.4 Police and congressional investigations began as the paper’s owner fled to Uruguay. In April 1951, the Argentine Congress invoked a constitutional provision that empowered the body to seize private property of public interest. Immediately, La Prensa and all of its productive infrastructure passed into the hands of the executive power, to be used “in the general interest and social perfection of the Argentine people.”5
During the May Day celebrations two weeks later, Perón presented the union leaders who had organized the Teatro Colón gathering with the ultimate trophy: the newly expropriated La Prensa. A startlingly different newspaper soon hit the streets. Now property of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT)—the core of the Peronist movement—the new La Prensa had “ceased to be the capitalist instrument of a small group of proprietors to become the patriotic dominion of five million Argentine workers.”6 Just as the workers had occupied the space of elite culture on the night of March 7, 1947, they now ostensibly controlled what only months before had been the most powerful voice of that elite within the Argentine public sphere. From the Peronists’ “fourth enemy,” La Prensa had become, in the words of Perón himself, the “symbol of the New Press of the New Argentina.”7
Peronism and the Transformation of the Argentine Press
The expropriation of the newspaper produced shock waves felt well beyond Argentina. Yet, as momentous as the Peronist seizure of La Prensa proved in itself, it also marked the culmination of an even more dramatic transformation of the entire Argentine newspaper industry. With the addition of the morning paper, Perón and his associates now controlled eight newspapers in the city of Buenos Aires alone, including what had been not just Argentina’s, but Latin America’s, five largest dailies at the time of Perón’s election in February 1946.8 Through a series of violent confrontations, backroom deals, economic pressures, and legal actions between 1946 and 1951, Juan Domingo Perón had managed to fashion the vast majority of one of the world’s more extensive and developed newspaper industries into an enormous quasi-state media empire.
The present study traces this unparalleled transformation of the Argentine press from the crises of the 1930s to the height and dissolution of the region’s archetypal populist experiment in the mid-1950s. This book is as much a history of the disputes that permeated the Argentine commercial press in the years 1930 to 1955 as it is a study of a key aspect of the growth and consolidation of Peronism as the focal point of Argentine political life. It is the story of the nation’s major newspaper institutions, their proprietors, and the newsworkers who daily created the media in the midst of a series of often debilitating ideological, economic, and political crises. At the same time, it is an account of the conflict-ridden emergence of the Argentine military, Juan Domingo Perón, and the urban working class as the major protagonists of a social transformation more profound than even its architects imagined.
The press conflicts of these years have largely escaped careful scrutiny by scholars of modern Argentina, despite the wealth of literature on Argentine populism and the great significance that Peronists themselves placed on control of the press. Though passing reference to conflicts with La Prensa are frequent in histories of Peronism, modern Argentina, and Latin American journalism, scholars have tended to overlook the experiences of other major Argentine newspapers and have left the narrative put forth in the wake of Perón’s overthrow in 1955 largely unchallenged.9 In this view, the history of the press in the Peronist years has become little more than a manifestation of Juan Domingo Perón’s authoritarian, unerring, relatively effortless, and perhaps inevitable subjugation of the whole range of institutions of Argentine civil society. In turn, those who have more directly engaged the question of populism and the Argentine media, as well as those scholars with a more nuanced understanding of Peronism’s complexity, have either left the specific process by which Peronists came to control the commercial press underexplored or strayed little from that same interpretive framework.10 For scholars of Peronism, then, the evolution of the movement’s relationship with the press has tended to serve primarily as an illustrative anecdote that has little to do with the historical development of the Argentine press and everything to do with the widening sphere of Peronist power; scholars of the media—far fewer in number—have tended to view the Peronist transformation of the press essentially as an aberration imposed from without, a sudden authoritarian intromission into the otherwise progressive development of an internally coherent, autonomous press.11
Without doubt, the history of the Argentine press in the Peronist years is inseparable from the authoritarian tendencies of Perón, Eva Perón, and sectors of the Peronist movement. The military regime from which Perón emerged systematically silenced sectors of the press through strict censorship, the detention of journalists, and the withholding of government advertising. On several occasions, Peronist crowds violently attacked newspapers like La Prensa, Crítica, and El Mundo—most notably on the evening of October 17–18, 1945, the very night that gave birth to Peronism proper. Later, while eschewing overt censorship, the democratically elected Peronist government seized control of newsprint distribution and used bureaucratic measures to pressure the opposition press. State-run and sympathetic media mounted relentless propaganda campaigns to discredit opposing media. Even the decisive conflict between news vendors and the owners of La Prensa received open encouragement not just from broad sectors of the Peronist movement, but from President Perón and Eva Perón themselves. Finally, the practical consequences of the Peronist transformation of the press bore little resemblance to the rhetoric invoked for that transformation: it neither democratized the Argentine public sphere, nor did it create a newspaper industry that effectively served as a vehicle for the exercise of working-class citizenship. As Cristián Buchrucker has signaled, for all their differences, Perón’s creation of a large propaganda apparatus stands as one of the more striking similarities between Peronism and the European fascisms.12
To
