The Argentine government of President Javier Milei, after announcing the closure of the press agency, Télam, proceeded early this Monday morning to disable the website while the building where the newsroom works was fenced.
At the same time, all workers were “dispensed” of their duties for a period of seven days and cannot enter to carry out their tasks.
From the last hours of Sunday, Télam’s public website was discharged. Upon entering the site appears an Argentine national shield and the legend “Page in reconstruction.”
In this way, not only is there no new information, but you can’t see the previously published content, composed of thousands of notes, photographs and multimedia material.
Télam workers had called for an “earm” to the agency’s building, after Milei announced the closure of Télam on Friday night, a protest that was taking place on Monday at 12h30 local (14H30 UTC).
However, this midnight police officers anticipated the protest and fenced the building, preventing workers from entering.
The agency’s Workers’ Assembly, in a response statement, said there was a: “Attack on freedom of expression. They’re doing a public medium, Télam, in the middle of midnight. 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, police in the city fenced the two buildings of the National News and Advertising Agency Télam, to avoid the massive hug and prevent access to the building by workers of the press.”
On Friday Milei had advanced to the Legislative Assembly that his management “is going to be closed” by the public news agency Télam, arguing that the agency “has been used for the last decades as a Kirchnerist propaganda agency,” although it did not provide any evidence in this regard.
TeleSUR’s collaborating journalist, Victor Hugo Morales, said in conversation with journalist Cinthia García that this is a “hard situation [the] that Télam workers 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 on a federal and pluralistic basis.”
He also conveyed his “solidarity with the workers and our total repudiation of censorship and authoritarianism of the Government.”
This article has been translated from the original which first appeared in TeleSurTV