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the triumph of silence [It is necessary] to consider the social function served by the press as an activity of public interest and to proceed, therefore, with its adequate regulation. —Decree 18.407, December 31, 1943 For the second time since the world crisis began in 1930, the city of Buenos Aires filled with the sounds of sporadic gunfire, tanks, sirens, and marching soldiers while thick smoke poured from burning buses and streetcars. Jubilant civilians occupied the Plaza de Mayo, embracing passing soldiers in appreciation and rushing the entrance to the Casa Rosada in excitement. Yet the success of the military coup of June 4, 1943, depended less on these open displays of force and spontaneous civilian support than on what was neither seen nor heard publicly. In contrast to the deft political maneuvering of General Justo, Castillo had embraced clumsy political fraud, open corruption, and increasing repression, exhausting whatever tenuous democratic legitimacy the Concordancia governments might have enjoyed in the 1930s. As troops began to move against his government, President Castillo stood bereft of even rhetorical defense of his right to govern. “It was the triumph of silence,” wrote one La Nación journalist: the active silence of the secret GOU military lodge that had organized the coup, and the passive silence of the regime’s would-be defenders.1 The coup marked the final dissolution of a political arrangement in agonizing disarray even as it opened possibilities for a profound transformation of Argentine politics. By the time he had begun to prepare the path for his even more unpopular successor, Castillo had not only undermined the ability of the Concordancia to govern, but he had inadvertently granted broad de facto legitimacy to virtually any military faction that might engineer his removal from power. As a result, few failed to embrace the call for political renewal issued by the new authorities, even if Argentines remained sharply divided on 3 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 91 18130-Cane_FourthEnemy.indd 91 11/3/11 3:36 PM 11/3/11 3:36 PM 92 / the fourth enemy why that renewal was needed and what it implied. For supporters of liberal democracy, the problem lay not in the Argentine state’s nineteenth-century institutional structures, but in their abuse and disregard by government authorities ; the ouster of Castillo was a necessary step toward the restoration and honest implementation of the Constitution of 1853. For right-leaning opponents , the corruption of the Castillo regime and growing political polarization were not the cause of the nation’s political and social degeneration, but mere symptoms of liberalism’s inherent decadence.2 The majority in the newspaper industry placed themselves firmly in the former group. With their professional practice already tightly restricted, scores of journalists detained, and newspapers repeatedly suspended and intervened, the editors and journalists at most Buenos Aires commercial dailies greeted the military movement with guarded optimism. For them, Castillo’s removal from power opened the possibility of reversing the inroads made by official censors and the police into what journalists regarded as their exclusive competence : public opinion formation. The new regime’s promise of a swift return to full constitutional rule implied the definitive end of state intervention in press operations and the lifting of the state of siege. The conspirators of June 4, then, seemed ready to perform a necessary task in protecting the “free press” from state interference. As a result, early military assertions of devotion to constitutional principles largely met with the press’s enthusiastic approval, as did the de facto government’s project of “cleansing” tainted and untrustworthy elements from the political class. Yet if official pronouncements in the days and weeks following the coup provided ample rhetorical fuel for optimistic speculation by newspaper editors and journalists, the new government’s actions belied the military rulers’ avowed constitutionalist tendencies. In its first six months, the new regime enforced the terms of the state of siege—including restrictions on the press— even more strictly than Castillo, while its prohibition of the Buenos Aires underworld lunfardo slang necessitated the creation of radio-friendly alternative versions of popular tangos.3 Newspaper closures and the vigilance of government censors only increased as the de facto government became more entrenched . Viewing the armed forces as the only national institution untainted by the corruption of the previous thirteen years, the military regime consistently positioned the state as a barrier between a fragile social order and the “indiscretion of the journalist.” Rather than simply...

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