upon his entrance into national politics, the strength of the broader historical precedents and constraints within which Perón and the Peronists operated, and the shifting nature of Peronism over its first decade of existence. Similarly, to imagine “the press” as a coherent, passive, or helpless object of state intromission fails to account for the importance of deep, ongoing conflicts surrounding a socially powerful, institutionally diverse, internally fractured, and rapidly changing newspaper industry. The commonplace reduction of the Peronist transformation of the press to a manifestation of Perón and Eva Perón’s personal aspirations to power, finally, neglects what was both a crucial element in this particular process as well as a fundamental component in the broader unfolding of Argentine history in the second half of the twentieth century: the utopian appeal of Peronism as a force seemingly capable of resolving acute social contradictions, realizing long-neglected egalitarian promises of citizenship, and empowering Argentine workers in unprecedented—though ultimately ambiguous—ways.32
This book shares with other recent studies an emphasis on the articulation of a more heterogeneous “Peronist ideology” rooted not exclusively in the authoritarian Right but in the pragmatic incorporation of a broader array of political philosophy.33 Looking at the articulation of that ideology in relation to the press, however, brings me to place even greater emphasis on the ambiguous persistence of fragmented liberal currents in Peronist discourse.34 In its self-portrayal as at once revolutionary rupture with Argentina’s liberal past and final realization of the unfulfilled emancipatory promises of that same past, Peronism came to occupy a vast ideological spectrum. This study helps to show that the movement’s ability to manage the ambiguity of this stance owes much to an overarching set of contradictions in mid-twentieth-century Argentine political life. Well before the military coup of 1943, the nation’s established liberal political forces had long proven themselves either unable or unwilling to bridge the gap between the promises of egalitarian political citizenship that they repeatedly invoked and the increasingly stark reality of political and social exclusion. That they had also become entangled in the degeneration of even the most basic of formal democratic practices in the course of the 1930s only served to make that abstract crisis of legitimacy all the more specific and real. By late 1945, those same contradictions had also engulfed the Argentine commercial press, making it a powerful set of institutions whose primary ideological vulnerability lay not in the liberal norms upon which it rested, but in the press’s failure to embody those ideals convincingly in practice. As a result, Peronists found they could best challenge the legitimacy of the whole array of anti-Peronist newspapers less by directly confronting the liberal basis of journalism practice than by embracing and transforming it.
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
