Armand Mattelart, Pioneer of Communication Studies, Passes Away

Armand Mattelart, one of the foremost scholars of mass communication and the media that carries it, passed away in Paris last Friday at the age of 89. His work broke with the rigid economicism that characterized the Latin American left and provided concrete empirical support for the initial reflections on cultural and ideological hegemony sparked by the arrival of Gramscian thought in the region. As early as 1968, Mattelart was engaged in a study on the pernicious role that the newspaper El Mercurio and its radio and television outlets played in Chilean political life, spreading all kinds of lies and fake news about the Chilean popular masses with the aim of confusing, demoralizing, and disempowering them. Once Allende was elected president, the prevailing communications oligopoly in Chile, without any counterbalance, redoubled its attacks against the government of the Popular Unity and its president. It was the richness of that report that, as a FLACSO student, allowed me to develop a master's thesis that demonstrated that a victory for the left in the next electoral contest was not only possible but, under certain conditions, also probable. In the context of the great political mobilization process that marked Chile in the second half of the 1960s, Mattelart, a refined observer of the realities of his time, redefined his research agenda, making the cultural domination of imperialism, ideology, and social communication the central object of his concerns. He graduated in Law and Social Sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) in 1960, but almost immediately moved to Paris, where he obtained a diploma in Demography from the Sorbonne. In 1963, he arrived in Chile as a professor at the Catholic University, from whose chair he would author several books on Chilean society, and especially on the theme of social integration, the demographic dynamics underlying urbanization processes, and their impact on the politics, youth, and women of that country. In 1965, he published the 'Social Atlas of the Communes of Chile,' a pioneering work that compiled and analyzed the socio-economic and census data of Chile's communes (around 300), opening the possibility of in-depth analysis of the social bases of the political forces in contention with a view to the future presidential election to be held in that country in 1970. Half a century later, the reasons for such animosity came to light: declassified CIA documents would demonstrate that El Mercurio and its director Agustín Edwards Eastman were mere operators of 'the agency' that relentlessly fought the government of the Popular Unity and later obscenely extolled the Pinochetist regime in exchange for the large sums of money with which the CIA rewarded their 'democratic zeal' for many years.