Peronism in Billiken and Billiken in Peronism (1946–1955)

Abstract

For a children's magazine to survive for a hundred years is an extraordinary achievement and it is unsurprising that Billiken and Editorial Atlántida would want to qualify just how remarkable this was. Prior to this research project, there were two claims upon which Atlántida had settled. The first was that Billiken was the world's longest-running Spanish-language children's magazine and the second that it had achieved continuous publication since 1919 without ever having missed a week. The first claim would appear to be too modest as the closest contender, the Russian monthly children's magazine Murzilka, was published only from May 1924. 1 The continuity claim, however, is disproved by Billiken's publication break of four weeks in 1949, which had been omitted from the publishing house's institutional memory. This occurred during 'el primer peronismo' , the term used to refer to General Juan Domingo Perón's first two terms as president, running from his election in 1946 to his re-election in 1952 and ending with his ousting by military coup in 1955. This 'first Peronism' is one of the most comprehensively researched periods of Argentine history and continues to attract studies from a variety of disciplines because of the complex and contradictory nature of the era's politics, the transformative effect it had on Argentine culture and society, and the enduring legacy of, and fascination with, both Perón and his wife, María Eva Duarte de Perón (Evita).Billiken's break in publication, from 21 February to 21 March 1949, coincided with a month-long printers' strike during which hardly any newspapers and magazines were printed in Buenos Aires. 2 There is an identifiable 'before' and 'after' the break in Billiken's approach to the Peronist regime, which moves from barely registering the regime's existence to publishing Billiken's first photograph of Perón on 28 March 1949 (issue 1528). From then until 1952, the majority of Peronist propaganda published in Billiken in the form of text, photographs and illustrations, or combinations thereof, falls into one of three categories: i) regime-sponsored events related to schools and children's sports, ii