1st Week Pressed

[아무개]

The Americas

Americas view

Argentina's media

Pressed

Aug 25th 2010, 19:54 by D.P. | BUENOS AIRES

EVER since Nestor Kirchner became Argentina’s president in 2003, he and Cristina Fernandez, his wife and successor, have ruthlessly divided and conquered their political rivals. Their biggest remaining adversary is the Clarin Group, the country’s dominant media conglomerate. The Kirchners have tried to cripple the firm after its television stations and Clarin newspaper gave sympathetic coverage to farmers striking over a tax increase in 2008. During that dispute, the government’s supporters plastered Buenos Aires with posters accusing the company of lying and of serving landed oligarchs. One year later the state broadcaster enticed Argentina’s football association to tear up its contractwith a Clarin-owned cable channel and put its matches on public television instead. And last October Congress passed a law expanding the government’s control over broadcast media, which would force Clarin to divest key assets. However, legal challenges have delayed its implementation.

The Kirchners are now launching two new offensives. On August 19th, the government gave Clarin 90 days to close Fibertel, a subsidiary which is Argentina’s biggest cable internet-service provider (ISP) with over 1m users. In 2003, Fibertel began operating jointly with Cablevision, a cable-television company. Three years later, Clarin bought both firms. However, the two never formalised their merger, and the government’s slow-acting communications regulator never approved the transfer of Fibertel’s ISP licence to Cablevision. When Clarin did officially register the merger last year, Fibertel ceased to exist—along with its ISP licence.

Rather than transferring the licence to Cablevision, the regulator has seized on this technicality to kick Clarin out of the ISP business. The company plans to appeal. But even if the order is overturned, many Fibertel users will have already switched providers to avoid the risk of losing internet access.

The first couple is also going after a business even dearer to Clarin: newsprint. Argentina has only one newsprint producer, Papel Prensa, which is jointly held by Clarin, La Nacion (the second-biggest daily), and the government. The Kirchners want to wrest control of the company from their co-investors—this month, Guillermo Moreno, the commerce secretary, handed out boxing gloves at its shareholders’ meeting. Ms Fernandez says she will propose a law declaring the production, distribution and sale of newsprint of “national interest”, which would allow greater state control of the industry.

To rally the public against the papers, the Kirchners have made two attacks on Papel Prensa. First, they accuse Clarin and La Nacion of price-gouging and muzzling their smaller rivals. In fact, Papel Prensa’s prices are similar to those of import!ed, tariff-free newsprint. And if anyone is using market power to influence coverage, it is the government, which routes its advertising to sympathetic outlets and withholds it from critical ones.

Second, the Kirchners are once again trying to tie their detractors to Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship. On August 24th, Ms Fernandez unveiled a report claiming that Papel Prensa's previous owners were forced to sell it in 1976. Lidia Papaleo, who controlled one stake, says she sold it only because Hector Magnetto, now Clarin’s CEO, warned her that she and her daughter would be killed otherwise. Ms Papaleo’s husband, David Graiver, had managed the ransom from a guerrilla kidnapping of two businessmen, and she was later detained and tortured by the army. Another former shareholder, Rafael Ianover, says he sold because one of the buyers promised him that in exchange he would be not be arrested. He was detained anyway the next year.

However, a full copy of the report has not yet been released, and it has been widely criticised. Ms Papaleo never said publicly that she sold under duress before this year. She has not repeated her account to the press. Her daughter disputes it, as do the newspapers. On August 25th, Mr Graiver’s brother Isidoro, who participated in the transaction, published a statementinClarin and La Nacion saying the family was not pressured to sell.

By declaring war on Argentina’s most powerful opinion-former, the Kirchners are gambling with their political future. If they can bloody the company enough to make its management seek a truce, they could secure friendlier coverage of the 2011 presidential election. Even then, however, the strategy might backfire. First, it has made them look hypocritical: by trying to kill Fibertel, they have made the already-concentrated ISP market even more so. Moreover, they have given the fractious opposition a new cause to unite around.

Two years ago, Ms Fernandez squandered her popularity by repeatedly escalating her conflict with the farmers until Congress forced her to retract the tax increase. She seems not to have learned from her mistake.