About El Censor

El Censor

Overview

El Censor was a Spanish-language weekly newspaper published in Buenos Aires between 1815 and 1819. It was an official oversight newspaper, created under the Provisional Statute of 1815 to scrutinise public officials and to defend freedom of the press. Its first number appeared on 15 August 1815. It was edited first by the Cuban intellectual Antonio José Valdés and, from February 1817, by the Chilean priest and patriot Fray Camilo Henríquez. It reached 177 issues before ceasing on 6 February 1819. It was financed by the Cabildo of Buenos Aires, the municipal council, precisely so that it could perform a task no ordinary government paper could: to censure, in print, the acts of the government that paid for it.

That paradox is the reason El Censor is still studied. The revolutionary authorities of Buenos Aires in 1815 maintained two publicly supported newspapers with opposite briefs: the Gazeta, which publicised the acts of government, and El Censor, whose explicit function was to censure those same acts and to instruct the public in its rights and interests. A later historian of the period called the arrangement a curious governmental tendency — to pay with state money for an official newspaper that gave the government's information, and for another destined to censure the government's own acts. El Censor was the fullest expression of that idea, and its four-year run makes it one of the most remarkable experiments of the independence-era press in Spanish America.

History and founding

El Censor originated in the political crisis of 1815. The uprising of Fontezuelas in April 1815 brought down Carlos María de Alvear as Supreme Director, and the Junta de Observación that followed drafted the Provisional Statute, sanctioned on 5 May 1815, to regulate the conduct and powers of the new authorities. The Statute restored the legal foundations of freedom of the press, reinstating the Press Freedom Decree of October 1811, and it introduced a specific innovation: the creation of a new newspaper, titled El Censor, financed by the Cabildo, whose function was to reflect on the procedures and unjust operations of public officials and to enlighten the people in their rights and interests. The Statute also established criteria for judging abuses of press freedom and charged the Junta Protectora de la Libertad de Imprenta with determining whether a public paper had committed an offence.

The first issue of El Censor appeared on 15 August 1815, and the paper was published once a week. Its creation gave the Buenos Aires press, for the first time, an institutional division of labour: information from the government in one paper, institutionalised criticism of the government in another. An earlier, short-lived namesake had existed in 1812, edited by Vicente Pazos Silva; the El Censor of 1815 consciously evoked that interrupted precedent, and the continuity of the title gave the new paper a claim to an older tradition of vigilance. The two papers of that name should not be confused: the 1812 El Censor was a brief episode of the early revolutionary years, while the 1815 El Censor was a statutory institution that lasted three and a half years and 177 numbers.

Antonio José Valdés and the first editorship

The first editor of El Censor, from August 1815 until February 1817, was Antonio José Valdés, described in the scholarship as a Cuban intellectual who had left his country because of his liberal ideas. Under Valdés the paper combined political, military, economic and cultural material, and it was counted among the few newspapers of the independence period that managed to combine those elements well. His editorial manner was distinctive: faced with the difficulties the revolution was passing through, the organisation of the Congress and the mobilisation of troops for the war, he emphasised collective questions — the search for unity and for centralised leadership in Buenos Aires among the towns that had belonged to the viceroyalty — and he rejected strong personalisms, rarely exalting the defects or virtues of individual figures. When he had to mention the Supreme Director, he referred to him by the title of the office rather than by name, a small stylistic discipline that embodied the paper's whole doctrine: offices were to be judged, not flattered.

Valdés simultaneously conducted one of the strangest episodes in early press history. Days after the creation of El Censor, he founded a private paper of his own, La Prensa Argentina, in which, anonymously, he attacked the director of El Censor — that is, himself — as daring, pedantic and conceited. To the public the two papers were enemies; in reality both were written by the same man. La Prensa Argentina ceased in mid-November 1816. Historians have treated the performance variously as a comedy of simulated plurality and as a shrewd recognition that genuine opposition could not be uttered even from within a statutory censor's chair. Either way, it qualifies any simple celebration of El Censor as a free press: its editor evidently felt that his official criticism had to be supplemented, under cover of anonymity, by a sharper private one.

Camilo Henríquez and the second editorship

On 13 February 1817 the editorship passed to Fray Camilo Henríquez, who directed the paper until its last number on 6 February 1819; some accounts date his tenure from the issue of 17 February 1817. Henríquez brought to the post an unmatched career in the patriot press. Born in Valdivia in 1769, educated in Lima, three times investigated by the Inquisition for his interest in prohibited books such as those of Rousseau, he had returned to Chile at the end of 1810, edited La Aurora de Chile, the first Chilean newspaper, from February 1812, and then El Monitor Araucano, before fleeing after the patriot defeat at Rancagua in October 1814, by way of Mendoza, to exile in Buenos Aires. There he contributed to the Gazeta, which he edited for a period in 1815, and studied mathematics and medicine, before taking over El Censor.

The change of editors marked a notable change of style. Where Valdés had stressed collective questions and avoided personal exaltation, Henríquez — regarded as the father of Chilean journalism and one of the boldest precursors of the independence idea in America — wrote with a more urgent, argumentative voice. Scholarship on the paper's news section notes that under Henríquez the Noticias section would begin, characteristically, with a complaint about the scarcity of news about the state of distant points in revolution: a reminder that El Censor, for all its institutional theory, depended for its information on slow, uncertain communications across a continent at war. Henríquez remained in Buenos Aires until 1822, when he returned to Chile at the invitation of Bernardo O'Higgins.

Content and character

El Censor continued, under both editors, a general line of affirming the discourse of government while sustaining the convenience of liberal institutions and popular sovereignty, and it defended freedom of the press with particular energy, dedicating articles to the subject, transcribing foreign newspapers, and publishing the corresponding section of the Provisional Statute itself. That combination — loyalty to the revolutionary cause together with insistence on liberal institutions, popular sovereignty and a free press — defines its character. It was not an opposition paper in the party sense. It was a constitutional watchdog inside the revolutionary camp, charged with keeping officials honest and citizens informed of their rights while the war for independence continued.

Its most regular section was Noticias, news, through which its editors constructed the figures of the heroes and villains of their time and decided what information their readers needed. Around that core the paper carried the political, military, economic and cultural coverage for which it has been praised. It also took part in the great editorial debates of the Congress of Tucumán period, including the argument over the form of government — republic, constitutional monarchy, even the proposal of an Inca monarchy, which its contemporary Pazos Silva attacked in print. El Censor's pages are therefore used by historians as a record not only of events but of how the revolutionary elite in Buenos Aires understood equality, unity and legitimate authority between 1815 and 1819.

Printing, frequency and finance

El Censor was published weekly in Buenos Aires, in Spanish, and its printing history is unusually well documented. From its first number to number 63 it was printed by Gandarillas and partners; from number 64 to number 70, by the Imprenta del Sol; and from number 71 to number 177, the last, dated 6 February 1819, by the Imprenta de los Niños Expósitos. For part of its existence, therefore, it was produced in a private printing house, itself an advance for the period. Its duration was particularly long for a second newspaper published alongside the Gazeta, and its survival across three printers and two editors testifies to the statutory protection it enjoyed: a paper created by a statute and paid for by the Cabildo could not be extinguished by a displeased official as easily as a private sheet.

That protection was also its dependence. El Censor existed because the Provisional Statute willed it and the Cabildo funded it. It had no independent commercial base of the kind that, later in the century, would allow newspapers to defy governments and survive. When the political order that had created it dissolved at the end of the decade, nothing remained to sustain it.

Closure in 1819

El Censor published its last issue, number 177, on 6 February 1819. The sources consulted record the fact and date of the closure without attributing it to a single act of suppression, and this profile does not invent one. The context is plain enough: the Directory was entering its final crisis, the Congress that had declared independence at Tucumán was nearing its end, the federalist war in the interior was consuming the state, and within a year the Battle of Cepeda would destroy central government altogether. A statutory newspaper of vigilance, designed for a constitutional order that had never fully come into being, ended with the order that had imagined it. Henríquez, its last editor, stayed on in Buenos Aires for three more years before returning to Chile, where he died in 1825.

Legacy and study today

El Censor has attracted sustained academic attention out of proportion to its size, including studies in the Latin American Research Review tradition, in the CONICET journal Cuadernos de H Ideas on its news coverage between 1815 and 1819, and in work on equality, translation and press freedom in revolutionary Buenos Aires. Complete or near-complete runs are rare — a bookseller's description of a surviving partial set lists 83 of the 177 issues, including a rare extra issue — which makes the paper both precious and difficult to study whole. Its legacy for press history is the idea it embodied: that a government confident in its legitimacy might fund its own censor. The experiment was not repeated in that statutory form, but the principle it asserted — that scrutiny of officials is a public function, not a favour — became a permanent part of Argentine political language.

What the record does not show

The record for El Censor is comparatively rich, yet it has real gaps. No verified circulation or readership figures survive in the sources consulted, and the paper's actual effect on any official's conduct cannot be demonstrated from the evidence cited here. The boundary between the 1812 namesake and the 1815 paper, the precise handover date between Valdés and Henríquez — given as 13 or 17 February 1817 in different accounts — and the reasons for the final closure in February 1819 all rest on secondary scholarship rather than on a surviving administrative archive quoted directly. The Valdés double editorship with La Prensa Argentina is well attested in the historiography, including the contemporary judgements it quotes, but it is known through later historians' reconstruction. This profile has relied on the points where the Cambridge, CONICET and university-press sources agree: the statutory origin, the first issue of 15 August 1815, the two editors, the three printers, the 177 issues, and the last issue of 6 February 1819.