About Somos

Somos

Somos was an Argentine general-interest and current-affairs magazine published by Editorial Atlántida in Buenos Aires from 1976 to 1993. It is listed among Atlántida's former titles with those dates, and publishing histories described it as the publishing house's current-affairs weekly. It closed in 1993. Its seventeen-year run began in the year of Argentina's last military coup and ended a decade after democracy returned, and its historical reputation is inseparable from that origin: Somos is remembered in scholarship on Editorial Atlántida as one of the magazines through which the publishing house most visibly supported the military regime, a role documented in detail by researchers of the dictatorship period.

That reputation makes Somos a different kind of subject from most magazines in this directory. Where other titles are remembered for their artistry, their humour or their resistance, Somos is studied as evidence — of how a major commercial publisher aligned itself with an authoritarian government, of what its covers and campaigns told readers at the time, and of how a current-affairs magazine could serve power rather than scrutinise it. Its profile is therefore written in the past tense and with attribution: the claims that define it come from published research on Atlántida and the dictatorship, principally the account drawn from Marguerite Feitlowitz's A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, as summarised in histories of the publishing house.

Editorial Atlántida, its publisher

Editorial Atlántida was one of Argentina's great magazine houses, founded by the Uruguayan-born writer and publisher Constancio C. Vigil. By the time Somos appeared in 1976, Atlántida's portfolio already included some of the longest-lived titles in Argentine publishing: the children's magazine Billiken, founded in 1919; the women's magazine Para Ti, founded in 1922; the sports magazine El Gráfico, founded in 1919; and the celebrity weekly Gente, launched in 1965. Atlántida's magazines reached deep into Argentine family life — children, women, sports fans and celebrity readers all bought its titles every week.

Somos was the house's current-affairs weekly within that portfolio, the title charged with politics and national events while its sister magazines handled family, sport and society. That division of labour gave the magazine a particular importance for the publisher's relationship with the state: when Atlántida wished to speak politically, Somos — together with the news coverage in Gente and Para Ti — was its voice. The magazine was edited and published in Buenos Aires, Atlántida's home city, and distributed nationally through the same kiosk and subscription networks as the rest of the house's titles.

A launch in the year of the coup

Somos began publication in 1976, the year in which Argentina's armed forces overthrew the government of Isabel Perón on 24 March and installed the regime that called itself the National Reorganization Process. The dictatorship that followed, led first by General Jorge Rafael Videla, conducted the campaign of abduction, torture and murder known as the Dirty War, in which thousands of Argentines were disappeared. It also censored and intimidated the press, closing some publications and ensuring that most of those that survived did so within limits the regime set.

Histories of Atlántida stated that, following the installation of the dictatorship in 1976, the publishing house's publications became the regime's explicit supporters, and that a bias towards military rule evident before the coup intensified afterwards. In that account, the support was most apparent in the house's best-selling women's magazines, Gente and Para Ti, and in its current-affairs weekly, Somos. The magazine's entire existence under the dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983, must be read against that documented alignment.

The World Cup cover of 1978

The single most cited example of Somos's editorial role came in 1978, when Argentina hosted and won the football World Cup — the regime's great propaganda showcase, staged while political prisoners were held in clandestine detention centres in the same city. Histories of Atlántida recorded that the national team's victory was followed by a Somos cover portraying not the team, but the dictator, Videla, as he rose in the bleachers to cheer the occasion.

The choice of that cover is worth dwelling on, because covers were a weekly magazine's loudest public statement, displayed at every kiosk in the country. A sports victory that belonged, in popular feeling, to the players and the public was presented on Somos's cover as the president-general's triumph. Researchers preserved that cover as a compact illustration of how the magazine converted national celebration into regime legitimation during the dictatorship's most internationally visible month.

Editorial campaigns in the regime's crises

The same histories documented the magazine's tone during the regime's difficulties in 1978, a year of severe recession and of a looming conflict with neighbouring Chile over the Beagle Channel. Atlántida's magazines, in that account, countered the crisis with exhortations to, in the quoted words, support the process that began on March 24, 1976, when we took a decisive step towards political maturity — the publishing house endorsing the coup itself, in its own pages, as an act of national maturity.

Growing international pressure against the regime over the Dirty War was answered within the Atlántida portfolio above all by Para Ti, which organised a postcard campaign under the label Argentina: The Whole Truth, inviting readers to mail pre-printed defences of the country to the regime's most prominent international critics. Those named in the histories included United States President Jimmy Carter, Senator Ted Kennedy and French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, as well as Amnesty International and numerous international newspapers. Somos belonged to, and echoed, that same editorial offensive: a group of magazines using their intimacy with Argentine families to defend abroad a regime that was murdering its own citizens at home.

After 1983: the rehabilitation camps series

Democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, with the election of Raúl Alfonsín after the dictatorship collapsed in the wake of the Malvinas defeat. Histories of Atlántida recorded that even after the return to democracy, Somos ran a series on non-existent rehabilitation camps for subversives, which included doctored photographs of detainees shown in a familial atmosphere, complete with medical, religious, psychological and legal services.

That series, as documented, is among the most damning episodes in the magazine's history, because it appeared not under censorship but in a free country, after the facts of the disappearance system were already being exposed by survivors, human-rights organisations and the courts that would try the junta leaders in 1985. A magazine that published fabricated images of humane detention, when the real detention centres had been torture chambers, had carried its dictatorship-era alignment beyond the dictatorship itself. Researchers cited the episode precisely because it showed the alignment to have been a choice, not merely compliance under duress.

Content and position within the Atlántida portfolio

In ordinary publishing terms, Somos was a general-interest and current-affairs magazine: it covered politics and society during the dictatorship and democracy, in the description preserved in the batch record based on Atlántida's publications list. Weekly current-affairs magazines of its type combined political reporting, interviews, social coverage and photography, competing for the reader who wanted the week summarised and interpreted. Within Atlántida, that role made it the political sibling of Gente's celebrity coverage, Para Ti's women's service journalism and El Gráfico's sport.

Its commercial position also explains its longevity across a turbulent period. Atlántida was a powerful, diversified publisher whose popular titles generated the revenue that sustained its whole portfolio, and a current-affairs weekly gave the house a presence in the political conversation that pure entertainment titles could not. Somos survived the transition to democracy, the hyperinflation of the late 1980s and the economic restructuring of the early 1990s before closing in 1993 — a lifespan that covered, almost exactly, the dictatorship, the democratic transition and the first decade of restored civilian rule.

Buenos Aires and the national reader

Somos was published in Buenos Aires, the seat of Argentina's government, armed forces and national media, and its subject matter was the national power concentrated in that city: the junta and later the elected governments, the economy, the Church, the unions and the scandals of public life. A current-affairs weekly edited in the capital in those years could not avoid being part of the story it covered; its access, its silences and its campaigns were all read by contemporaries as political signals.

At the same time, Atlántida's distribution made the magazine a national presence, sold far beyond the capital in provincial cities and towns. For many readers outside Buenos Aires, magazines of this kind were the principal illustrated account of national politics they encountered each week. That reach is part of why historians take its dictatorship-era record seriously: what Somos showed, and what it refused to show, helped shape what a mass readership believed was happening in its own country.

Closure in 1993

Somos closed in 1993, listed thereafter among Editorial Atlántida's former publications with the dates 1976–1993. By the early 1990s Argentina's magazine market was contracting under television competition and economic change, and Atlántida itself was entering the period of ownership changes that would eventually carry the historic publishing house into larger media groups. The current-affairs weekly, never the house's most beloved title, did not survive the decade.

No successor publication continued it, and the magazine left no standing digital edition; the website field for the title in publishing records is empty, as befits a magazine that ended before the web era. Its afterlife has been in archives and in the work of historians, journalists and human-rights researchers reconstructing the media history of the dictatorship.

Historical assessment

The historical assessment of Somos rests on the documented record summarised above: a current-affairs weekly whose publisher's histories identify it as one of the regime's explicit supporters after 1976; a magazine that put the dictator, rather than the team, on its cover to celebrate the 1978 World Cup; part of a portfolio that exhorted readers to support the process begun on 24 March 1976; and a title that, after democracy returned, published a series presenting fabricated rehabilitation camps for the disappeared. Those episodes, recorded in published research drawing on Feitlowitz's A Lexicon of Terror, are the reason Somos is remembered at all beyond the trade.

Its value to history is therefore diagnostic. The story of the Argentine press under the dictatorship includes heroic exceptions, prudent silences and active collaboration, and Somos belongs in the record as a prominent example of the third category from the country's biggest magazine house. A complete directory of Argentine magazines has to include it — seventeen years of weekly publication cannot be erased — but it includes it honestly, as this profile has tried to do: as a closed magazine whose pages are now evidence in the continuing Argentine reckoning with the years 1976 to 1983.