More than three quarters of the daily newspaper market is now controlled by the same company – some of whose titles are considered to take an undemocratic line. Plans are afoot to mount a legal challenge to what critics say is a threat to Peru’s free press.

In August it was announced that El Comercio, historically one of Peru’s most important titles, was acquiring a controlling 54% stake in a company called Epensa. Epensa publishes the newspapers Ojo and Correo as well as a number of tabloids – some would say sensationalist scandal sheets – like Aja and El Bocón and multimedia outlets.

It is reckoned that the purchase gives El Comercio – which also publishes Perú 21, Gestión and tabloid titles (El Trome) as well as owning television stations like America TV and Canal N (cable) – 78 per cent share of the market for daily newspapers, up from 48 per cent previously.

El Comercio, controlled by the Miró Quesada family, has long adopted a conservative stance. It conducted a vendetta against APRA, then a progressive party, in the 1930s and 1940s. During the late 1990s, however, it stood out in taking a critical position towards the more egregiously authoritarian characteristics of the Fujimori governments. Since then, its editorial line has been consistently pro-business and anti anything that smacks of the left.

It took up a particularly vitriolic line in opposition to President Ollanta Humala’s election in 2011, as well as towards Lima’s mayor Susana Villarán during the unsuccessful recall referendum earlier this year. Even some of its more conservative columnists, like Mario Vargas Llosa, have stopped publishing in El Comercio because of what they see as its undemocratic political line.

El Comercio’s acquisition of Epensa immediately set alarm bells ringing with El Comercio’s main rival, the left-of-centre La República, whose director – Gustavo Mohme – has argued forcefully that the acquisition represents a direct threat the press freedom in Peru. La República has argued that the acquisition violates Article 61 of the constitution that guarantees a free press.

The weekly magazine Caretas has also been critical. Its director, Marco Zileri, recently raised the issue of media concentration in Peru at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Press Association (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa, SIP) at its annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.

The issue of concentrated media ownership and the threat it raises for press freedom has been a major point of political friction in a number of Latin American countries in recent years, especially those with left-wing governments. In countries like Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador, governments have been highly critical of what they see as the use made of the press (and the media more broadly) by business groups to launch political campaigns against democratically elected governments designed to bring them into disrepute.

In Argentina, there has been a long-running battle between the Kirchner administration and the Grupo Clarín, the most powerful media organisation in the country. In Venezuela, the Chávez administration – and more recently that of President Maduro – has engaged in regular skirmishes with the media, in particular television stations like Globovisión whose support for the right-wing opposition is manifest. In Ecuador, President Correa has railed against media organisations like El Comercio (un-related to Peru’s El Comercio), passing legislation designed to cut the institutional ties between business organisations and media outlets.

In all three countries, the weakness of right-wing parties has tended to reinforce the role of the media as a key channel for opposition to left-of-centre governments.

In these debates, the SIP has been a stalwart defender of what it calls ‘press freedoms’. At the annual Denver meeting, the statement raising the question of media concentration in Peru was finally watered down at the insistence of El Comercio’s director, Alejandro Miró Quesdada and the editor of Peru 21, Fritz Dubois, under the argument that editorial control of the Epensa titles remained in the hands of the now minority owners the Agois Banchero group. However, even some of the leading lights of the SIP had to admit that the issues of ownership concentration and press freedom are intimately related.

Gustavo Mohme says he intends to challenge the constitutionality of El Comercio’s dominant position in the market with the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees.