The End of Press Freedom in Argentina?

Certain sections of the international media are going mildly berserk about press freedom in Argentina. The headline in this Miami Herald story informs readers that the government has taken over a key paper mill, which the story below softens a little to it having merely “moved to take over the country's largest newsprint mill”. It then goes on to quote an opposition politician talking of the government’s “unlimited authoritarianism”. El País of Madrid has an editorial, headlined “Silencing Critical Voices”, which says that the government claims that the previous owners of the Papel Prensa paper mill were forced to sell it to the present ones while being tortured. It also claims that the government wants to pass a law nationalizing it.

Is all of this true? The short answer is, “no”. On Tuesday August 24th President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner presented a report containing the results of an investigation that she ordered to be carried out into Papel Prensa. What’s Papel Prensa? It’s the monopoly provider of newsprint in Argentina and it’s owned by the newspaper La Nación, the Clarín media group which runs the newspaper of the same name and the Argentine state. Imagine wanting to buy newsprint in the USA and having to get it from a monopoly dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the Washington Post and you get the idea.

The government investigation confirmed what everybody interested in recent Argentine history knew already; the current owners of Papel Prensa acquired control of it at the bloodiest hour of Argentina’s 1976 – 1983 military dictatorship when Lydia Papeleo, the widow of David Graiver, the Jewish banker who owned the paper mill until he died in an air accident in 1976, was terrorized into signing it over to its present owners. Shortly afterwards she and other members of her family were kidnapped by the dictatorship and savagely tortured by agents of the state convinced that the widow of a Jewish banker would have access to infinite amounts of money that she could be forced to hand over and could inform them in depth about the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against Catholic Argentina.

The report also details the monopoly practices which over the last 34 years have allowed the Clarín group and La Nacíon to grow at the expense of their rivals and prevent new ones from emerging. And what did the President Fernández de Kirchner say she was going to do about all this? Inform the courts of the report’s findings with regard to possible crimes committed by the present owners of Papel Prensa in the course of their acquisition of it and send a bill to Congress (where the government is in a minority in the Chamber of Deputies and lacks a reliable majority in the Senate) that would declare the production and distribution of newsprint in Argentina to be of national interest, a move which would allow for greater government regulation of the sector. So no nationalization and no claims that the previous owners were actually being tortured when they were made an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Here in Argentina the media outlets controlled by La Nacíon and the Clarín Group have reacted as one might expect given that their monopoly interests are being threatened for the first time since the fall of the last dictatorship. They have accused the government of every conceivable sort of manipulation and abuse in the preparation of the report and of being determined to crush the press in Argentina and maintain itself in power permanently.

But how to explain the similar reaction of papers such as El País and the Miami Herald? Enthusiastic supporters of the government would say that it’s a reaction to what they see as its revolutionary economic policy which has the running dogs of global neo-liberalism cowering in fear as far away as Miami and Madrid. If only it were so. This government, like the previous one led by the president’s husband, has certainly annoyed some foreign business interests by its actions but it has also gone to great lengths to please others, especially those related to the mining and petroleum industries.

I suspect that the excessive reaction abroad to Tuesday’s announcements has more to do with a condescending and somewhat Orientalist attitude to politics and society here. As Argentina forms part of South America events tend to be interpreted through a lens that sees everything as tropical, disorganized, loud and colorful. Nice people, of course, but they don’t really know too much about democracy and they’re always looking for a strong leader to keep order. In this regard it’s notable the frequency with which Argentina is compared to Venezuela, a country whose capital is more than 3000 miles from Buenos Aires and with which, apart from the Spanish language, it has little in common.

Does all of this mean there’s nothing to worry about as regards freedom of the press in Argentina? Unfortunately it does not. President Fernández de Kirchner is obviously not being motivated purely by the public interest in taking on the power of La Nacíon and, especially, the Clarín group. While the former has always opposed her government, as it did that of her husband the latter was, until relatively recently, her ally. Instead of exaggerating the extent of the measures being taken against the Clarín group a more valid criticism would be to signal just how comfortable with it the supposedly leftist governments of the president and her husband were for so long. Careful scrutiny of the bill to be sent to Congress and any decisions taken by the courts with regard to the owners of La Nacíon and the Clarín group will be necessary.

It must also be remembered that the government distributes official publicity in a manner that blatantly favors media outlets sympathetic to it and that the state media presents an unfailingly rosy view of the government and its initiatives but also borne in mind that it has made changes to the libel laws that make it easier for journalists to criticize politicians and other public officials without the risk of being sued.

In this case, as in so many others, attempts to explain Argentine politics on the basis that the Kirchners are either the harbingers of a new populist-socialist dawn or a Southern Hemisphere version of Nicolae Ceauşescu and Elena Ceauşescu are based either on mental laziness, wishful thinking or the deployment of crude stereotypes about politics and society in Latin America.

Eamonn McDonagh is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.