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the fourth enemy If La Prensa was born a forum of ideas, it soon set that characteristic aside and structured itself as a purely commercial enterprise. —Congressman Antonio J. Benítez The press itself abolished freedom of the press with its own commercialization, putting itself at the service of oppression and exploitation. —La Época, April 12, 1951 The consolidation of the Peronist media project left the Argentine journalism landscape utterly transformed. In October 1945, at Perón’s moment of greatest crisis—and greatest political victory—the major Buenos Aires dailies had stood unanimously against him; five years later, most of those same papers had become his unconditional supporters. Reflecting the ongoing accumulation of power in Perón’s hands, even the disparate range of pro-Perón newspapers created in the midst of the political opening that followed the 1945 crisis had become subsumed within a disciplined, and increasingly homogenous, media framework set on solidifying that same centralization of power. In addition, the success of Perón’s steady drive toward an ever-increasing presence in the organs of “public opinion” expressed both a fundamental claim of his movement and a deeply held aspiration of its leader: Peronism would achieve not mere hegemony, but unanimity.1 Yet La Nación and La Prensa, the two dailies most closely tied to the social order that Peronists claimed to displace, daily belied the notion that full public consensus reigned in the New Argentina. Of the country’s major newspapers, only they remained defiantly out of reach, while Clarín, the small newcomer in the non-Peronist commercial press, maintained a quasi-oppositional form of “constructive engagement” with the Peronist government.2 Much to the con7 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 206 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 206 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM the fourth enemy / 207 sternation of Peronists, the circulation of these papers continued to rise, in good measure thanks to their position as opposition media in a press landscape that, despite official claims to the contrary, had grown increasingly univocal by 1950. Even more troubling for the Peronist government, La Prensa’s firm monopoly on classified advertising lent Gainza Paz’s intransigently antiPeronist newspaper a substantial readership among the Argentine popular classes—Perón’s natural constituency. The paper’s financial power, furthermore, continued to pose a challenge to a Peronist media project heavily dependent on both massive state subsidies and increasingly expensive imported newsprint. The absorption of most of the country’s major commercial dailies had done much to resolve a political problem for Peronism, but had failed to answer the basic question that had plagued those papers’ previous owners: how could the press weather the postwar financial storm without the cooperation of La Prensa? In fact, the financial crisis facing the newspaper industry only deepened, threatening to undermine the viability of Democracia and the Editorial ALEA papers just as Perón and his allies stood on the verge of consolidating their control of the commercial press. By mid-1949, La Prensa’s status as Latin America’s most powerful nongovernmental media corporation, which had protected the paper from Peronist pressures , now made it an increasingly enticing political and economic prize as the regime entered its crucial fifth year. Just as the owners of Crítica and Noticias Gráficas had needed the cooperation of Alberto Gainza Paz to stabilize the market situation of their newspapers, the new proprietors of those papers set their sights on the only other media organization left in the country that mattered : La Prensa. If the inability of the Peronist press to overcome the acute world newsprint shortage made stronger action against La Prensa an economic imperative, by late 1950 there were also a host of political reasons to take the Peronization of the Argentine press further. As the economic boom that had sustained Peronism began to falter, La Prensa’s political influence posed a growing threat to a regime that owed its existence to a set of redistributive social policies that were becoming untenable. Growing labor unrest, including an unprecedented wildcat printers’ strike and increasing militancy among railway workers, signaled labor’s waning enthusiasm for a government that had already begun to step away from its social commitments. That signs of exhaustion had already begun to appear in the Peronist economic project well before the presidential elections of 1952 only made continued working-class patronage of Gainza Paz’s newspaper that much more threatening...

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