Manuel Belgrano, a pioneer of Argentine journalism

The pioneer of the River Plate press, El Telégrafo Mercantil, “dared” publish a series of notes on viceregal corruption and abuses in the Church.

The commissioner of the Inquisition, Don Cayetano José María de Roo, wrote to the viceroy in these terms:

“The Telegraph of the date is nothing but an inflammatory libel against the body of the parish priests of Peru and, since such libels are prohibited by rule 16 of the Expurgatory of the Holy Office, please provide competent assistance to collect all the copies that have been distributed in this Capital and prevent their circulation outside of it.” (1)

Shortly after, by order of the Viceroy of Pino, the Telegraph would stop appearing, on October 17, 1802, after reaching number 110.

By way of reproach and regretits director and founder Francisco Cabello said goodbye as follows:

“But if for this, at last, this newspaper would die of hunger, in his childhood, between the arms of his patrons and in his own country, (neither) this, (nor) those, nor history will be able to omit that his editor was the first and the one who has worked the most on the banks of the Paraná and the Rímac to transplant the good taste and knowledge of Europe to these countries.” (2)

On September 1, 1802, Hipólito Vieytes and Pedro Cerviño had published the first issue of the Agriculture, Industry and Commerce Weekly.

The editorial office operated on San Juan Street (today, Esmeralda) between present-day Sarmiento and Perón. In addition to gather resources of his own fortune for this journalistic venture, Vieytes and Cerviño turned to the support of the Buenos Aires Consulate.

His secretary, Manuel Belgrano, would be one of his most determined collaborators. and his ideas would inspire many of its pages.

The newspaper’s title was quite explicit about its editors’ concerns; he would deal with the economic activities that he understood agriculture, industry and commerce were to be promoted.

Significantly, livestock farming was excluded, the main economic activity of this area of ​​the viceroyalty, which according to the editors of the Semanario does not I needed promotionbut to organize and modernize it.

But Vieytes and his companions were not men to stop at the diagnosis. Starting with issue 44, the Semanario began to publish a series of notes under the title “Elementary lessons in agriculture through questions and answers for the use of young people in these campaigns.”

Also They proposed the foundation of a theoretical-practical school of agriculture in each parish of the viceroyalty.

The Weekly It suspended publication during the first British invasionfrom June to August 1806, and then resumed it until reaching number 218, on Wednesday, February 11, 1807.

On this date, as a consequence of the capture of Montevideo by the English, its edition was suspended again, but it would not appear again.

Belgrano, a regular collaborator of the Semanario, at the beginning of 1810 wrote the prospectus for a new newspaperintended to replace it and called El Correo de Comercio.

In it he included a “balance sheet” of his predecessor: “The noise of weapons took away from us a very useful newspaper with which knowledge was able to spread in the most important matter for the happiness of these provinces:

such was the Agriculture Weekly whose editor will always be preserved in our memories, particularly in those of us who have seen some of our farmers have put into practice their healthy lessons and advice, from which many advantages have resulted.” (3)

1. Cited by Guillermo Furlong SJ, History and bibliography of the first printing presses of the River Plate, Librería del Plata, Buenos Aires, 1960.

3. Cited by Juan María Gutiérrez, op. cit.