David Kraiselburd
Encyclopedia
Life and times
David Kraiselburd was born into a working-class Ukrainian Jewish family in BerissoBerisso
Berisso is the "cabecera" of the Department of Berisso of Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. It forms part of the Greater La Plata urban area and has a population of approximately 14.021 Inhabitants.-People:...
, a suburb north of La Plata
La Plata
La Plata is the capital city of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and of La Plata partido. According to the , the city proper has a population of 574,369 and its metropolitan area has 694,253 inhabitants....
, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, in 1912. In his teens, a high-school writing contest earned him an internship in La Plata's main daily, El Día, after the end of which he was hired by the paper as a sports commentator. He enrolled in the prestigious University of La Plata, and, at the paper, he was promoted to university affairs correspondent. He was also involved in university politics -- he had anarchist sympathies, and had protested Sacco and Vanzetti's execution a few years earlier. After earning the equivalent of a JD degree from Law School, he became a representative of the alumni association (Graduados). To broaden his background, he re-enrolled in the university and earned another degree in History. Also in those early years, the paper sent him to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War.
Gradually, he rose up in the journalistic ranks and became a prominent figure within and outside the paper. El Días financial straits eventually led the heirs of its founding partners to sell part of their stake in the daily, and, in September 1961, Kraiselburd purchased a share of El Día. The main owners of the daily became, thus, the Fascetto family (heirs of one of the founding partners) and Kraiselburd, although none had a controlling share (this partnership ended in 2010, with an agreement that gave the Fascetto family full control of Diario Popular
Diario Popular
Diario Popular is a local newspaper published in Sarandí, Argentina, and read widely in the surrounding southern Greater Buenos Aires suburbs of Avellaneda, Lanús and Quilmes....
, founded by Kraiselburd in 1974, while control of El Día was given fully to the Kraiselburd family, especially his eldest son, Raul, who took up his father's post after his murder).
Putting his legal background in action as director and editor-in-chief, Kraiselburd was among the few Argentine publishers to openly oppose the 1966 coup d'état against the moderate, democratically elected President Arturo Illia. Kraiselburd denounced the imminent coup, and then refused to publish dictator Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía
Juan Carlos Onganía Carballo was de facto president of Argentina from 29 June 1966 to 8 June 1970. He rose to power as military dictator after toppling, in a coup d’état self-named Revolución Argentina , the democratically elected president Arturo Illia .-Economic and social...
's inaugural address. Onganía's La Plata officials retaliated by confiscating that day's circulation and harassing the paper.
El Días challenges were not mitigated by the return to democracy
Argentine general election, March 1973
The first Argentine general election of 1973 was held on 11 March. Voters chose both the President and their legislators and with a turnout of 85.5%, it produced the following results:-President:...
in 1973. A decree signed by interim President Raúl Lastiri sought to prohibit Argentine periodicals' access to international news agencies wires, in an attempt to limit them to wires published by Telam
Télam
Télam is the Argentine national news agency founded in 1945. It provides news and information to about 300 subscribers, including government entities and national and international media. It operates as a state enterprise...
, the state news agency founded by Lastiri's benefactor, populist former President Juan Perón
Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine military officer, and politician. Perón was three times elected as President of Argentina though he only managed to serve one full term, after serving in several government positions, including the Secretary of Labor and the Vice Presidency...
. This measure amounted to a monopoly of news wires by the state agency, controlled by the government. Kraiselburd moved quickly, however, and, on his initiative, El Día and numerous other Argentine dailies established a national news agency, Noticias Argentinas. He was named president of the agency while remaining at the helm of El Día.
Staunchly centrist, El Día marshaled its "Page 4" editorial section against both right-wing military interventions and extreme left-wing groups's intransigent politics, raising particular concern about the far-left's increasingly violent methods to control the local university's student publications. The most powerful and violent of these groups, Montoneros
Montoneros
Montoneros was an Argentine Peronist urban guerrilla group, active during the 1960s and 1970s. The name is an allusion to 19th century Argentinian history. After Juan Perón's return from 18 years of exile and the 1973 Ezeiza massacre, which marked the definitive split between left and right-wing...
, retaliated by kidnapping Kraiselburd on June 25, 1974, and murdering his personal friend and El Día contributor, former Interior (law enforcement) Minister Arturo Mor Roig on July 15. Mor Roig had been instrumental in the transition toward democracy during the Lanusse military regime (which took place between the Onganía coup and the 1973 elections), but Montoneros regarded him as a supporter of the military, since he had been involved with Lanusse's government.
Kraiselburd was being held captive in a house in Gonnett, located between La Plata and Buenos Aires. Twenty odd days after the kidnapping, a neighbor called the police after noticing "suspicious activity" in the house next door. On July 17, 1974, a police unit was sent to investigate, and a shooting between the Montoneros cell and the police ensued. Outnumbered, the Montoneros shot Kraiselburd to death and fled the scene.
In September 1975, Kraiselburd was posthumously awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot prize
Maria Moors Cabot prize
The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes are the oldest international awards in the field of journalism. They pick what the Trustees of Columbia University see as journalistic contributions to inter-American understanding.-Award:...
by Columbia University's School of Journalism, for his unfailing defense of democratic values in the face of authoritarianism of both right-wing and left-wing leanings. After Kraiselburd's murder, his eldest son, Raul, took up his post. Under his direction, and following the lead of his father, El Dia became, along with The Buenos Aires Herald and Diario Rio Negro, one of the few Argentinean newspapers to report on disappearances and other issues that were covered up by most of the Argentinean media during the Dirty War (1976-1983), as attested by subsequent awards of Columbia's Moors Cabot prizes.