On the afternoon of June 17, 1844, hundreds gathered in an angry crowd outside the courthouses in Santiago de Chile. Hissing, whistling, booing, and cursing were somewhat typical on such occasions, but the unruliness and high-voltage excitement surrounding the ending of a spectacular trial against an obscure student named Francisco Bilbao were unprecedented in the short history of this young republic.

A little-known journalist and philosophy student, Bilbao had been taken to court and ultimately fined for the publication of an antireligious piece, “Sociabilidad chilena.” The trial was one of the most talked about events in the subcontinent in those...

One evening in 1835, Maj. José de los Santos Mardones, a veteran of the Argentine war of independence, invited a very unusual guest for dinner. Social life was scarce in the Chilean town of Copiapó, where Mardones had been managing a mining operation since the end of the war. The former soldier and his wife grew accustomed to entertaining, almost every evening, a conspicuous group of expatriates, mostly Argentine miners under Mardones’s supervision. After work, the boisterous bunch, sometimes three, sometimes five, oftentimes more, would gather at the Mardoneses’ home and hang out by the stove, discussing politics and the...

Soaked in the cold, gray rain of a late September morning in 1889, the US Coast Guard cutter Manhattan crossed New York Harbor. It carried a diplomatic mission comprising a representative of the US government, Charles R. Flint; two delegates of the business world in New York, William H. T. Hughes and F. G. Pierra; a member of the Chamber of Commerce, Henry Hertz; envoys of the Argentine and Uruguayan governments in the United States; and a thin, pale journalist dressed all in black and wearing a silver ring engraved with the word Cuba as his only adornment. Not long...

At the astounding speed of eighteen miles an hour, it would take Juan José de Soiza Reilly only twenty minutes—stops included—to cover the six miles that separated the still bucolic neighborhood of Flores from the noisy and vibrant area of Plaza de Mayo in the traditional heart of downtown Buenos Aires.

Soiza’s house at 95 Membrillar Street, surrounded by lush gardens, dirt roads, and open avenues, was only two blocks away from Flores Square. From there, an electric tram would take him directly to the office of Caras y Caretas magazine, at 151 Chacabuco Street, or to the...

The life of a tabloid crime reporter in the 1920s and 1930s was no bed of roses. To hobnob with Buenos Aires’s pimps, to schmooze with the police, and to produce a readable, sensational drama each day out of abhorrent murders, petty crimes, arsons, and garden-variety accidents was only the first part of the job description. Reporters for Crítica, La Prensa, and El Mundo also had an acquired obligation that stemmed from the implicit reading contract their newspapers had forged with the mass audiences. In a way, to be a reporter for a newspaper in those years was to enter...

On April 16, 1961, the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rodolfo Walsh was where most journalists in the world would have wanted to be.

Following his colleague and friend Jorge Ricardo Masetti, the thirtythree-year-old balding, shortsighted, slim, and jovial Walsh had arrived in Havana in 1959 with his partner, Stella “Poupée” Blanchard. He was there to join a project that was about to gain historical significance.

In 1958, from the depths of the Cuban jungle in Sierra Maestra, Masetti had broadcast the first interview with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara for Argentine Radio El Mundo and had remained...