About Crisis

Crisis

Crisis is an Argentine cultural and political magazine with one of the most storied histories in the country's press. Originally published from 1973 to 1976 as Revista Crisis, directed by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano under publisher Federico Vogelius, it was relaunched several times — in 1986–1987, in 1987–1990, and definitively in October 2010 in Buenos Aires by a new editorial collective led by Mario Santucho. The modern Crisis, produced by a journalists' and intellectuals' collective and published in print and at revistacrisis.com.ar, is a magazine of essays, chronicle and political debate that consciously inherits — and argues with — the name of its 1970s predecessor.

The First Crisis, 1973–1976

The original Crisis published forty issues between May 1973 and August 1976. University archive records of the magazine's run describe the first period as issues 1–40, directed by Federico Vogelius and Eduardo Galeano. Galeano, exiled from Uruguay after its 1973 coup, edited the magazine in Buenos Aires; he had arrived in Argentina as an exile and would be forced into further exile in Spain after Argentina's own 1976 coup, during which he wrote his trilogy Memory of Fire.

The first Crisis was a monthly of culture and politics that treated Latin American culture as a single conversation: literature, visual art — the first twenty issues included serigraphs by Argentine artists, and issues 21–40 reproduced historical documents — popular culture, history and the politics of the continent. Its correspondence archive, preserved in a university collection in the United States, contains letters from figures such as Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Amado — a measure of the continental literary network the magazine convened in three years. The magazine closed in August 1976, months after the coup that installed Argentina's military dictatorship; a critical magazine of its orientation could not survive that regime, and its first life became a legend of the Argentine cultural press.

The Intermediate Returns, 1986–1990

With democracy restored, the name returned twice. Archive records divide the afterlife into a second period, issues 41–53 (April 1986 – April 1987), directed by Vicente Zito Lema, and a third period, issues 54–80 (October 1987 – June 1990), directed by Eduardo Jozami and José Luis Díaz Colodrero, with a related title, Adios Crisis, Fin de Siglo, appearing in 1987–1988. Academic studies of the magazine describe these 1980s experiences as unsuccessful attempts to recover the first period's place in a changed Argentina, where the new newspaper Página/12, launched in 1987, was capturing the progressive readership Crisis had once addressed. The third period ended in June 1990.

The 2010 Relaunch

Crisis returned to the street in October 2010, in the account of a University of Buenos Aires study of its fourth period, with a new Colectivo Editorial led by Mario Santucho and collaborators of his generation. Santucho — sociologist, former member of the Colectivo Situaciones research collective — refounded the magazine with a new editorial team, as he has described in interviews, without organisational continuity with the previous owners but with the declared intention of preserving the title's thematic orientation, in a more sober, minimalist aesthetic with dense contents, and, an advantage the founders of the 1970s never had, a digital edition.

The relaunch was conceived during the height of Kirchnerism, and the UBA study characterises the new magazine's project precisely: not programmatic like the first Crisis, but occupying the role of the critical intellectual — a non-party left publication disputing a space of enunciation with the progressive current of Kirchnerism itself, with criticism of the neo-developmentalist economic model at its centre, and with a recurring mission of making visible the violence suffered by Argentina's most impoverished sectors.

Editorial Identity of the Modern Magazine

The modern Crisis publishes essays, chronicles, interviews and dossiers on Argentine and Latin American politics and culture, written in what reviewers describe as a sharp, critical language, approaching problems through sociological analysis and political commitment as a deliberate counterweight to what its editors regard as the snob, linear and light content of mass media. Its author pages show the register: long interviews and essays on the digital machinery of the far right, on state violence and its theorists, on the unresolved questions of the 1970s — including, in a recent issue previewed by its editor, Santucho's own investigation into the fate of his father's comrades in the ERP, a subject on which he also wrote the book Bombo, el reaparecido (2019).

That last detail captures something essential about the fourth Crisis: its editor is the son of Mario Roberto Santucho, the legendary commander of the PRT-ERP killed in 1976, and the magazine's dialogue with the 1970s is conducted by the generation that inherited them — a generation, as its reviewers note, of highly educated young intellectuals close to a progressive sensibility, who are also its principal readers.

Collective Production

The relaunched magazine is produced by an editorial collective rather than a conventional proprietor-director structure — the Colectivo Editorial is its formal byline of governance. Members came in part from the milieu of Colectivo Situaciones, the militant-research collective formed around Argentina's 2001 crisis, and the magazine has been linked in academic writing to that network's wider ecology of independent publishing projects in Buenos Aires. Collective editorship is both an ethic and an aesthetic for the title: authority is distributed, dossiers are argued over, and the magazine presents itself as a trench of meaning — a space of enunciation — rather than a commercial product.

Rhythm and Interruptions

The fourth period has not been continuous in the manner of a commercial monthly. The UBA study records that, conceived amid the Kirchnerist ascendancy, the magazine ceased publication at the beginning of 2015 and returned to the street a month before the change of government at the end of that year, in a new context for the production of discourse. Its publishing rhythm since has been that of an independent bimonthly of politics and culture — Santucho is described in interviews as editor of a bimonthly — sustained by its collective and its readership rather than by a large advertising base.

Digital Presence

The modern magazine publishes online at revistacrisis.com.ar, where its essays, interviews and author pages appear in full — the digital access that the 2010 relaunch's chroniclers singled out as the fourth period's structural novelty. Online, the title's long essays reach the dispersed readership of the Argentine and Latin American intellectual left for whom the print issue is an object to keep but the text is the thing itself.

Place in Argentine Magazine History

Few Argentine magazines carry a name with this much history. The first Crisis is a canonical object of the 1970s cultural field; its relaunches in the 1980s measured the difficulty of reviving such an object; and the 2010 revival, by editors with no connection to the original beyond admiration and argument, tested whether a masthead could be inherited as an idea. Reviewers conclude that the new publication deliberately slides along its own past rather than hiding it — denouncing and uncomfortable, in the phrase of one academic review, as it intends to continue.

The Name as an Inheritance

The modern magazine's relationship to its name is worth stating plainly, because the scholarship on the fourth period returns to it repeatedly: the 2010 relaunch had no professional, managerial or administrative continuity with the earlier Crisis, yet its editors relaunched the title precisely to preserve its thematic orientation — politics, culture and society in critical perspective from the progressive sectors of society, in the summary of the magazine's chroniclers. That makes the fourth Crisis an act of deliberate inheritance: a younger generation, led by an editor whose own family history runs through the 1970s, adopting a masthead as a programme. Argentina's cultural press offers few comparable cases of a title revived across four decades by admirers rather than owners, and the experiment's survival — interruptions included — is the strongest evidence that the inheritance took.

Current Status

Crisis continues in its fourth period, published in Buenos Aires by its editorial collective under Mario Santucho's editorship, in print and online. Across fifty years, four periods and two centuries of Argentine political weather, the name has stood for one proposition: that a magazine of culture and politics, written seriously and from the left, is a form of public action.