The Fourth Enemy

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

James Cane

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780271067841
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The rise of Juan Perón to power in Argentina in the 1940s is one of the most studied subjects in Argentine history. But no book before this has examined the role the Peronists' struggle with the major commercial newspaper media played in the movement's evolution, or what the resulting transformation of this industry meant for the normative and practical redefinition of the relationships among state, press, and public. In The Fourth Enemy, James Cane traces the violent confrontations, backroom deals, and legal actions that allowed Juan Domingo Perón to convert Latin America's most vibrant commercial newspaper industry into the region's largest state-dominated media empire. An interdisciplinary study drawing from labor history, communication studies, and the history of ideas, this book shows how decades-old conflicts within the newspaper industry helped shape not just the social crises from which Peronism emerged, but the very nature of the Peronist experiment as well.

Part 1

1

THE FOURTH ESTATE

Buenos Aires. Callao and Rivadavia: “Noticias Gráficas!” “Crítica!”

And the whirlwind of the newsboy’s cries —dark, dark—,

that opens like a fan and invades the streets of the city:

Like a lance.

Like an arrow.

—José Portogalo, 1935

Nothing moves in a civilized nation if the printed press does not work. … The highest ideals, the most honorable aspirations for the common good have been sown, cultivated, and harvested through the columns of newspapers.

—La Nación, September 1, 1935

Disconcertingly well-stocked periodical kiosks crowded the sidewalks of mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, stuffed with the enormous variety of the morning’s fruits—the afternoon’s detritus—of Latin America’s largest publishing industry. With over seven hundred different Spanish-language newspapers and magazines together with sixty-seven dailies and periodicals in Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Armenian, Greek, German, and a host of other languages, all competing for readers’ attention, the sheer volume and variety of publications could easily overwhelm any curious pedestrian.¹ As two foreign journalists working at the English-language Buenos Aires Herald in the 1940s remarked, “the newsstands of Buenos Aires have for years offered a bewildering assortment of newspapers printed locally in such a babel of languages that I never did learn to recognize more than a third of them, let alone read them.”² Earlier visitors to the city like Georges Clemenceau and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez highlighted the technological complexity and wealth of the periodical press, proclaiming newspaper institutions like La Prensa and La Nación the embodiment of an obviously vibrant and optimistic Argentine modernity.³

The rise of the Buenos Aires press in the first decades of the twentieth century marks more than a simple quantitative expansion of publishing capacity. In Argentina, as in many other parts of the world, newspapers underwent a dramatic transformation from their roots in the partisan publications of the mid–nineteenth century to emerge as a qualitatively distinct new means of social communication. The twentieth-century press, though forged in the heat of the previous century’s political agitation, was shaped less by formal partisan disputes than by a rapidly expanding market of readers and advertisers. In this new world of commercial journalism, explicit identification with a specific, politically inscribed circle of readers acted less to guarantee an audience than to constrain a newspaper’s potential market. Overt partisan militancy increasingly ceded to “general interest” reporting and class-based cultural appeals in the ceaseless effort to attract what appeared an ever-expanding readership.

This transformation implied an important refashioning of the whole network of relationships that constituted the Buenos Aires press. Where partisan political engagement and journalism practice had been intimately intertwined in the nineteenth century, the proprietors and journalists of the new press professed their autonomy from the vagaries of explicit partisan interests and—most emphatically—state power. Drawing on the rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse market of readers and advertisers, the owners of the commercial press forged a new relationship not only between political society and the newspaper industry, but between individual newspapers and their readership. Press and public increasingly faced each other as commodities, their relationship driven less by partisan militancy than by the more mundane forces of market exchange. In the process, Argentina’s commercial newspapers became a particularly complex amalgam of journalistic types: the “objective” reporting of the independent press—independent of both state power and organized political factions—allegedly mirrored reality, while editorialists sought at once to reflect and shape the interests and opinions of Argentine society as a whole.⁴

At the same time, the institutional structure of the press increasingly reflected the general contours of the Argentine economy. Not only did newspaper production necessitate progressively greater investments in imported capital goods and inputs like technologically advanced rotary presses, newsprint, and ink, but the transformation of the press demanded a reworking of newspaper relations of production. In the Buenos Aires of the mid-1920s, the politician-proprietors of nineteenth-century journalism, who had founded newspapers as “combat posts” in the defense of private economic and political interests, had largely given way to journalistic entrepreneurs whose primary business interests sprang from the newspapers themselves. As the ranks of politician-proprietors ceded to newspaper capital proper, the press’s rapid economic development and increasing technological complexity, as well as the growing thematic diversity of newspaper content, demanded a corresponding expansion of the ranks of wage earners specialized in different aspects of newspaper composition, production, and distribution. By 1930, Argentina’s commercially insignificant partisan press of the nineteenth century had become an economically powerful, capital-intensive, newspaper industry employing thousands of wage-earning journalists, printers, managers, and distributors.

This emergence of a new kind of press carried with it a rising dissonance between idealized conceptions of the social role of journalism and the commercial practices of the modern Argentine newspaper industry. The press’s juridical bases centered upon an understanding of newspapers as vehicles of citizen participation in an idealized public sphere, with the press as a whole acting as a fourth estate alongside and balancing the other representative institutions of republican governance. This conception, firmly rooted in nineteenth-century liberalism, held the economics of newspaper operations as incidental. Indeed, newspapers had rarely proven profit-making ventures in the course of the nineteenth century, and economic self-sufficiency was usually as surprising as it was short-lived.⁵ Yet, by the 1920s, not only had newspaper proprietors begun to wring spectacular wealth from an activity that for ideological reasons lay beyond the margins of the Argentine commercial code, but the commercial transformation of the newspaper industry had left the relationship between the ideological bases of journalism practice, press-related jurisprudence, and the actual functioning of the newspaper industry increasingly strained. The multiple fissures that had begun to open in the Argentine newspaper industry in the course of this transformation were precisely what would fuel the press conflicts of the 1930s and, ultimately, of the Peronist years.

The Legal Environment of the Argentine Press

The ideological roots and legal precedents of Argentine journalism are tangled with ambiguities more pronounced and more complex than the dominant, romanticized view of national press history allows.⁶ Rather than marking an abrupt and total rupture with an emphatically statist colonial political philosophy, the initial moves to create what would become the Argentine national press retained crucial aspects of the previous views of the realm of state prerogative, and thus of the relationship between the state and the means by which information is created and distributed. Both the Argentine press and early press law necessarily emerged in a moment in which, as Jorge Myers has argued, “the principal ideological traditions that have shaped the political vocabularies of the twentieth century … had still not achieved a full crystallization.”⁷ Indeed, in the chaotic first years of the republic, ideological clarity often served only to limit the range of options open to those attempting to establish a new political order in the wake of the dissolution of the old. Even if the Constitution of 1853 created a more stable juridical basis for journalism practice, the charter also incorporated new elements of uncertainty. Not surprisingly, each of the multiple parties to twentieth-century press conflicts could find ample raw material and historical precedents for their arguments by invoking the nineteenth-century ideological, institutional, and juridical beginnings of the national press.

Based as much in the immediate political exigencies of national state formation as in the realm of private political expression, the Argentine press’s moment of birth embodies these profound ambiguities. While informational hand-copied gazetas circulated in Buenos Aires even before the city became the seat of a new viceroyalty in 1776, commercial print journalism began with the appearance in 1801 of El Telégrafo Mercantil, Rural, Político, Económico e Historiográfico del Río de la Plata.⁸ The first regular periodical of the republic, however, had its origins as an integral part of the nascent national state: at the behest of the ruling junta, the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres 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 sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: From Fourth Estate to Fourth Enemy
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Conclusion: Journalism and Power in the New Argentina
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index