ARGENTINA: The Burial of La Prensa

Dictator Juan Peron, always at pains to keep his dirty work legal, executed a maneuver last week that gave the sanction of the law to the strangling of La Prensa. By terms of the law, the great independent newspaper was expropriated by the government.

To frame up a case, a Peronista-packed Parliamentary Commission had dug through La Prensa’s files for a month in search of irregularities. Pickings were evidently slim. The worst crime the commission could find to charge against the newspaper was that it used the United Press news service, and paid the U.P. $8,000 a week; that proved that La Prensa was a foreign-bossed enterprise.*

A few brave Argentine voices protested publicly against the expropriation. “Liberty is on trial—not the fate of a newspaper alone, but the fate of the country itself is in balance,” cried opposition Deputy Arturo Frondizi. He was howled down.

After the bill passed, La Nation, the country’s last surviving major independent newspaper, once again took its life in its hands to denounce the Peron regime for violating “the categoric constitutional precept which prohibits Parliament from passing laws which restrict the freedom of the press.”

No Argentine had thought that such a thing could happen in his country, said La Nation. “Nevertheless, we find ourselves confronted with a fait accompli. A great voice has been silenced. But its echo will continue vibrating in the hearts of all those who love liberty.” Though the authorities might take over La Prensa’s assets, they could never acquire “its intellectual prestige, its public confidence . . . We must believe that the independent truth and devotion to the national interest which always distinguished La Prensa of yesterday will return again to be respected and blessed in La Prensa of tomorrow.”

* The commission solemnly reported to the Argentine Congress that the U.P., along with the Associated Press, “controls all information and nearly all thoughts spread throughout the world. What La Prensa gives its readers, with the exception of a few editorials, is not the thoughts of La Prensa but the thoughts of the United Press. The thought-out news [articles] manufactured by the United Press … are the thoughts of bankers, industries and powerful commercial interests. The U.S. people are also under this yoke, and their leaders are threatened by its enmity. That is why Truman has said he has four or five punches in store for American newspapermen.”