The government moved on Tuesday to take over Argentina’s only newsprint maker, alleging two leading newspapers illegally conspired with dictators to control the company three decades ago and then used it to drive competing media out of business.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said the courts should decide whether the Grupo Clarin and La Nacion media companies should be charged with crimes against humanity — specifically whether the newsprint company was illegally expropriated by the newspapers and the military junta.
The companies, with which Fernandez has been feuding for two years, deny any illegality in the acquisition of the newsprint maker, or other crimes. They accuse Fernandez of baldly trying to control the essential material needed to guarantee freedom of expression, a position supported by the Inter-American Press Association and other media groups.
Speaking in a national broadcast, Fernandez said she was defending those rights. She accused Grupo Clarin and La Nacion of using the newsprint company, Papel Prensa, to impose media monopolies on Argentina, stifling other viewpoints by refusing to sell paper at fair prices to competitors.
Fernandez presented the conclusions of a government investigation of Papel Prensa’s history and economic activities — some 23,000 pages in all, stacked in large piles on a table beside her — and said her human rights secretary would send it to the justice system for consideration of rights charges against owners of the two media firms.
She also said she would propose legislation declaring newsprint supply to be a matter of national interest, subject to regulation that guarantees equal and fair distribution to all of the nation’s newspapers. Papel Prensa sells newsprint to more than 130 clients across the country.
Since the 1976-1983 dictatorship, Papel Prensa has been jointly owned in roughly three equal shares between Clarin, La Nacion and the government — now Fernandez’s leftist administration is pushing prosecutions of crimes against humanity committed by the junta.
Human rights groups, which have a prominent role in the government, accuse La Nacion and Clarin of being conspicuously silent about “dirty war” crimes committed against leftists and other opponents of the dictatorship.
Fernandez said the newspapers obtained Papel Prensa through a forced sale in 1976 at a time when the military junta was doing all it could to destroy its owner, David Graiver, a prominent banker who was secretly supporting the leftist Montonero guerrillas. Graiver died in a suspicious plane crash, sending his company into bankruptcy and leaving his widow, Lidia Papaleo, and parents to face the dictators.
“And five days after she signed [the papers selling the company], she was detained. And during her detention, she was raped, tortured, beaten in the head. The same luck was suffered by her in-laws and other members of their company,” Fernandez said. “They had been forced to sell — and their detention was delayed so that the buyers could claim they obtained the company in good faith.”
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