About Esquiú

Esquiú

Esquiú was an Argentine Catholic weekly magazine published in Buenos Aires from April 1960 until 1993, without interruption. It was founded by the brothers Luis and Agustín Luchía Puig — Agustín was a priest — whose family administered and directed it from 1960 to 1987; after the death of Luis at the beginning of the 1980s, the direction passed to his son Luis Eduardo Luchía Puig, and in its final stage the magazine was acquired by the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. Esquiú was, in the judgement of the scholarly literature published in SciELO Argentina, very probably the most widely read Catholic general-interest publication among the laity from the 1960s onward. Through sections of national and international politics, economy, entertainment and sport, and content dedicated to women and to children, it aimed to reach the whole family with a Catholic discourse always attentive to the positions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It was named for Fray Mamerto Esquiú, the nineteenth-century Franciscan friar and bishop whose eloquence in defence of the Argentine Constitution made him a national Catholic symbol.

Foundation by the Luchía Puig brothers in April 1960

Esquiú came onto the streets in April 1960 on the initiative of the brothers Luis and Agustín Luchía Puig, who had a long trajectory in the Catholic press. The weekly was, as historians of the magazine have shown, one more link in an extensive chain of journalistic and publishing projects that the Luchía Puig family had carried out since the first decades of the twentieth century. Their initiatives sought to position themselves as popular products, accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, and Esquiú applied that family formula to the Catholic family market at the beginning of the 1960s: a general-interest weekly, not a theological review, in which a Catholic household could read the week's politics, economy, sport and entertainment within a Catholic frame. The contrast with Argentina's other great Catholic magazine defined both titles. Criterio, founded in 1928, was an intellectual review of current affairs and culture that, under Monsignor Gustavo Franceschi, Father Jorge Mejía and Father Rafael Braun, cultivated a relative autonomy from the hierarchy; Esquiú, as the SciELO comparison puts it, was a family weekly attentive, always, to the hierarchy's positions. Between them, Criterio and Esquiú were the two most important Catholic-oriented publications of the period.

A magazine for the whole family

The formula of Esquiú was breadth within a single household. Its sections covered national politics and international politics, economy, entertainment, and sport, together with contents dedicated to women and contents dedicated to children. That architecture was a commercial and pastoral strategy at once: the same copy of the magazine was meant to pass from hand to hand within a family, giving each reader a section while exposing all of them to the magazine's Catholic reading of public life. It made Esquiú a general-interest weekly competing, for the Catholic segment of the public, with the secular general magazines of its era, and it explains the scholarly judgement that it was probably the most read Catholic publication of general interest among the laity from the 1960s. Where Criterio addressed the Catholic intellectual and the decision-maker, Esquiú addressed the Catholic home — and there were far more Catholic homes than Catholic intellectuals, a fact the Luchía Puig, with their decades of experience in popular Catholic publishing, understood thoroughly.

The Luchía Puig direction, 1960 to 1987

Between 1960 and 1987 Esquiú was administered and directed by the Luchía Puig family. The founders were the brothers Luis and Agustín, the latter a priest. After the death of Luis at the beginning of the 1980s, the direction remained in the family, in the hands of his son Luis Eduardo Luchía Puig. That twenty-seven-year family tenure gave the magazine an unusual continuity of ownership and line across a period of Argentine history that included the governments of Arturo Frondizi and Arturo Illía, the military regime of 1966 to 1973, the return of Peronism, the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 and the democratic restoration under Raúl Alfonsín. Through all of those changes, the magazine's identity, in the analysis of its historians, remained its close link with the Episcopate — the Argentine bishops' conference — and its alignment with the hierarchy's positions, a link that distinguished it from the relative autonomy of Criterio and that became, at certain moments, both its strength and its difficulty.

Esquiú and the dictatorship years

The scholarly study of Criterio and Esquiú on the human-rights question between 1981 and 1985, published in the journal Quinto Sol through CONICET, reconstructs the magazine's delicate position at the end of the military regime. Unlike Criterio, the Luchía Puig weekly cultivated a close bond with the Episcopate and had explicitly supported the military government. That identification presented no great problems until 1981, but from then on its alignment became difficult, because the ecclesiastical hierarchy began to take a prudent distance from the government, at least in its most important collective documents. To overcome the tension, Esquiú committed itself fully to the defence of the reconciling formula that the bishops sustained on the question of the disappeared. Its strong backing for the bishops' reconciliatory call allowed it to close the tension by deepening its identification with the hierarchy; at the same time it was a non-traumatic way of turning the page of history, raising the banner of national unity against the voices that sought to review the actions of the military. The study concludes that, in Esquiú's case, the double sense of the ecclesial discourse of the period functioned fully — a judgement that makes the magazine an indispensable, and uncomfortable, primary source for the history of Argentine Catholicism in the transition.

The Alfonsín years and the education question

Under the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín, Esquiú acquired, in the analysis of its historians, a renewed strategic importance. In periods of high conflict between the Church and political power, such as the first three years of the Alfonsín government, publications like Esquiú became, for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, instruments of identity articulation and mobilisation of Catholics faced with a perceived threat from the government — and for that reason, resources especially rich for the researcher interested in the Church. The magazine was not the official voice of the bishops, and the bishops showed no particular predisposition to privilege Esquiú over other publications; but in the conflicts of the period its role grew. A principal battleground was education. The Alfonsín government convoked a National Pedagogical Congress to rethink Argentine education for the democratic era, and the Catholic hierarchy moved to orient the participation of the laity in it; studies of the weekly examine how Esquiú intervened in that dispute over the school, one of the defining Church–state contests of the 1980s, alongside the wider debates over the revision of the past and the prosecution of human-rights violations, on which the magazine defended the bishops' reconciliatory line against the demands for judicial review.

Final stage under Communion and Liberation

The last stage of Esquiú began when the magazine was acquired by the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, the Italian-founded lay movement that expanded in Argentine Catholicism in the 1980s. The historians of the magazine close their account with that acquisition, reading the changes the magazine underwent as an editorial project as a reflection, in part, of deeper realignments within Argentine Catholicism — the passage from the family Catholic publishing house, sustained by the Luchía Puig across most of the century, to the new ecclesial movements as the organisers of Catholic media. The weekly had been published uninterruptedly since April 1960; it ceased publication in 1993, after thirty-three years. The verified seed record for this profile gives the same dates: founded in April 1960 by the brothers Luis and Agustín Luchía Puig and published uninterruptedly until 1993.

Esquiú as a source for historians

A notable feature of Esquiú's afterlife is the seriousness with which academic historians have treated it, both as a source and as an object of study. The reflection on the magazine in the historiography of recent Argentine history argues that Catholic press of its kind must be read inside a configuration of power that includes the ecclesiastical hierarchy — a hermeneutic pole — even when the magazine was far from being the bishops' official voice. Read that way, its pages on politics, education, the family and the revision of the past document not only what a mass Catholic readership was offered each week, but how the Argentine Church's public positions were translated into the language of the Catholic home. Its run from 1960 to 1993 spans the Second Vatican Council, the radicalisation of Argentine Catholicism in the late 1960s, the dictatorship and the democratic transition, and for each of those moments Esquiú provides the version of events that reached, in weekly form, the largest Catholic lay audience in the country.

Esquiú and Criterio: the two poles of Catholic print

Argentine Catholic print culture of the second half of the twentieth century is usually written as a story of two magazines. Criterio, the elder, took distance from integrist perspectives and maintained a relative autonomy before the hierarchy, opening its pages to intellectual debate; Esquiú sought the whole family with a Catholic discourse always attentive to the hierarchy's positions, and supported, at the decisive moments, the line of the Episcopate. Neither pole is intelligible without the other, and the comparative literature — the SciELO studies of the two magazines on human rights between 1981 and 1985 and on the recent past — treats them as a pair. Esquiú's pole was the more popular and the more widely read among the laity, and for that reason its history carries the greater social weight: it shows what Argentine Catholicism looked like not in the seminar room but at the kitchen table, week by week, for thirty-three years.

Legacy

Esquiú closed in 1993, and no Argentine Catholic family weekly of comparable reach replaced it. Its legacy is double. As a publishing achievement, it demonstrated that a Catholic general-interest weekly, produced by a family firm with long experience of popular Catholic journalism, could hold a mass lay readership from 1960 into the 1990s, across dictatorship and democracy, by covering the whole of life — politics, economy, entertainment, sport, women and children — within a single confessional frame. As a historical record, it preserved the most complete weekly account of how official Argentine Catholicism wished to be understood by its own faithful during some of the most contested decades in the country's history, including its support for the military government, its defence of reconciliation on the disappeared, and its mobilisation in the education disputes of the Alfonsín years. A directory of Argentine magazines needs Esquiú for both reasons: it was probably the most widely read Catholic publication in the country for three decades, and it remains one of the richest sources for understanding the Church that published it.