The Argentinian government of President Javier Milei, after announcing the closure of the news agency, Télam, proceeded early Monday morning to disable the website while the building where the newsroom operates was fenced off.
At the same time, all workers were “excused” from their duties for a period of seven days and cannot enter to perform their tasks. Since the last hours of Sunday, Télam’s public web page was taken down. When entering the site, an Argentinian national coat of arms and the legend “Page under reconstruction” appear.
Thus, not only there is no new information, but also it is not possible to see the content previously published, made up of thousands of notes, photographs and multimedia material.
Télam workers had called for an “embrace” of the agency’s building after Milei announced Télam’s closure on Friday night, a protest that was to take place this Monday at 12:30 local time (14:30 UTC).
However, this midnight, police officers anticipated the protest and fenced off the building, preventing workers from entering.
The Assembly of the agency’s workers, in a statement in response, said that this was an “Attack on freedom of expression. A public media, Télam, has been closed in the middle of the night. The national government is carrying out one of the worst attacks on freedom of expression in the last 40 years of democracy.”
They pointed out that “tonight, city police fenced off the two buildings of the National News and Publicity Agency Télam, to prevent the massive embrace and to impede access to the building by press workers”.
On Friday, Milei had advanced before the Legislative Assembly that his administration “is going to close” the public news agency Télam, arguing that the agency “has been used during the last decades as a Kirchnerist propaganda agency,” although he did not provide any evidence in this regard.
The collaborating journalist of teleSUR, Víctor Hugo Morales, declared in conversation with the journalist Cinthia García that it is a “tough situation [that] the workers of Télam are going through while the Government begins to fulfill Javier Milei’s promise to close a key agency for communication and information throughout the country with a federal and plural character”.
