Media and authoritarian utopia: The Office of Information and Tourism. Argentina, 1967-1969

Abstract

The Office of Information and Tourism (Spanish acronym: SDT) was the most ambitious official Argentine media policy after the time of the first Peronism. This work reconstructs the main aspects of this experience forgotten by historiography, from the study of journalistic publications of the time, among other oral and written sources. The aim is to understand the general objective pursued by the communicational policy of the dictatorship of General Onganía and to contribute to the knowledge of the links that are forged between authoritarian political projects and the media. The hypothesis is that the SDT project proposed a restructuring of the entire media system (state and private), aimed at supporting a dictatorship that set out to administer from above the times of economic and social policy. and political participation. In a complementary way, the SDT set out to build an image of the Argentine dictatorship abroad, which would positively present a population of liberal customs that produced and consumed all kinds of cultural goods without censorship. The article presents the limits and contradictions of this policy but highlights its foundational character in terms of consolidating the State’s actions in the media, a logic that would remain in the dictatorship and post dictatorship of the following two decades.