This Owl, with more than thirty years practicing journalism, is aware that one of the fundamental pillars in a democracy is freedom of expression. Following the death of Arturo Salazar Larraín (94), one of the few men who remained alive from the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of national journalism, prop of the late newspaper La Prensa, by Pedro Beltrán, in the middle of the last century, I began to think about the abuses and abuses that suffered.
Prison and deportation for his ideas and position in front of the military government of General Juan Velasco, after his disastrous ‘expropriation of the newspapers’ in 1974, which in reality was the dispossession by the military of the most important and independent media in the country , such as El Comercio, Correo, La Prensa, Última Hora, La Crónica, to their legitimate owners.
Don Arturo and hundreds of journalists who protested the outrage were fired and, from that date until 1980, when democracy returned with Fernando Belaunde, the newspapers became crude ‘parametric’ lampoons and their journalists transformed them into simple ‘turnarounds’ of the communiqués from the sinister Central Information Office.
Many press men felt harassed, but accepted it for not losing their job. Peru suffered a delay of two decades of progress during those twelve years of military obscurantism. There was a war economy and the national strikes paralyzed the country, but for the ‘gagged’ newspapers none of this existed. The nationalized press was a disgrace. The Research Units did not exist.
Only independent magazines such as Caretas, by another great freedom of expression fighter, Enrique Zileri, stripped the rottenness of the regime and, on touch, was censored. Leftist journalists, seeing that their publications were also censored, chose to launch one of political humor, the remembered ‘Monos y Monadas’, which baffled the censors and allowed their circulation, but in the end, after a cover that ridiculed generals in power was also censored.
In those times, great journalists ended up taxiing or emigrating to other countries, because they could not bear the fact that the “military censors” came to the newsrooms to boss around as if it were their headquarters. Young journalists who today work their own portals with total independence, regardless of the mainstream media, should thank professionals such as Arturo Salazar Larraín, Enrique Zileri Gibson or Humberto Damonte Larraín, among many others, who suffered jail and deportation in those dark times, just for exercising freedom of expression.
With the return of the media to their rightful owners, plurality of information returned, and with it, the written and television press in the early 1980s regained their level, their breadth and gave birth to brilliant cultural programs such as ‘La Torre de Babel’ , led by Mario Vargas LLosa or ‘Pulso’, where exactly the deceased Arturo Salazar Larraín He served as a diligent panelist.
It was possible to disagree with the political or ideological positions of Don Arturo, but there is no denying his status as a teacher of journalists, especially from his address in La Prensa, in 1980, where he sponsored a generation called ‘The young Turks’, made up of his son Federico Salazar, Mario Ghibellini, Juan Carlos Tafur , Jaime Bayly, Enrique Ghersi, Freddy Chirinos, Carlos Espá, among others. I turn off the TV.
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