El plebiscito de 1984 por el canal Beagle en el discurso de la prensa patagónica argentina. El caso del diario Río Negro

Abstract

In their 200 years as independent nations, both Chile and Argentina fought wars against all their neighbors, except each other. However, on the Christmas of 1978, controversy over the limits of the Beagle Channel almost made them face one other on the battlefield. It was thanks to the timely mediation of Pope John Paul II and Argentina’s later return to democracy that the conflict was pacifically resolved, through an agreement overwhelmingly supported by the Argentinian people, who expressed their approval in the 1984 referendum. The present article aims to analyze the meanings surrounding the agreement and the referendum, expressed in the Rio Negro, the most influential journal of the Argentinian northern Patagonia. In order to achieve it, theoretical tools of discourse analysis are used to study the news, editorials and opinion columns published in the sections in which the newspaper dealt with international, national and regional information. The article shows that in the journal, the positive discourses about the agreement predominated over the negative ones. The former were presented as a manifestation of the new democratic climate experienced by the Argentinian society.