Argentina’s Media Workers Just Knocked Back Javier Milei
Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, promised to close press agency Télam and sack its 700 employees. But media workers fought back — and saved the agency from being shuttered.
Photojournalists protest Javier Milei's closure of the Télam news agency, on June 7, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Santiago Oroz / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
When I first met her, Andrea Delfino was smoking a cigarette in front of the shuttered offices of Télam, the state-run press agency in Buenos Aires. It was March 24, the anniversary of Argentina’s military coup in 1976. The entrance to the building was barricaded, but outside there was a hive of activity. Union leaders drank maté as journalists placed calls and conducted interviews from a tent set up by the Buenos Aires Press Union.
Delfino, a journalist at Télam and a spokesperson for the union, had been camping out in front of the shuttered offices for nearly three weeks, since far-right president Javier Milei announced the closure of the press agency and the dismissal of seven hundr4ed employees on March 1. It’s part of a series of attacks on public services by the libertarian leader, who promises to take “the chainsaw” to the Argentine state.
“We made the decision as an assembly of workers to reject the forced leave to which we are being subjected and therefore remain at the doors of the building day and night,” Delfino explained.
Despite the official closure of the agency, Télam journalists — who were laid off with pay and given the option to accept a payout — continued to report, publishing stories on a site run and managed by dissident staff. On March 4, three days after the announcement, workers set up assemblies outside of the two Télam buildings in Buenos Aires, where journalists could organize editorial meetings, producers could edit videos, and union leaders crafted their strategy. All of this was open facing to the public.
Every so often, as we spoke, passersby cheered in support of furloughed staff and other protesters gathered in front of the building. At the time, Delfino explained to Jacobin that the workers planned to camp in front of the entrances to the press agency’s two buildings for as long as needed.
“This fight might last one month, two months, or four years, but we will win,” Delfino told me.
A Victory Within a Defeat
Four months later, on July 10, Delfino and roughly three hundred other Télam journalists returned to work — albeit under changed circumstances. Télam was renamed and its journalistic staff reduced, but workers were able to prevent the closure of the news agency, which Milei has called an “agency of Kirchnerist propaganda,” and save around three hundred jobs.
“It’s an enormous victory,” Tomás Eliaschev, a member of the Buenos Aires Press Union and a Télam editor, told Jacobin by phone from Buenos Aires, the night before heading back to work. “We are very happy, very strong in our organizing, and demonstrating that we can stand up to this government that is so powerful and that has so much support from the ruling classes. A group of workers were able to put a stop to it and at least maintain the existence of the agency, although under a different name.”
The return to work comes just ten days after Milei’s government announced that Télam would be renamed the Agencia de Publicidad del Estado (State Advertising Agency), or APESAU, and converted into a state propaganda and advertising agency run by presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni. Roughly three hundred Télam journalists who did not accept a payout in March will continue to work out of one of the two former Télam offices as employees of Radio Televisión Argentina (RTA), another public media outlet, the Buenos Aires Herald reported. They will form a new press agency, whose name has not yet been announced.
This wasn’t the first time Télam came under attack from a right-wing government. In 2018, Mauricio Macri’s center-right government fired more than 350 workers. Then, as now, the Buenos Aires press union fought back.
In a communiqué, Télam workers announced that the Somos Télam (“We Are Télam”) site, which had continued to report and disseminate the news throughout the 128-day protest movement, would stop publishing as employees go back to work. “If necessary, Somos Télam will return,” they wrote. “For now, we say see you later.”
“Two Birds With One Stone”
Télam’s reshuffling comes in the context of a prolonged attack against both the media and public institutions by the Milei government. It has vowed to reduce the Argentine state through a wave of economic shock therapy, laid out in his December 2023 “omnibus law,” a reform package that aims to drastically privatize Argentine institutions, including media, airlines, and the oil sector.
“One of Milei’s biggest adversaries has been journalism,” Gonzalo Sarasqueta, the director of political communications studies at Spain’s Universidad Camilo José Cela, who studies populist rhetoric in Latin America, told Jacobin. The other has been the state. “What’s better than killing two birds with one stone, taking apart the media and attacking the state?” he said of Milei’s dismantling of Télam.
The attacks against Télam fit into a broader political communication strategy of defining the enemy and setting the narrative, Sarasqueta said. “He’s fighting against singer Lali Espósito much as Donald Trump fights against Taylor Swift.”
Since Milei took office, the impact on media has been notable. Argentina’s ranking in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index has dropped by twenty-six places. In December, journalist and feminist Luciana Peker left the country after feeling threatened in Argentina. Milei has regularly demonized not only progressive and state-run media but also private outlets like Clarín and La Nación — preferring instead to use social media to broadcast his message, Sarasqueta explained.
“All the media does for him is distort the message, and this is a very Gramscian interpretation,” Sarasqueta said. “They are part of the cultural battle, and they defend interests that are against the interests of the majority of the people, of the people that Javier Milei defends.”
Télam employees worried about the long-term impacts of this strategy on the country’s press ecosystem.
Eliaschev, the Télam editor and trade unionist, noted that Télam was a key way of transmitting information from the capital to Argentina’s provinces, economically impoverished regions that overwhelmingly voted for Milei. The death by a thousand cuts strategy meant that these regions were the first to lose access to the news.
Nonetheless he remained hopeful that under a new government, Télam might be able to come back from its embers.
“The important thing to highlight is that the government did not manage to close the Télam agency, but they had to transform it,” he said. “Let’s say they managed to shrink it, but there is still a public news agency.” That, at least, is a reprieve.