POLITICS AND PRESS

Amigorena, newsprint, Hamlet

by Marcelo J. García

for the herald

There is no middle ground in war. Cold feet may equal cowardice and treason. A young and popular actor got caught this week in the middle of Argentina’s increasingly irrational media war, and was forced to duck friendly fire. Like Hamlet, the character he is playing this theatre season, Mike Amigorena was haunted by the ghost of doubt and decided to walk out, halfway through the process, of El Pacto (‘The Pact’), a TV miniseries making fiction out of the real life case of the foundation of the country’s largest — and virtually monopolistic — newsprint company, Papel Prensa.

Amigorena’s was not even the main character fictionally but the main character politically: Beto, the villain CEO of a huge media conglomerate. Amigorena shot his lines for eight of the total 13 chapters of the series before parting company with the producers. Any resemblance with reality was no coincidence: Beto pretended to be no other than Héctor Magnetto, the CEO of Argentina’s largest media group, Clarín, and the government’s number one public enemy.

Papel Prensa is one chapter of the government’s brawl with Argentina’s two largest newspapers, the best-selling, middle market Clarín and the conservative broadsheet La Nación. The story of Papel Prensa includes a sin of origin, which condenses the convoluted Argentina of the 1970s. Born to an import substitution industrial plan masterminded by an outgoing dictator in 1969, the project was stained by the internecine squabbling of one of the bloodiest decades in the country’s history, all the way through the actual inauguration of the plant in the Buenos Aires province town of San Pedro in 1978. Stranger than fiction, the saga includes young multi-millionaires with alleged ties to guerrillas, deaths in mysterious plane crashes, deserted public tenders and shady business interests from various sides. In the end, the company landed in the hands of only three newspapers, Clarín, La Nación and La Razón (now owned by Clarín). The state was and still is a minority stakeholder in the newsprint company. The papers’ main sin was both seeking business with the established rulers of the time and (worse than that) the subordination of their editorial agendas to those businesses.

But that was then, and this is now. Last year, the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner unearthed the saga to write a new chapter of its manifold confrontation with Clarín, started by the 2008 conflict with the heavyweight farming sector that peaked in 2009, when Congress passed government-sponsored legislation to reform Argentina’s broadcast industry. In August 2010, the government unveiled a 20,000-page-plus report pompously entitled The Truth about Papel Prensa. The President presented evidence that she said showed Papel Prensa had been purchased via human rights violations in 1976-77 and also that the papers had since then resorted to unfair trade practices to expand their market share to the detriment of other newspapers. Clarín and La Nación account for more than half of the Argentine newspaper business, market share-wise. The government submitted the report to the courts, and the case is now entangled in a legal cobweb over jurisdiction.

El Pacto seeks to turn that story into prime-time television material. The series, which was to air in the private channel América 2 starting this week, is one of the 10 projects sponsored by the government as part of a TV content-generation policy. Television fiction has played an important role over the last few years in getting human and social rights agendas to the big public: The series Montecristo in 2006 and the miniseries Televisión por la Identidad in 2007 contributed to creating awareness about the search by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo for children born in captivity and abducted by the 1976-83 dictatorship (Amigorena actually played the part in Televisión por la Identidad of Alfredo Astiz, the notorious Navy "dirty warrior"). Vidas Robadas in 2008 made fiction out of the story of Susana Trimarco, a woman who has been for years searching for her daughter Marita Verón, allegedly abducted by a ring of human traffickers. All these stories were written by the same team, led by Marcelo Camaño, who also authored El Pacto.

New communication technologies might be thriving, but television continues to have the greatest popular impact. A study conducted by the Latin American Advertising Council (Lamac) said that Argentines watch 5-6 hours of television a day, almost double than the global average. Allocating State money to the production of TV content can be healthy, as shown by the quality cultural channel Encuentro and the children’s channel PakaPaka. El Pacto’s role in the government’s more short-term political agenda of confrontation with the leading papers, however, makes this new project less worth of praise.

Amigorena said he left because he felt "uncomfortable" with the political implications of the character. "This is not how I work. I am not a militant," said the actor. Before and after his words, there was (too much) talk of "pressure" allegedly exerted on the actor by his "friends" in Clarín and La Nación. The actor said none of that was true and that he had "only realized later in the process what I had agreed to do." Amigorena did not want to be Orson Welles making a Citizen Kane out of Héctor Magnetto. And he is perfectly entitled, as his Hamlet performance may have taught him, to hold his peace about his reasons.

Source: Buenos Aires Herald