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Argentine president Mauricio Macri is one of hundreds of politicians, businessmen, athletes, and other millionaires, whose activities have been exposed by the Panama Papers. He shares the dubious privilege of being one of the four heads of states that that are now under the spotlight. In reality, there were six, but both Icelandic prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, and the premier of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatseniuk, resigned within days after the scandal broke out.

The South American leader, Mauricio Macri, has a hierarchical stake in two companies based in from the Panamanian tax haven: he is the director of Fleg Trading, Ltd. operating in the Bahamas, and is the vice president of the Kagemusha company - this company actually located in Panama. In both companies, his businessman father, Franco Macri, fills the title of president. The first company existed up until 2009, when Macri was already the mayor of Buenos Aires for two years. According to the Panamanian authorities, the second business is still operating. Upon the writing of this piece, it is known that the Macri family is linked to at least seven other companies.

Setting up a company in a tax haven – otherwise known as an off-shore account - is not in itself a crime, but usually these ventures involve capital flight, tax evasion, and money laundering from activities such as drug trafficking, arms sales, and other crimes, maintaining the identity of their owners secret. Although it may not be possible to establish the actual motives for creating the companies overseas, Macri failed to disclose their existence in sworn statements during his tenure as a public official. For that reason he was charged by federal prosecutors and must now respond the court, clarifying his position.

The event should be enough to generate a political earthquake in Argentina, especially taking into account of the social conditions when the secrets became public. For weeks there has been a tense social climate, the result of increases in gas, water, electricity, and public transportation costs promoted in large part by the government - in some cases exceeding 1000% - tens of thousands of layoffs, and with inflation on the rise, and far from stagnating, all of which continues to grow daily - it has paralyzed the most vulnerable sectors of society, in terms of their purchasing power. The marches and strikes condemning the rate hikes, and defend jobs, have multiplied throughout the country.

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The earthquake, however, did not occur. And this forces one to reflect once again about the poisonous role that mainstream media conglomerates played in national politics, such as Grupo Clarin and the traditional right-wing newspaper, La Nacion, key players in Macri’s almost immediate victory in the presidential elections. Although at the beginning, because of the worldwide significance of the Panama Papers could not be ignored, ultimately the leak was treated with a lenient simplicity, as if it were a secondary issue and of little relevance - surprising even the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that led to the revelations.

In the same vein, journalist Cecilia Gonzalez, stressed that those suspects detained were nothing more than 'media arrests of officials and businessmen linked to the former government', accused of corruption. Not because of their presumed innocence - ultimately dealt with by the court - but because it seems too great of a coincidence that this has occurred at the time of the leaks, and thus capturing the front pages and making headlines. Even the former president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, reappeared in public after a four-month hiatus, compelled to testify in a case involving alleged irregularities of dollar exchange rates during her government, leading to her denunciation of the judge for incompetence and having had her implicated in the case for political motives. This seems all too reminiscent of what just happened recently in Brazil; in large part due to a media-judiciary operation, former president, Lula Da Silva, was forced to testify in court.

The treatment of the Panama Papers serves as an example of the account and current state of journalism in Argentina.

In the South American country, to veil the actions and abuse of its elite and those in power is called a "media shield". Although it is not new that journalism is used by different sectors to influence public opinion, considering that one of the main guarantees to democracy is the pluralism of different points of views, the concentration to fewer voices, leading to power in fewer hands, has created a real threat to democracy.

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The situation has worsened with the current government's by decree-changes to the “Media Act”, an act passed in 2009 under president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner after a long process of research and discussions in conjunction with universities, NGOs, media, and human rights organizations. The amendments made by Macri involved recovering benefits for large companies and virtually casting aside any state regulation.

When in power, the Kirchner administration made political use of the law by pointing all their guns on their main threat, Grupo Clarin - not to mention the forming of public opinion in Argentina - and in short turning a blind eye on issues that were less problematic. This was a fatal error discrediting a significant form of legislation, despite it having mistakes and errors, it nonetheless represented a fundamental advance over the legacy of the dictatorial era. But right or wrong, the norm was already established.

Coupled to the legislation led by Macri’s decree, various insubordinate media outlets were also closed - due to official pressure or for financial reason- and led to censorship of those journalists trying to expose government abuses. Thus, much of the opposition who more or less held sympathy for Kirchnerism, took refuge to the few critical spaces left, such as the newspaper "Pagina / 12" and the television commentator Roberto Navarro on “C5N”.

This media, although they have nowhere near the capacity of the communication monopolies that support and protect the government, share a lot with them in that they too have lowered their information quality to suit the mass of eager consumers. And so, for example, despite the scandalous front page headlines of the Macri family's offshore ventures, they also downplayed the Daniel Scioli, the Kirchnerist candidate who lost the election, and Daniel Muñoz, a former secretary of Nestor Kirchner, ownership and possession of companies in different tax havens.

As Cecilia Gonzalez points out, the area that suffers the most with this situation is journalism, which has become a show of double standards: some accuse and raise alarm and other veil their own gross mistakes, but it is rare to find the professionals who propose less bias and reveal what actually happens in the country. Journalists stopped talking about the process in order to speak almost exclusively about people. It is not damaging that a media use arguments to explain their support for a movement, party, or a candidate - a frequent ingredient within the recovery of the significance of the “political”, fifteen years in the making in Latin American societies - but it is unacceptable to force it into being, and to hide or tell half-truths.

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The remarkable, necessary, and recent path taken to disclose the interests corresponding with a media monopoly communication system that supposedly seeks objectivity ended up becoming a battle of operators and compulsive vendors that again and again repeated the same the same lines to the same audiences, which in turn is consumed without analysis in order to convince them of something that they are already convinced of. That absurd and repetitive circuit removes any sense of journalism.

Crisis are moments of opportunity. It remains to be seen whether the firepower from the concentration of media, explicitly endorsed by the government, will allow new options arising from the even larger critical mass that demands changes in the way of creating and distributing public information, composed of journalists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens who consume the content.

The latter group must not remain passive. The diversification of sources, diving into independent alternatives taking advantage of the Internet, and amplifying the voices are some of the existing forms to make a turn from this toxic stage.

When making decisions, citizens need a variety and quality of essential information. Otherwise, two major risks take hold: large-scale replicas of those micro-worlds in which individuals move about every day, inhabited by others who tend to think like them, or losing critical thinking skills used not only to challenge the abuses of the current government but also to raise constructive debates about how to defend political projects.