History of Censorship in South America

Description: Western Hemisphere continent containing more than twenty independent nations

Significance: Many of the independent countries of South America have retained the legacy of government and church control over information as a way to ensure uniformity of thought and action

The people of South America have experienced censorship in many forms over the centuries. Beginning with the Incas, and continuing through the colonial period into the national era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those who have held ecclesiastical or political power have tried to control freedom of expression. While the form of censorship has changed, the goal has not: to enforce orthodoxy. Pluralism has not often been recognized as a desirable goal in South America, and opposition has rarely been loyal to established institutions. As a result, church and state have exercised their powers to limit freedom of speech, press, radio, film, and television.

Precolonial and Colonial Periods

During the fifteenth century the Incas, with their capital in Cuzco, high in the Andes, began to conquer most of the peoples of what became modern Peru, Ecuador, and portions of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Two policies enforced by Inca rulers had the effect of limiting the actions and speech of the conquered peoples. The first of these policies was that of resettlement. Those defeated by the Inca were removed from their towns and villages and resettled in other parts of the empire. The goal was to destroy the identity of conquered tribes so that they would not rebel and would eventually blend with other peoples under Inca rule. The second policy assisted in this effort by banning local languages and enforcing the Inca language, Quechua, as the official language of the empire.

When the Spanish arrived and began their conquest of the Inca Empire in the 1530s, their goals were to enlarge their king’s domains and to bring the American Indians into the Christian church. When the Inca capital of Cuzco was captured, Inca temples were pulled down and churches constructed on their sites, symbolizing the suppression of earlier religious beliefs by Christianity. Through methods that included loving guidance and harsh punishments, natives were prohibited from worshiping their gods and instructed in Christian beliefs.

Spanish settlers were restricted by both the state and the church from obtaining printed material thought to be sinful or corrupt. The royal decree of April 4, 1531, prohibited the importation to the Indies of all romances and books other than those of a religious or moral nature. The Inquisition and the Casa de Contratacion, or Board of Trade, in Seville, were responsible for judging the value of written works sent to Spain’s colonies. Many prohibited works reached the Americas, however, because oversight was lax. During the period of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, most of the works of the French philosophes, although banned, were readily obtainable in the Americas, and often found in the libraries of church or government officials. Many of these works praised individual liberties and were critical of censorship. While the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were banned by the government because of their revolutionary nature, they too could be found throughout South America, and influenced leaders of the independence movements.

Nineteenth Century

South American countries freed themselves from Spain in the early nineteenth century, in most places, through wars of liberation. In the aftermath of independence, conflicts erupted among military leaders, called caudillos, who vied for control of the state, and governments were faced with armed opposition. In this atmosphere, newspapers were most often published for their polemics rather than news, and the dictators responded harshly to their critics. Perhaps one of the most effective and colorful such dictators was the Argentine, Juan Manuel de Rosas who, between 1835 and 1852, established a method of control over the population that embodied censorship and terror. Official documents were printed on government stationary which had in its letterhead a call for death to the Unitarist opposition. A secret police enforced the dictator’s will through assassinations, leaving victims in the street with their throat cut as an animal in the slaughterhouse. Rosas also used symbolism to control opposition. Anything blue, the color of the Unitarists, was prohibited in public. Argentines, to show their loyalty to Rosas, had to wear red ribbons and hang red banners from their homes or stores. Liberty, in Rosas mind, led to unrestricted license, so the only education permitted was controlled by the church, and the press was restricted.

The use of the press as a partisan tool, however, was not restricted to dictators. Politicians in the nineteenth century regarded newspaper editors and reporters as purveyors of an ideological point of view rather than objective journalists. The great statesman and president of Argentina, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, used the presses under his control to vilify his enemies.

Colombia’s president in the early 1800s, and hero of the independence movement, Francisco de Paula Santander, attempted to enact liberal legislation to restrict the power of the church. However, he also put pressure on the publisher of a liberal newspaper to cease publication after it had called for the suppression of all monasteries and caused the president political embarrassment.

Liberal regimes during the nineteenth century in Colombia passed laws to abolish libel and do away with restrictions on the free exchange of ideas in printed form. The Constitution of 1853, written by the liberals, abolished religious censorship, and the Constitution of 1863, another liberal document, abolished all restrictions on the freedom of speech. The Conservative Party, however, gained control of the government and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, began to silence opposition newspapers through occasional crackdowns. The Roman Catholic church in Colombia favored the Conservative Party and at times threatened excommunication or other religious penalties to those who voted for, or even read the newspapers printed by, the Liberal Party or dissident Conservatives.

Twentieth Century

Many South American countries endured dictatorships and repressive military regimes during the twentieth century. One of the most repressive military regimes in the twentieth century was that of General Augusto Pinochet who headed the junta that overthrew President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The Chilean military rounded up thousands, tortured and killed many hundreds, and kept political prisoners in jail for years. Many Chileans fled into exile in the face of Draconian measures.

The government of Juan Perón in Argentina attacked newspapers which opposed his government. In 1951, after denying sufficient newsprint for the paper to be published, La Prensa, the most prestigious daily newspaper in Buenos Aires, was taken over by state-dominated unions. The government also banned foreign journals which were critical of Perón. Another method of stopping newspapers was employed by conservatives in Bogota, Colombia, in the 1970s. There, the liberal newspaper El Periodico was punished for its political views by restricting its revenues. This was accomplished not by the government itself, but through private citizens who withheld their advertising to silence the newspaper.

Labor unions and working class organizations were often limited in their activities and their freedom of expression. At the beginning of the twentieth century strikes invariably led to police or army intervention on behalf of employers. Workers by law were not permitted to organize or to strike and their press was censored or seized. La Protesta, the anarchist daily in Argentina, was often the target of police.

In Brazil, the 1937 constitution establishing the Estado Novo, or corporate New State, under Getulio Vargas banned all strikes, and union activity was more tightly controlled by the government. Employees were forbidden from owning newspapers, magazines, or radio stations. In addition, a Department of Press and Propaganda was created to censor newspapers.

In 1964 a military coup ended civilian government in Brazil for nearly two decades. Military governments passed laws that restricted political expression as well as freedom of the press. In 1968 the government of Artur de Costa e Silva tightened press censorship and suspended the right of habeas corpus for those accused of political crimes through Institutional Act Number 5. This led to the suspension of political rights for 294 people, among them congressional deputies, mayors, and journalists. Opposition was not permitted, and in 1973 the prestigious daily newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, Jornal do Brasil, was closed by the military government. In 1979 a National Security Law established heavy penalties for criticizing the government: thirteen years in prison for “subversive propaganda.” In the face of such sustained pressures, much of the media in Brazil managed to survive only through self-censorship, avoiding topics that were sure to produce a reaction by the government.

Media Censorship

By the mid-twentieth century South American governments had to contend with more than newspapers, and acted to control broadcast media. Television presented a powerful way to inform or entertain as well as a means of government propaganda. To counter widespread opposition to the military regime inBrazil, government-controlled radio and television spread propaganda about the successes of the regime. Other countries passed legislation to license broadcast media and in some cases, to nationalize it. In Argentina, military-dominated governments of the late 1930s and early 1940s censored radio stations by denying them license renewal, and Perón’s regime would eventually nationalize the industry, making all those who worked in broadcasting employees of the state. The Falcao Law in Brazil, in force for the elections of 1978 and 1982, restricted access to the media by political parties for two months prior to elections. In Colombia, where democratic regimes vied for power in relatively free elections, the government reserved the right to censor telecommunications during what it considered to be periods of national emergency. A Statute for the Defense of Democracy and amendments to the right of habeas corpus were enacted in 1988, at the height of the conflict with the drug cartels, to maintain public order in Colombia.

Films and performing arts have also been censored in South American countries. The Last Temptation of Christ could not be shown in movie theaters in Colombia because of church opposition. In Argentina, Last Tango in Paris was prohibited as pornographic, and Jesus Christ Superstar was not shown after a bomb went off outside one theater. The opera Bomarzo by the world-famous Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, premiered in Washington, DC, because it was forbidden to be performed in Argentina by the military government.

In the last decade of the twentieth century some South American nations achieved democratically elected regimes, which respect the rights of their citizens to a free press and expression of ideas. Nevertheless, the tradition of government control and censorship, especially in times of conflict, remained.

For example, in 2007, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declined to renew television station RCTV's license for public broadcasting, forcing the station to air only on cable. Three years later, Chávez ordered cable providers to cease airing the station after it refused to televise his entire speeches. Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has been in direct conflict with the largest media conglomerate in the nation, Grupo Clarin, ever since she passed a media law in 2009 that aims to prevent companies from monopolizing large shares of the market. While proponents have argued that it supports diversification, critics claim that it is designed to stifle dissenting views, such as those that had been expressed by Grupo Clarin. Meanwhile, Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, passed the Communication Law in 2013, which imposed strict content regulations across media and did not guarentee freedom from government interference in public broadcasting, among many other stipulations.

Bibliography

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Falcoff, Mark. Modern Chile, 1970–1989: A Critical History. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1989. Print.

Haring, C. H. The Spanish Empire in America. New York: Harcourt, 1963. Print.

Oppenheimer, Andres. "Press Censorship on the Rise in Latin America." Seattle Times. Seattle Times, 8 Jan. 2012. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.

Parks, Ken. "Argentina Threatens to Break Up Media Giant Grupo Clarin." Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, 9 Oct. 2014. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.

Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. New York: Knopf, 1981. Print.