About Tribuna (Rosario)

Tribuna (Rosario)

Tribuna was a popular Spanish-language evening newspaper published in Rosario, in the Argentine province of Santa Fe. It was launched on 12 October 1928 as the expression of the political sector led by Lisandro de la Torre, the Rosario-born leader of the Partido Demócrata Progresista. It was founded by a group of de la Torre's followers, among them Enzo Bordabehere, Mario Antelo and Vicente Pomponio, who directed it in turn. Born as a party-linked vespertino, Tribuna later became an independent company newspaper; it clashed with the ideological controls of the Peronist government and was closed in 1948, and, in the words of its principal historian, a long career awaited it in the following period. Its history is documented chiefly in Alejandro Damianovich's El Periodismo en Santa Fe. Because it was a Rosario paper with a strong political origin, its story is inseparable from that of Lisandro de la Torre and from one of the most dramatic episodes in Argentine political history, the assassination of Bordabehere in the Senate in 1935.

Launched on 12 October 1928

Damianovich records that the popular Rosario evening paper Tribuna emerged on 12 October 1928 as the expression of the thought and action of the political sector led by Lisandro de la Torre. The date placed its birth in a charged political year: 1928 was when Hipólito Yrigoyen returned to the presidency of Argentina, and opposition forces across the country were organising their press for a decade that would bring the 1930 coup and the years of conservative rule known as the Década Infame. In Rosario, Santa Fe's great port and commercial city, the Partido Demócrata Progresista had one of its strongholds, built on the Liga del Sur that de la Torre had founded in Rosario in 1912 and transformed into the PDP in 1914. A party with that base needed a popular daily voice in the city, and Tribuna was created to be that voice: a vespertino, read in the evening, aimed at a broad public rather than a narrow circle of militants.

Founders: Bordabehere, Antelo and Pomponio

Tribuna was founded by a group of followers of the progresista leader, among whom Damianovich names Enzo Bordabehere, Mario Antelo and Vicente Pomponio, who directed the newspaper in succession, in that order. Each of the three was a political figure in his own right, and their rotation in the directorship underlines the paper's original character as the organ of a political movement rather than a purely commercial venture. Enzo Bordabehere, the first of the directors named, would become the most famous: a Santa Fe senator-elect in the PDP, he was at de la Torre's side during the Senate investigation of the meat trade in 1935. Mario Antelo and Vicente Pomponio, who followed him at the head of the paper, belonged to the same Rosario progresista milieu. The founding group as a whole represented the generation of younger PDP men who built the party's presence in Rosario's public life between the wars.

Lisandro de la Torre and the Demócrata Progresista world

Lisandro de la Torre, born in Rosario in 1868, was one of Argentina's most prominent opposition politicians: a founder of the Unión Cívica Radical who broke with Yrigoyen, creator of the Liga del Sur and the Partido Demócrata Progresista, and later, as a national senator, the celebrated denouncer of the meat-packing scandal associated with the Roca-Runciman Pact of 1933. A newspaper that spoke for his sector in his home city therefore had a defined editorial identity from its first issue: reformist, critical of conservative governments and of the foreign meat companies, and committed to the PDP's programme of political and economic reform. Tribuna's foundation in 1928 preceded the most famous chapter of that struggle, the Senate debates of 1935, but it belonged to the same political project, giving Rosario readers a daily paper aligned with de la Torre's movement at a time when the great metropolitan dailies largely took other sides.

Enzo Bordabehere and 23 July 1935

No account of Tribuna can omit the fate of its first-named director. On 23 July 1935, during the Senate debate on the meat trade in which de la Torre was interrogating government ministers, a gunman, Ramón Valdés Cora, a former policeman acting as a bodyguard in the official orbit, fired at de la Torre on the floor of the Senate. Enzo Bordabehere, who had rushed to help his leader as he fell, was struck by three bullets and died, the only Argentine legislator assassinated in the Senate chamber. Contemporary accounts, including the report in El Mundo of 24 July 1935 quoted by later historians, describe the confusion in the chamber and Bordabehere dying in de la Torre's arms. De la Torre's phrase at the homage, that the name of the killer was known but the name of the murderer, meaning the intellectual author, remained to be found, became famous. Bordabehere's death devastated de la Torre, who resigned his seat in 1937, and it marked Tribuna's founding generation indelibly.

A popular evening paper in Rosario

Damianovich characterises Tribuna as a popular evening newspaper, el popular vespertino rosarino. Rosario in 1928 was Argentina's second city in economic weight, a grain port on the Paraná with a large working class, a strong commercial bourgeoisie and an intense political life. An evening paper aimed at a popular readership competed in a demanding market that included La Capital, Rosario's historic morning daily founded in 1867, and the metropolitan papers arriving from Buenos Aires. The vespertino format suited readers who bought a paper after work, and a popular style meant accessible language, strong local coverage and attention to the concerns of ordinary rosarinos alongside the political line that had brought the paper into being. Tribuna's durability in that market, two decades from foundation to its 1948 closure, indicates that it found and kept such a readership, even as its formal relationship with the PDP evolved.

From party voice to independent company

According to Damianovich, when Tribuna became a sociedad anónima, a limited company, it adopted an independent stance. That transition, from movement organ to company newspaper claiming independence, mirrors the professionalisation of the Argentine press in the 1930s and 1940s, in which party papers across the country either disappeared or reconstituted themselves as commercial enterprises with editorial lines rather than party instructions. The change did not make Tribuna neutral in the eyes of governments: Damianovich records that, as an independent paper, it collided with the ideological controls of justicialismo, the Peronist movement that came to power in 1946. The Peronist government's relationship with the opposition press was restrictive, involving newsprint controls, official advertising pressure and, in prominent cases, intervention or expropriation. Tribuna's fate belonged to that pattern.

Closure by the Peronist government in 1948

Tribuna was closed by the Peronist government in 1948. Damianovich's account, as preserved in the excerpted text of El Periodismo en Santa Fe, states that the paper clashed with the ideological controls of justicialismo and was shut down; a typographical slip in some digitised copies renders the year as 1848, but the context, a closure under Peronism, fixes it unambiguously in 1948, twenty years after the foundation. The closure ended the paper's first life. It is worth being precise about what the record supports: the historian attributes the closure to the paper's collision with government ideological control, in line with the broader history of press restrictions in the first Peronist governments, but the specific administrative mechanism used against Tribuna is not detailed in the sources consulted, and none is invented here. The seed record for this profile likewise records closure by the Peronist government in 1948.

Resumption in the following period

Damianovich closes his summary of Tribuna with the observation that a long career awaited it in the following period, le esperaba una larga actuación en el siguiente período. That is, after the 1948 closure and the end of the Peronist government in 1955, the title resumed publication and continued for a substantial further period. The sources consulted for this profile do not provide a verified final closure date for the resumed Tribuna, nor a detailed account of its later ownership and direction, and this profile states that limit openly rather than assigning it dates that cannot be checked. What can be said is that the paper's story has two acts: the party-born vespertino of 1928 to 1948, ended by government closure, and a later existence after the fall of Peronism, long enough for its historian to describe it as a long performance. Researchers seeking the second act's details must go to Damianovich's full text and to Rosario hemeroteca holdings.

Tribuna among Rosario's newspapers

Rosario's press history is dominated by La Capital, the dean of the Argentine press, but the city's twentieth-century journalism also included party and popular papers that gave voice to its intense political movements, and Tribuna is the clearest Rosario example of a newspaper created by a political movement that outgrew its origins. Its significance is threefold. It documented, daily and locally, the world of the Partido Demócrata Progresista in its home city. It was directed in turn by men at the centre of national events, above all Bordabehere. And its closure in 1948 illustrates, at the level of a single provincial city paper, how press freedom contracted under the first Peronism. Against the scale of Rosario, Tribuna was never the largest paper, but few Argentine newspapers of its size were so directly connected to a national political tragedy and to one of the country's most respected opposition leaders.

Sources and limits of this profile

The principal source for Tribuna is Alejandro Damianovich's El Periodismo en Santa Fe, which devotes a concise entry to the paper within its survey of the provincial press, and which supplies the foundation date, founders, directorial succession, change to a company structure, 1948 closure and later resumption recorded here. Context on Lisandro de la Torre and the assassination of Enzo Bordabehere on 23 July 1935 is among the most thoroughly documented episodes in Argentine political history and is corroborated by numerous national sources. The limits are equally clear: the material consulted gives no verified circulation figures, office address, or final closure date for the resumed paper, and preserves no catalogue of its editors after the founding trio. This profile has therefore confined itself to the documented record. Within those bounds, Tribuna stands as Rosario's popular progresista evening paper, born in 1928, silenced in 1948 and remembered through the movement and the men who created it.