Next April 2 will mark the 42nd anniversary of the beginning of the Malvinas War, and Télam news agency is fenced off, its staff on “leave” and its website shut down, due to a decision imposed by Javier Milei’s administration.
As key witness of Argentina in the last eight decades, Télam’s coverage of the Malvinas War, with photographs and news wires, was essential to Argentinian journalism and is part of the history of the news agency created by Juan Domingo Perón on April 14, 1979.
Under the civic-military dictatorship, Télam became an agency of propaganda of a regime that promoted state terrorism and imposed fierce censorship to the agency’s service. As a result, part of the agency’s content was disseminated in the international black market of information.
Télam and ATC, the only media authorized
The situation got worse during the Malvinas War, in 1982, when Télam and public television network ATC were the only media authorized to cover the conflict from the islands, with correspondents among the Argentinian troops.
Some of the photos taken by Télam during the war were recovered many years later. In 2022, on the 40th anniversary of the war, the agency published a special document with over 200 images -many of them never before seen- with key moments of the conflict and the everyday lives of soldiers and islanders.
The testimony of the correspondents
Télam’s correspondents to the Malvinas War were journalists Diego Pérez Andrade, Juan Carlos García Malod and Juan José Marc, and photographers Román Von Eckstein, Eduardo Navone and Eduardo Farré.
“The military government intercepted and seized the material that we tried to send to the continent. They were usually camera rolls or video tapes. The curious thing was that many of those photographs, which were never published in Argentina, were later seen on the pages of the most important magazines and newspapers in the world: Stern, Newsweek, Time, Cambio 16, Paris Match, among others”, said in an interview Farré, who passed away in 2021.
Farré estimated that with all that photographic material, for which he risked his life more than once, the military regime made “a fortune in US dollars”.
Pérez Andrade also explained in several interviews his experience as correspondent of Télam during the war: “The evening of April 1, 1982, I was told that my boss was ill and I was in charge of the editorial office. And something strange happened: around 9:30 PM they brought food and dozens of Colonels, Admirals and General Officers arrived. They said we were taking over the islands and they were celebrating. We stayed up all night, because early in the morning we had to send the official news wire”, he recalled in an interview to La Nación in 2012.
On April 5, Pérez Andrade replaced Télam’s correspondent in the city of Río Gallegos, and later he was sent to the islands, since he was the only one who spoke English.
“We were in a privileged position. Since we were not war correspondents, the high ranks could not give us orders. We travelled across the island, we could be among the units and the soldiers were eager to tells us about the conditions in which they were, so people would know: they were freezing, they had no weapons and had no strategic planning. We wrote about that, but Télam wouldn’t publish any of it”, he remembered regarding the censorship they suffered when their news wires reached the continent.
The journalist said that the house where they stayed became “a crucial place, because soldiers could get news, take a shower or eat there”.
“We rented a house from a lady who had gone with her grandchildren to a friend’s ranch, escaping the war. We were not allowed to put up soldiers, but that was the first thing we did, because Menéndez forced us. Weeks later, you would open the fridge and find a hand-grenade. It was chaotic. There were at least ten of us. We accommodated three captains and one priest”, he said.
A historic archive
On the 40th anniversary of the Malvinas War, in 2022, Télam opened its archives to the community to show the photographs taken by the special correspondents on the islands during the conflict.
It was an exclusive material that, in many cases, had not even been seen by the photographers themselves, because camera rolls were sent to the agency undeveloped, nor had it been published. The 2,250 photographs were digitized by the National Memory Archive, thanks to an agreement of collaboration signed in 2012 and renewed in 2021.
A selection of the photographs was presented in ten galleries that described different moments of the war: disembarkment, Operation Press, Governor Menéndez, the first bombardment, everyday life, the soldiers, the trenches, icebreaker ARA Irizar, the most famous ones and the correspondents.
The photographs were published in 2022 by the most important national and international media, such as El País (Spain). Then, an itinerant exhibition travelled across Argentina.
The images were available on Télam’s website, now shut down by Milei’s government.