The Press: Insufficient Funds

As El Pampero goes, so usually goes the Nazi fifth column in Argentina. And last week Pampero, biggest openly Nazi newspaper in the Western Hemisphere, stopped publishing. This week it reappeared in reduced format: a single printed sheet folded to make four pages.

Either the Nazi fifth column had run short of cash or wanted it to appear so, Buenos Aires believed that the fifth column was nearly broke.

Until 1941 Pampero’s normal budget included $11,000 a month from the German Embassy; since early in that year Nazi businessmen have been encouraged by subsidies to give the paper plenty of advertising. With these subsidies Pampero was able to get its circulation up as high as 140,000 and pay the heavy upkeep on Editor Enrique P. Osés, whose salary was $1,500 a month, plus fat expenses covering such items as an eight-man bodyguard. Additional expenses were incurred through Pampero’s 58 suits for libel, calumny, contempt, slander, vilification, defamation, extortion, and once for repairs to Pampero’s offices after a fed-up crowd had wrecked them.

Editor Osés was hauled up three months ago for saying that a visit of Argentine congressmen to the U.S. prepared a “Yankee invasion” of Argentina. In July 1940 he was arrested for obscenity, for printing an ostensibly mild lampoon of Winston Churchill which was an acrostic: the first letter of each line combined to read “One must be English to be a son of a whore.” Editor Osés never stayed long in jail. When impetuous police raided Pampero’s office last fall, Acting President Castillo promised that Pampero would be “unmolested, uncontrolled and the publication and distribution uninterrupted.” Pampero could perhaps still count on Ramon Castillo’s sympathies. But even the efficient Germans can’t publish a paper on sympathy sans cash.