About El Argentino (Gualeguaychú)

El Argentino (Gualeguaychú)

El Argentino is a Spanish-language morning daily newspaper published in Gualeguaychú, in the province of Entre Ríos, Argentina. Its first issue appeared on 6 February 1911, and it was founded and directed by Nicolás Montana, who made the newspaper the central enterprise of his life. More than a century after that first edition, El Argentino continues to publish, today with a digital edition as well as its long print tradition, and it remains one of the two historic local dailies of Gualeguaychú, alongside El Día. For historians of the city, its pages are an indispensable record: the local encyclopaedia Gualepedia and the Instituto Magnasco hemeroteca both treat El Argentino as a primary source for reconstructing everyday life in southern Entre Ríos across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Gualeguaychú itself was founded on 18 October 1783 by Tomás de Rocamora, and by the early twentieth century it was a growing river city on the western bank of the Uruguay River, facing the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos across the water. A daily newspaper founded there in 1911 therefore arrived at a moment when the city was consolidating its institutions, its port trade, its agricultural hinterland and its civic identity. El Argentino grew with that city, documenting municipal government, rural production, carnival, sport, education and the long environmental and binational debates that have shaped life on the Uruguay River.

Founding in 1911 and Nicolás Montana

The founding facts are unusually well preserved in local historiography. According to the Cuadernos de Gualeguaychú preserved in Gualepedia, El Argentino appeared in Gualeguaychú on 6 February 1911 with Nicolás Montana as its founder-director. The local historian Aníbal Vásquez, quoted in that account, wrote that Montana was not properly a journalist by training but a man who had the exact vision to conceive an enterprise of breadth and the judgement to steer his newspaper along the path of prosperity. That distinction matters for understanding the paper: it was conceived from the beginning as a durable company as well as a newsroom, an institution meant to last rather than a short-lived political sheet of the kind that filled Argentine towns in the nineteenth century.

Montana devoted himself to the newspaper with a totality that local memory still emphasises. Marco Aurelio Rodríguez, who was formed from the age of fourteen in the offices of El Argentino, recalled that Don Nicolás scarcely saw the sun on his face or his back, so absorbed was he by his work that what little remained of each day had to be spent in a short period of sleep in order to recover and continue the struggle. Among Montana's papers, Rodríguez preserved three small sheets written in an elegant hand in which the founder set out lines of conduct for a journalist, intended as guides for the formation of anyone inclined to take up a profession so laden with demands and self-giving. Montana died at his post, attending, in the words of the local account, to every aspect of an enormous and sacrificial activity until his last breath.

Early newsroom and contributors

The early El Argentino drew on a recognisable circle of local writers and editors. The Cuadernos account names among its editors Raúl Pintos Marino, José Teófilo Salas, Luis Alberto Ruiz, Horacio Romero and Arnaldo S. Rodríguez, in addition to occasional collaborators. Those names place the newspaper inside the educated, civic culture of a provincial Argentine city in the first half of the twentieth century, when a local daily depended on lawyers, teachers, public employees and literary amateurs as much as on professional reporters. The newspaper's office was a training ground: Rodríguez himself entered as an adolescent and formed his craft there, a pattern typical of interior Argentine journalism, where the local daily functioned as an informal school of writing, printing and public life.

After Montana's death, his successors took charge of the morning paper and, according to the same local history, knew how to direct it along guidelines better adapted to new times, succeeding in placing it in the position of a large-circulation daily that covered the city and the department and reached every part of the country where a strong line of local attachment caused expatriates to claim it. That description — a paper read in Gualeguaychú and also sent to gualeguaychuenses living elsewhere — captures a defining feature of successful interior dailies in Argentina: they serve both a geographic community and a diaspora that keeps its subscription as a link with home.

A record of everyday life in southern Entre Ríos

Because El Argentino has appeared continuously since 1911, its archive records subjects that national newspapers rarely touched. Gualepedia's research notes show, for example, how the paper reported the locust plagues that repeatedly struck southern Entre Ríos. In January 1946 its pages reported large swarms of locusts around the Arroyo Gualeyán that were not being combated, denounced the resale in shops of fuel supplied for the anti-locust campaign, and interviewed Martín Labayen, director of the fight against the plague, who reported working with four mobile squads, six hundred flamethrowers and twenty thousand litres of gas oil, while noting shortages of personnel and transport. Such coverage is agricultural, municipal and environmental history at once, and it illustrates why a century-old local daily is a historical source of the first order for its region.

The newspaper likewise chronicled the institutions that define Gualeguaychú: the Hospital Centenario inaugurated in 1913, the Teatro Gualeguaychú inaugurated in 1914, the football clubs founded in the same years, the Parque Unzué, and the city's famous carnival, which grew into one of Argentina's largest popular festivals. El Argentino's own contemporary reporting, sampled in its digital edition, continues that civic function, gathering residents of different generations to reflect on why they choose the city on anniversaries such as the 243rd anniversary of its founding in 2026. The continuity between the paper of Montana's era and the digital paper of today is the continuity of a city talking to itself.

Place in Entre Ríos press history

Histories of the Entre Ríos press place El Argentino within a dense provincial newspaper culture. By around 1930, some thirty localities in Entre Ríos had their own press, and Gualeguaychú supported El Argentino from 1911 alongside other titles such as El Censor and El Diario. The province's government and the Argentine press association ADEPA have listed El Argentino among the established newspapers of Entre Ríos, and provincial press histories treat it as the large-circulation daily of the city and department of Gualeguaychú. In a province whose capital, Paraná, and whose other river cities — Concordia, Concepción del Uruguay, Gualeguay — all sustained durable dailies, El Argentino belongs to the generation of early-twentieth-century foundations that professionalised the interior press and outlived the party newspapers of the nineteenth century.

Its survival is also a story about archives. The Instituto Magnasco in Gualeguaychú maintains an important hemeroteca where the city's old newspapers are preserved, and where El Argentino and El Día are received permanently and are among the most consulted holdings. The institute's officers have explained that local newspapers are the most consulted material by the general public, consulted by historians and by residents searching for events in their own lives and in the lives of institutions that may have disappeared. Older Gualeguaychú papers were microfilmed for preservation, while El Argentino and El Día are preserved on paper. That an active daily is simultaneously a working newsroom and a community archive is characteristic of the great interior titles of Argentina.

Gualeguaychú, the Uruguay River and the paper's territory

El Argentino's territory is the department of Gualeguaychú and the south of Entre Ríos, a region of cattle and crop farming, river ports, and towns such as Larroque, Urdinarrain and Gilbert whose news has historically reached print through the departmental capital's daily. The locust coverage quoted above names precisely that geography: the arroyos Gualeyán, El Cura and Del Valle, the Frigorífico, Parque Unzué, El Potrero, Larroque, Irazusta and Gilbert. A departmental daily maps its region in a way no national medium does, recording rural roads, harvests, floods, school and club life, and the municipal politics of small communities whose only regular chronicler is the paper from the departmental head town.

The river setting also gave the paper binational subject matter. Gualeguaychú faces Uruguay across the river, and in the twenty-first century the city became internationally known for the prolonged conflict over the pulp mill installed at Fray Bentos, during which the Gualeguaychú citizens' environmental assembly blocked the international bridge for years. A local daily founded in 1911 was the natural forum for that dispute, as it had been for earlier questions of port trade, bridges and river navigation. Readers should note, however, that detailed, independently verified accounts of El Argentino's own editorial positions in each of those episodes are not widely available in published secondary sources, and this profile does not attribute specific stances to the newspaper beyond what local historiography documents.

From print tradition to digital edition

Like every Argentine interior daily of its generation, El Argentino has had to negotiate the transition from a purely print business to digital publishing. It maintains an online edition under the name Diario El Argentino, publishing local news, society, sport and opinion for Gualeguaychú and its region, and its contemporary articles show the same mix that characterised the print paper: municipal affairs, education, anniversaries, community profiles and the carnival and sporting life of the city. The digital edition extends the old diaspora function of the print subscription: former residents can now read the paper of their city daily, wherever they live, without waiting for a mailed copy.

The economics of that transition are the economics of the Argentine interior press generally: declining print circulation, advertising migrating to platforms and social networks, and newsrooms sustained by deep local loyalty and by being, in many subjects, the only professional record of their community. El Argentino's longevity — founded in 1911, still publishing more than eleven decades later — places it among the oldest continuously published newspapers of Entre Ríos, a province where the title of oldest paper belongs to El Debate Pregón of Gualeguay, founded in 1901. Within Gualeguaychú, El Argentino's claim is different and equally significant: it is the city's great twentieth-century foundation, the paper of Nicolás Montana, which became the large-circulation daily of the city and department.

What is not documented

An honest profile must state the limits of the public record. Detailed circulation figures for El Argentino across its history, a complete list of its directors after Montana's successors, and a documented chronology of its changes of ownership are not available in the published sources consulted for this profile, which rest principally on local historiography — the Cuadernos de Gualeguaychú and Gualepedia — on provincial press listings, and on the newspaper's own current digital edition. Where this article describes the paper's role, it relies on those sources and on the well-documented general history of Gualeguaychú and Entre Ríos, and it does not invent circulation numbers, awards or editorial episodes that cannot be verified. Researchers seeking the full record have a clear path: the complete collection preserved at the Instituto Magnasco, where the paper's own pages remain the primary source for its history.

Legacy and significance

El Argentino matters because it embodies the founding generation of modern interior journalism in Argentina. Founded on 6 February 1911 by Nicolás Montana, a man remembered less as a trained journalist than as a builder of an enterprise, it was staffed in its early years by editors such as Raúl Pintos Marino, José Teófilo Salas, Luis Alberto Ruiz, Horacio Romero and Arnaldo S. Rodríguez, trained generations of local writers from adolescence, and grew after its founder's death into the large-circulation daily of Gualeguaychú city and department. Its pages preserve the texture of southern Entre Ríos life — locust plagues and harvests, hospitals and theatres, carnival and football, municipal disputes and river conflicts — with a continuity that no later source can reproduce. For WorldNM's directory of Argentine newspapers, El Argentino (Gualeguaychú) is therefore recorded as a historic and continuing Spanish-language morning daily of Entre Ríos, distinct from the many other Argentine papers that have shared the name El Argentino in other cities and centuries.