About Primera Plana

Primera Plana

Primera Plana was a weekly Argentine news, political and cultural magazine published in Buenos Aires between 1962 and 1973. It was founded in 1962 by the journalist Jacobo Timerman and was modelled on the American newsweeklies Time and Newsweek. It closed in 1973. During little more than a decade of existence it was very influential in shaping the journalism tradition of the country, modernising Argentine journalism and cultural coverage in the 1960s, publishing the comic strip Mafalda for the first time, and setting a standard for the illustrated newsweekly against which later Argentine magazines were measured.

The magazine appeared in November 1962, in an Argentina that, as the historian John King's Warwick research summary described it, had a shaky democratic order based on excluding the deposed former president Juan Domingo Perón and his voters from the electoral process. That fragile democracy was pushed aside in June 1966, when General Juan Carlos Onganía took power. Primera Plana's life therefore spanned the full arc of the Argentine 1960s: fragile civilian rule, military coup, authoritarian modernisation and escalating political violence, ending in the year Perón himself returned. Its pages remain one of the richest records of that decade.

Jacobo Timerman and the founding in 1962

Jacobo Timerman, born in 1923 in the Ukrainian town of Bar and brought to Argentina as a small child, had risen as a journalist reporting for various publications including Agence France-Presse, and had served on the editorial board of the biweekly Nueva Sión in the late 1940s. In 1962 he founded Primera Plana, an Argentine newsweekly often compared to Time. Reference accounts described the magazine as created to support the supposedly liberal wing of the military forces, with a nationalist stance that also supported cultural nationalism and modernisation — a positioning that reflected Timerman's milieu in the Argentina of the early 1960s, when many liberals still looked to a modernising faction of the armed forces as an engine of national development.

The headquarters of the magazine were in Buenos Aires, and it was published weekly as a glossy political, cultural and current-affairs magazine. Timerman's editorship lasted only until 1964: he resigned as editor of Primera Plana amid rumours of official threats due to his line of opposition to the government, and the magazine announced his resignation the week after it had reported on government threats to sanction uncooperative publications. The episode established, very early, the pattern of the magazine's existence — editorial ambition running repeatedly into the power of the state. In 1965 Timerman founded another newsweekly, Confirmado, and in 1971 the daily La Opinión, which many considered the greatest work of his career.

The Time and Newsweek model

Primera Plana was modelled on Newsweek and Time magazines, and that modelling was its modernising act. The American newsweekly format organised the world into signed-off sections — nation, world, economy, arts, books — written in a brisk, authoritative, interpretive voice that did not merely list events but explained their meaning and ranked their importance. Argentine journalism before Primera Plana was dominated by newspapers whose cultural coverage and news analysis followed older conventions; the magazine imported a format that treated politics, economics, literature, cinema and manners as parts of a single story about a country changing quickly.

The format also changed who journalism was for. The magazine addressed an urban, middle-class reader who wanted to feel informed about everything at once: the government, the bestseller list, the new cinema, the economic debate. Warwick's research summary paired Primera Plana (1962–1969 in its principal run) with the later journals Crisis and Punto de Vista as the key periodicals through which Argentine politics and culture between 1960 and 2010 could be studied — a measure of how completely the magazine came to embody its decade.

Mafalda's first home

The magazine's most famous contribution to Argentine culture began modestly. Primera Plana was the first magazine to publish the comic strip Mafalda. Mafalda, produced by Joaquín Salvador Lavado — Quino — was first published in the magazine on 29 September 1964. The magazine presented Mafalda to its readers as a strip especially created for it by Quino, whom it described as the most brilliant cartoonist of his generation, peopled by an intellectually precocious little girl and her unique universe of family and friends, according to scholarly reconstruction of the launch.

That study also recorded that in the year Mafalda launched, Primera Plana had a circulation of roughly 60,000 copies and targeted a male middle-class audience, reaching as many as 250,000 readers according to a market study — each copy passing through several hands. Mafalda, the small girl who interrogated her parents and the world about politics, soup and the state of humanity, went on to become Argentina's most beloved comic character, syndicated internationally across the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. That she began in Primera Plana's pages, surrounded by political journalism, was fitting: the strip was from the start a middle-class child's-eye commentary on the same Argentina the magazine's reporters covered.

Books, prizes and cultural authority

Primera Plana was also the first magazine in Argentina to publish a list of best-selling books, a small innovation with large consequences: it made literary success visible and comparable, and gave the magazine a weekly instrument for shaping reading taste. In June 1964 the magazine initiated an annual literary prize, and in 1967 Daniel Moyano's novel El Oscuro won the prize. A magazine that could both measure the book market and crown its winners had made itself an arbiter of literary culture, not merely a reporter of it.

The cultural ambition extended internationally. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was the Lima correspondent of Primera Plana, a detail that captures the magazine's Latin American horizon: it wanted correspondents, arguments and reputations that moved across the continent. Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez was one of the editors-in-chief of the magazine, and the presence of writers of that calibre in its leadership helps explain why its cultural pages carried an authority beyond ordinary magazine journalism. Politics and culture were not separate desks at Primera Plana; they were the same project of interpreting a modernising Argentina.

Politics, nationalism and modernisation

Reference profiles of the magazine described its stance as nationalist, supportive of cultural nationalism and modernisation, and — at its founding — of political authoritarianism in the form of the military's supposedly liberal wing. That combination can seem contradictory now, but it was a recognisable position in the Argentina of 1962, where Peronism was proscribed, civilian governments were weak, and many intellectuals believed only the armed forces could impose modernisation on a deadlocked country. The magazine's history is partly the history of that illusion's collapse.

The magazine was published through the 1966 coup that overthrew President Arturo Illia and installed Onganía, whose administration was characterised by violent repression of Argentina's universities and intellectuals and by the imposition of strict, conservative Catholic morals. A modernising, culturally liberal magazine could not coexist comfortably with a regime that raided universities and policed private morality, and Primera Plana's later 1960s were marked by friction with the very kind of military power it had once hoped would modernise the country.

Closures and suspensions

During its existence Primera Plana was closed down by the military government several times. Onganía suspended publication of Primera Plana in 1969. The next year it resumed publication, but never regained its previous status. The suspensions were not footnotes to the magazine's story; they were the story's turning points. Each closure interrupted its commercial momentum, scattered its staff's energies and reminded its readers that in Onganía's Argentina even a glossy, middle-class newsweekly published at the sufferance of the state.

Timerman's own trajectory ran parallel. He had left in 1964 under reported official threats; the magazine he founded was suspended in 1969 by a dictatorship; and the newspaper he founded afterwards, La Opinión, would be shut down by the later military regime in 1977, when Timerman himself was arrested, tortured and held for some thirty months before being expelled from the country. Primera Plana cannot be understood apart from that larger history of the founder's collisions with military power.

Perón's purchase and the end in 1973

In 1971, Juan Perón acquired the magazine while he was in exile in Spain, planning, in reference accounts' phrasing, to control it and part of the political discussion in the country. Another account dated the purchase of Timerman's former magazine to 1970, from Perón's exile. Either way, the symbolism was stark: the magazine founded in a political order built on excluding Perón ended its life as the exiled leader's property, bought as an instrument for his return.

Primera Plana ceased publication in 1973, the year Perón did return to Argentina and to the presidency. Its eleven-year run had ended with the decade that created it. The magazine had never recovered its earlier status after the 1969 suspension and the change of ownership, and the Argentina of 1973 — polarised, violent and entering the crisis that would end in the 1976 coup — no longer resembled the country in which a glossy, modernising newsweekly could plausibly claim to interpret the whole national scene to a confident middle class.

Legacy in Argentine journalism

The magazine's legacy was foundational. It was very influential in shaping the journalism tradition in the country: the interpretive newsweekly, the signed and sectioned magazine, serious cultural coverage inside a general-interest title, bestseller lists and literary prizes as instruments of cultural authority — all entered Argentine practice through or were consolidated by Primera Plana. Historians and literary scholars continued to use its run as a primary source for the Argentine 1960s, and the Warwick research project on writers and cultural change in Argentina took the magazine as one of its three central periodicals for the half-century after 1960.

Its alumni and discoveries carried its influence outward: Timerman to Confirmado and La Opinión, Tomás Eloy Martínez to a major career in journalism and fiction, and Mafalda from its pages to the world. Measured against its ambitions, Primera Plana failed to survive its country's politics; measured as an institution, it succeeded completely, because Argentine journalism after it was different from Argentine journalism before it.

Buenos Aires setting and present-day status

Primera Plana was a Buenos Aires magazine: headquartered in the capital, written by the capital's journalists, and read above all by the capital's middle class, whose apartments, cinemas, bookshops and political anxieties filled its pages. Its Buenos Aires was the city of the 1960s boom in cinema, theatre, publishing and psychoanalysis, and the magazine chronicled that city's sense of itself as the cultural capital of Spanish America even as the political order around it decayed from fragile democracy into dictatorship.

The magazine is closed and has no current print or official digital edition; its status is historical. Its issues survive as documents, its reputation is maintained by scholarship on Timerman, on Mafalda and on the Argentine 1960s, and its name remains the standard reference for the moment when Argentine magazine journalism modernised. For a publication that lived only from 1962 to 1973, that is an unusually permanent afterlife: Primera Plana is remembered not as one newsweekly among many, but as the newsweekly that taught Argentina what a modern magazine could be.