Argentina: free press, for now

06 Apr 09 | Comment

From Raúl Alfonsín onwards, Argentina has done well to move on from the dark days of the generals. But is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government now threatening media freedoms? Andrew Graham-Yooll reports

Argentina’s five-year old Kirchner government has been accused of seeking to control the press and media, not by simple old-fashioned censorship, but by buying out its critics, who are branded ‘enemies’. The tool used is a set of friendly corporations that put up the money to pull the rug from under the critics, and the new proprietors are compensated with generous government funding in the form of state advertising.

The Kirchner regime, which has made the human rights trials outstanding from the dictatorship of the 1970s its most prominent banner, and won considerable favour in the international NGO community after elections in 2003, is keen to offer lip service to the advocates of the occasional trials of ancient torturers and military criminals, but officialdom wants to castrate criticism in the media.

Néstor Kirchner made a good start in 2003 when he appeared to encourage an access to information bill in Congress. An Article 19 director visiting Buenos Aires praised the access bill. But these proposals were allowed to die on the shelves of committee rooms. Néstor Kirchner never held a press conference in his four and a half years in office: his wife, Cristina Fernández, held a limited Q&A at the Olivos presidential residence on 2 August 2008. Government House journalists claim she has only walked into the press room once, and then to give them a pep talk on objective journalism.

So the forced resignation of Nelson Castro, a brain surgeon turned journalist, and one of Argentina’s most respected political commentators, on 2 February from his radio slot, ‘Points of View’ (Del Plata Radio), confirmed the government and the press were on a collision course. Castro was asked to quit (with a financial settlement) one year short of completing a three-year contract by his new proprietors, Electroingeniería, a Córdoba-based corporation run by friends of the government. The irony is that one of the heads of the company, Carlos Bergoglio, had told Castro at the start of the year that they wanted him to complete his contract, in spite of his criticism of the country’s president.

Castro had used his medical training to ridicule a report of presidential ill-health used to cancel a visit to Havana and Caracas. Apart from his radio programme, he had a TV slot on Thursday evenings, and a Sunday column in the newspaper Perfil.

Electroingeniería is an energy supplier which owns several dozen companies, and regularly wins public contracts for government constructions. It received assistance to buy a power carrier, Transener, from US owners, thereby preventing purchase by the Petrobras Brazilian oil utility. Its most recent purchase was the AM station, Del Plata Radio, where Nelson Castro was employed. Del Plata was sold by a successful TV producer and friend of the government. The new owners admit they have no background in media, but the government supplies the management.

‘The government has a one-track view of the media, it is an enemy that has to be beaten,’ Nelson Castro remarked in a discussion panel held on 21 February, after his removal.

The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) said it would not criticise the owner’s company rule, as it is the policy of the US-based association of publishers to respect the entitlement of proprietors to make corporate decisions. But while that is allowed in a classic capitalist environment, it hardly works where censorship or media control is taking new forms.

Neither is it reprehensible, for that matter, to fiddle the figures at the national statistics institute (INDEC). The opposition claims that the government has done for the last two years, to show cost of living levels below those of private analysts. While the press screams murder (mainly the conservative daily La Nación, and the bi-weekly Perfil), the accepted popular line is that all politicians lie, but some lie better than others.

Cristina Kirchner faces half-term parliamentary elections in October and the outlook is grim, with an opposition growing out of a wave of allegations of corruption and disenchantment caused by economic failings that preceded the international crisis.

It’s not all been bad, however. The human rights policy was a welcome change to the historic course of indifference towards the generals who had ruled Argentina in the last military dictatorship (1976-83); and the economy had recovered substantially after a run on banks and financial meltdown in 2001-2. Pensioners, for example, have not seen their pay rise so often in years. Trade unions were unabashedly favoured in all wage negotiations.

Before the Kirchners (now referred to as the Matrimonial Presidency) came to office in 2003, Néstor had been governor of Santa Cruz province, in Patagonia, for 11 years, and Cristina had been the province’s senator in the national congress. In Santa Cruz, Néstor Kirchner was notorious for knocking out unfriendly radio stations.

For example, the power supply was switched off in a neighbourhood where a critical FM station operated, with the result that most residents blamed the radio for being put in the dark, instead of accusing the government. Funny, perhaps, but not fun.

Since the rise of Néstor Kirchner from provincial governor to president, and his continued control of every move in the administration presided over by his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the unchanging the aim of the ‘Penguin’, as he is popularly called, has been to control the media. The methods are a little more subtle than burning cars, but not much. His friends front for him. There are six new and expanding media groups in Argentina’s ‘Constellation K’, as it is known. Only one of these, owned by businessman Daniel Hadad, controls media of influence. Others hold a diversity of magazine and newspaper titles, radio stations and websites.

The newspaper publishers association (ADEPA), which includes government friends and foes, started screaming demise when the national tax office (AFIP, in its Spanish initials) threatened major audits on several newspapers, especially outside of Buenos Aires. So what’s so wrong about being expected to pay taxes? Nothing, really, except that after years of indifference about the accounts of small provincial rags, these become the target of a policy of fund-raising for badly needed cash. ADEPA warned that small papers (never mind radio stations — the majority of FMs are illegal in Argentina) might fold. And the networks of friendly media proprietors welcome transfer of small organs in difficulty: they could be put on their feet with cash from government advertising.

Is there freedom of the press in Argentina? That’s the question to follow this listing of modern forms of limitations. Alfredo Leuco, a leading political commentator who writes for Perfil and runs an afternoon omnibus programme on an AM station that government chums tried to buy, remarked, ‘When I’m asked that I make a silly joke: I look at my watch say, “now, yes”. But the restrictions have never been so great since the restoration of democracy in 1983.’