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scenes from the press wars Crítica, after this, has disappeared from Argentine journalism. Its pistol-packing scribes, its criminal directors, its assault bands will be cleaned up by the police. Its machines have been left totally destroyed, and the front of the building says good and loud what the struggle was. The people will never again be shot in the back. —La Época, October 18, 1945 Few moments are as pivotal in modern Argentine history as the evening of October 17, 1945. The forced resignation of Juan Domingo Perón from the government and his subsequent detention by military officials on October 12 laid bare the fragility of the sweeping social transformation inaugurated less than two years earlier. As millions of Argentines mobilized in the early hours of October 17 to demand Perón’s release, it became clear that the Farrell regime had succeeded beyond expectation in building a popular base; ironically, however, it also became clear that this support remained contingent precisely upon the presence of Perón himself within the regime. The unexpected success of the working-class mobilizations of October 17 in gaining the release of Perón changed the balance of power within the nation, earning labor an unprecedented protagonism. It also set the stage not just for a continuation of the social reforms that had begun under the aegis of the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, but for their deepening under a constitutional Peronist regime. The crisis that had spurred that mobilization, however, also revealed important weaknesses in Perón’s approach to the media. The dramatic events surrounding October 17, 1945, quickly became the center of political ritual for what now became the Peronist movement proper, and have justly received more attention from scholars of Argentina than those of any other single date.1 Still, few have addressed more than anecdotally that evening ’s most violent episode: the siege of Crítica.2 As demonstrators dispersed 5 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 143 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 143 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM 144 / the fourth enemy after Perón’s emotional address from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, a large crowd made its way thirteen blocks down the Avenida de Mayo, where it stopped in front of the Crítica offices. In a confrontation that lasted nearly three hours, demonstrators laid siege to the building with Molotov cocktails and machine guns before finally forcing their way into the offices and setting fire to the Crítica machine room. When the exchange of gunfire between demonstrators, the police, and the building’s defenders finally ended, two men lay dead, nearly forty people were wounded, and forty-seven Crítica employees were detained.3 The paper’s director, Raúl Damonte Taborda, was already en route to Montevideo . The evening also left Crítica, the Spanish-speaking world’s most innovative and widely read evening newspaper, moribund. Despite the ferocity of the fighting at Avenida de Mayo 1333 and the extent of destruction caused by the onslaught on Crítica, historian Daniel James is the only scholar to seriously consider the nature and meaning of attacks on newspaper offices on October 17 and 18, albeit primarily in reference to worker mobilization in and around the city of La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires.4 As James argues, beyond reasons of political enmity, demonstrators saw the press, together with the universities, as the quintessential redoubts of a cultural and symbolic power exercised over and against them. In attacking newspaper offices, then, workers “attempted to assert their own symbolic power and the legitimacy of their claim for representation and a recognition of the social relevance of working class experience, values and organization within the public sphere.”5 This “secular iconoclasm” of pro-Perón demonstrators thus responded not just to the political stance of the Argentine press, but also to its clear failure to articulate faithfully the broader aspirations of the nation’s popular classes in its pages. That evening’s attacks on the press, then, signaled a symbolic rejection of private and exclusive control over the means of social communication, an unraveling of press claims of universal representation , and a dramatic assertion of demands for working-class access to expression through the press. In good measure, the siege of Crítica was a particularly explosive product of the stark disjuncture between long-standing ideas of what the press should...

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