By Dom Serafini
When I first traveled from New York City to Buenos Aires, Argentina for the June 5-8, 1985 International Association of Broadcasters (IAB) conference, I was disoriented to discover that one million peso banknotes were in circulation in order to keep up with the country’s unruly inflation. I still own two of them today. This look back was prompted by the recent election of Javier Milei to the role of Argentina’s newest president and the fact that he won a mandate to reform the country’s financial and economic systems by replacing the peso with the U.S. dollar — this time to control inflation.
The year 1985 was a challenging one for Argentina. The country was under its first democratic government, and the peso Argentino that replaced the peso ley was itself being replaced by the austral.
The currencies in circulation were even confusing for Argentine residents, and my recollections are that a 10,000 peso Argentino banknote exchanged for $0.06, and that the 1 million peso banknotes in my possession were worth little more than one U.S. dollar. However, as I recall, despite the turmoil in the financial sector, the mood in the country was upbeat, and the television sector was ready to expand.
The IAB conference held at the Plaza Hotel was attended by then Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, the first democratically elected president after the military dictatorship, and the country was also going through the so-called “Trial of the Juntas” (the judicial trial of the military dictators), which was later featured in the 2022 film Argentina 1985, which was produced by Amazon Studios.
The Montevideo, Uruguay-based IAB was created in 1946 as the Inter-American Association of Broadcasters. In 1985, this morphed into the current IAB, which has a goal of protecting LatAm TV stations from government interference. Indeed, the focus of the Buenos Aires IAB conference in 1985 was “Censorship.” At the time, the IAB president was Luiz Borgerth of Brazil’s Rede Globo.
The IAB’s Buenos Aires conference, which was covered in VideoAge‘s July 1985 edition (pictured above), also introduced VideoAge‘s newest publication, VideoEra, the first trade magazine for the Latin American TV sector. Unfortunately, that magazine only existed for a short time since the region’s production industry was not as developed as it would later become. The 1990s saw an explosion of companies exporting their programs internationally, including Argentina’s America Video Films, Artear, Azul TV, Ledafilms, Imagen Satelital, Telefe, and Whiland (now Telefilms), just to mention a few.
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