Young Newspaper Tests Limits of Chile’s Dictatorship

Amid chaos on the sixth floor of a downtown office building here, a few dozen young Chileans are editing an audacious new newspaper called La Epoca.

Each day their product, which is not politically partisan but of a frankly democratic cast, is testing the limits of one of the hemisphere’s toughest dictatorships.

La Epoca, a morning tabloid born in March, editorially supports a transition to restored democracy; it is therefore, de facto, an opposition newspaper.

“Chile lacks a newspaper with four basic characteristics: professional, independent, pluralist and democratic,” publisher Emilio Filippi wrote in a letter to his staff. “These are indispensable qualities for a different kind of newspaper. Without them, La Epoca would have no reason for being.”

Filippi’s injunction might have been borrowed from a journalism textbook in the United States, but it is rare in much of Latin America, where the historic role of many newspapers has been to inform by reinforcing the political prejudices of their readers.

Much of Press Partisan

A partisan press, obedient in slanted news columns to government, opposition or vested economic or political interests, flourishes still, from Mexico to Argentina, and from Nicaragua to Paraguay, where leading opposition newspapers are closed by government fiat.

“Our job is more important than that of a political party. We offer access to ideas of all kinds: left, right and center, resisting identification with any one of them. This kind of newspaper is essential for Chile if democracy is to return,” Filippi said in an interview. “Explain the options and let people decide for themselves. That’s what good newspapers do all over the world.”

La Epoca’s self-assigned role is a lonely and perilous one under stiff-necked President Augusto Pinochet, but Chile’s new newspaper is not the only upstart in Latin America today.

Amid a democratic wave that has reduced South American dictatorships to two--Chile and Paraguay--ground-breaking newspapers serious in content and purpose, distinguishing clearly between their news columns and their editorial opinions, are maturing in one country after another.

More Professionalism Seen

“Newspapers in Latin America are growing up, becoming more professional. There is a clear trend away from the traditional partisan press toward more U.S.-style papers,” said Bill Williamson, executive director of the Miami-based Inter American Press Assn., a grouping of more than 1,000 newspapers from both halves of the hemisphere.

In virtually every South American capital, and in some surprisingly articulate provincial centers as well, there are newspapers today that also quest for what Filippi calls “a new journalism, honest, responsible and dignified . . . without myths or taboos.”

The new breed is not always welcome. At presidential instruction, Ecuador’s national airline does not carry copies of Hoy, a lively new Quito paper. In Uruguay, President Julio M. Sanguinetti, one of Latin America’s most articulate democrats and himself a one-time political journalist, has no time for Busqueda, an independent newsweekly in a country with a long and literate tradition of a partisan press.

“I have nothing against Busqueda,” Sanguinetti said with a grin during a recent conversation, “I just don’t read it.”

In Latin America, dictators have repeatedly silenced opposition newspapers, magazines and radio stations.

What is curious about La Epoca here in Chile is that it was born in a dictatorship with grudging government consent. Filippi, then editor of Hoy, a newsweekly friendly to the opposition Christian Democratic Party, applied for necessary government permission to start a newspaper.

2 Years to Get Permit

Met with a prolonged silence, he went to court, won a judgment ordering the government to respond, and finally received his permit. In all, it took more than two years.

Frankly patterned after the successful El Pais in Madrid, La Epoca is being weaned as a dense, solid paper that seeks to avoid both the distortions and the sensationalism of its peers. By conviction or coercion, Chile’s older newspapers support the government of Pinochet, whose scant patience with opponents has been a hallmark of Chilean life these past 13 years.

Pinochet’s loathing for the press, and foreign and domestic opposition, is well-known, but early days at La Epoca have been marked by the absence of government harassment, according to Ascanio Cavallo, the paper’s 29-year-old editor.

Rather, La Epoca has been importuned by Pinochet’s multi-striped opponents hungry for a sounding board.

“People on all sides try to trick us with rumors and unconfirmed information,” said Filippi. “There is pushing all the time for us to go to one side or the other. I won’t. We will not be a newspaper of the barricades.”

Circulation Fluctuates

With early circulation figures fluctuating widely, Filippi is hoping to stabilize at around 75,000 daily and 95,000 Sunday.

His competitors say that La Epoca, owned by 24 individual investors of whom Filippi and prominent Christian Democrat Juan Hamilton are the largest, is currently selling far fewer than that. In addition to Chile’s established newspapers, La Epoca’s competitors grew this month to include a new opposition paper called Fortin Mapocho, a frankly combative center-left tabloid more of the old school than new.

Early difficulties at La Epoca have come entirely from within: the practical troubles of translating an idea into a readable product that reaches newsstands each morning, and old-fashioned exhaustion.

“My wife is threatening to change the locks,” editor Cavallo said. “We haven’t decided yet who gets what days off. Everybody just works every day.”

The average age of the newspaper’s 40 journalists and 15 photographers is 33, but many are younger, according to Cavallo, an eight-year veteran of news magazines who says unabashedly that he is more interested in cultural and foreign news than politics.

Hired Young People

“We chose mostly young people from around 300 applicants because it’s sometimes tough to change a reporter’s habits and mentality. It is easier to teach the young not to bring their own prejudices to a story,” Cavallo said.

Although the newspaper’s editorial bent is clear, news columns in early editions have seemed both comprehensive and straightforward.

“We have published a few stories that gave the government hard raps,” Cavallo said, “not because we set out to do it, but because other papers didn’t use them.”

El Mercurio, conservative dean of the Chilean press, boasted of having two journalists on the plane with Chile-bound Pope John Paul II last month, but neither heard the Pope’s en route characterization, repeated in six languages, of the Pinochet government as “dictatorial.” La Epoca published a report from the wire services on its front page.

“I don’t know if Pinochet reads La Epoca, but if he doesn’t, he’s not well informed,” Cavallo said.