The Fourth Enemy: Journalism and Power in the Making of Peronist Argentina, 1930–1955

Introduction: From Fourth Estate to Fourth Enemy

The history of the Argentine people is the history of their liberties. The history of Argentine liberties is the history of the national press. —La Prensa, November 11, 1943 When Juan Domingo Perón announced his new government’s economic agenda from the stage of the Teatro Colón, the working men and women sitting in the posh seats of the famed Buenos Aires opera house could not miss the symbolic importance of the act. Not only was the Argentine president directly addressing Argentine workers “as compañero to compañero,” he was doing so from the cultural bastion of a national elite in clear retreat. Declaring his government “an extension of the working class in the Government House,” Perón warned the audience that their newfound political 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 introduction: from fourth estate to fourth enemy 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 1 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 1 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM 2 / the fourth enemy 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 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 conFig . 1 Perón addresses public in the Teatro Colón opera house, March 8, 1947. 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 2 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 2 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM introduction: from fourth estate to fourth enemy / 3 trolled 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...