of the United Press in favor of the more established and powerful Associated Press thus linked La Nación with a news service less dependent upon the paper’s continued satisfaction, especially in comparison to the services rendered to La Prensa by United Press. Still, La Nación became the Associated Press’s gateway into the South American news market, and the offices of the Mitre family’s paper also served as the regional offices of the Associated Press. The relationship between La Nación and the Associated Press only grew more intimate in the wake of the formal dissolution of the wire service cartel in 1934—a process that the Argentine papers did much to facilitate.59
Where La Prensa and La Nación represented the journalistic high-water mark of Argentina’s “serious” press in the first half of the twentieth century, the proprietor and journalists of the newspaper Crítica fervently embraced the whole range of possibilities that the medium of commercial journalism presented. Founded by the Uruguayan émigré Natalio Botana in September 1913, the evening paper dramatically changed the practice of journalism in the country, and its abrasive, sensationalistic character is as intimately linked to its historical moment of origin as the more staid, reasoned styles of the Paz and Mitre family newspapers are linked to their moments of origin. Within a decade of the paper’s founding, Botana himself also became the most spectacular and controversial example of a new social type: the journalistic entrepreneur, whose conspicuous wealth and enormous social influence flowed not from landed interests or political patronage, but from the practice of journalism itself.60 Indeed, although La Prensa’s economic power and international stature were unrivaled among the Argentine press of the first half of the century, Crítica’s unique character, and the vast web of anecdote and legend surrounding Botana, still loom largest in the Argentine popular imagination.61 In quite unexpected ways, it was Botana’s great success in creating an aura around Crítica as the voice of the urban popular classes and embodiment of utopian aspirations for egalitarian democracy that placed the paper at the center of the many of the press conflicts after 1930.
The same national political opening that prompted Jorge and Luís Mitre to abandon the vestiges of La Nación’s entanglement with factional politics created much of the impetus for the founding of Crítica. Botana, a working journalist, launched the paper in the wake of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law’s expansion of suffrage, a moment when national political life suddenly became significantly more relevant to a much larger section of the population.62 Crítica, Botana announced in the paper’s first issue, would “repudiate the old practice of the fourth power”—that is, the “petulant” use of journalism to advance the interests of a specific political faction—and instead would remain “without program, but with ideas.”63 If the Mitre brothers sought to create in La Nación a forum of debate and guidance for the nation’s political class as a whole, Botana similarly intended to create an organ that would shape broad political worldviews. Unlike La Nación, with its self-conscious appeals to the nation’s political class, however, Crítica would engage the now effectively enfranchised and rapidly growing urban middle and working classes. Through Crítica, Botana sought to make the Argentine press—or at least his newspaper—a factor in the new age of mass politics. The direction he took implied a dramatically new journalistic style and set of journalism practices.
Yet the director’s intention of using the paper as the vehicle for organizing the urban popular classes into a base for a disparate array of conservative political forces left Crítica at a serious competitive disadvantage with respect to its already well-established conservative evening rival La Razón. The difficulty of success for Botana’s project only seemed confirmed as the Sáenz Peña Law resulted not in the unlikely scenario of mass affirmation of liberal-conservatism, but in the rather predictable ascent of the tremendously popular Radical Party leader Hipólito Yrigoyen to the presidency in 1916. As Sylvia Saítta has convincingly shown, the particular model of factional journalism that Botana initially sought to follow—ironically, one so eclectic and independent that it remained without the financial backing and guaranteed public of any organized political faction—simply did not generate the revenue needed to sustain a viable newspaper in what had become a capital-intensive and fiercely competitive industry.64 That Botana adopted this strategy in the midst of the First World War, with its predictable spike in the price of imported newsprint, ink, and machinery, only aggravated the situation for the evening paper.65
In the course of the 1920s, however—what one Crítica journalist called the paper’s “romantic period”—Botana transformed Crítica from a failing mouthpiece of “popular conservatism” into Latin America’s most widely read evening newspaper, and a stylistically innovative and politically influential daily.66 Through shrill editorials, sensationalistic crime investigations, a heavy emphasis on graphic material, and the latest and most complete sports reporting, Botana reshaped the newspaper to capture readers among ever-increasing sectors of the population.67 The pages of Crítica also became a vehicle of ceaseless self-promotion, in which the paper’s journalists proclaimed Crítica and its young, bohemian journalists—the “muchachada de Crítica”—central protagonists in the very news the paper carried. Natalio Botana held no pretension of dispassionately viewing “politics from above,” while Crítica reporters proudly rejected the model of an objective journalism divorced from the subjectivity of the journalist.68 Political opinions, cultural assertions, and open subjective biases thus dramatically shaped the paper’s format, appearance, and content. Indeed, not until the mid-1930s—well beyond the period of Saítta’s study—did Crítica regularly carry a separate “opinion” section, and even then commentary remained interspersed throughout the paper’s articles and graphic materials. Combined with a new commitment to the speed of news reporting, this strategy proved remarkably successful: by the middle of the 1920s Crítica had surpassed the circulation of its evening rival La Razón to become the third most widely read paper in Argentina.69 By decade’s end, Crítica had ceased its frequent moves around the city and established itself, with the most powerful rotary presses, in a suitably modern Art Deco building on the country’s passageway of political power, the Avenida de Mayo, and its circulation had exceeded that of La Nación, behind only La Prensa.70
The tremendous influence of Crítica, its sensationalist style, and its economic success have given Natalio Botana’s paper a presence bordering on the mythical in the Argentine popular memory. The figure of the Citizen Kane–like Botana himself also continues to hold a particular place in memories of the 1920s and 1930s, maintained by the anecdotes and memoirs of numerous Crítica journalists as well as the thinly disguised Botana character in Leopoldo Marechal’s epic novel Adán Buenosayres.71 Regardless of the veracity of stories of Botana’s use of Crítica as a tool for extortion (of matchmakers who did not include the correct number of matches in each box, or breweries whose product was over 95 percent water), the image of Botana as a flamboyant and powerful man circulated widely. That the Crítica owner had managed to expand his power to include other media only increased the sense of that power: where other film studios could threaten to withhold advertising from newspapers as a means of ensuring favorable reviews, the Botana-owned Baires Film studio had the added recourse of Crítica crusades against competitors who printed “questionable” criticism of its films. Such tactics seem to have ensured the critical acclaim of the studio’s releases—as well as bolstered Botana’s self-cultivated reputation as a local blend of Hearst and Al Capone.72
Botana’s mansion in Don Torcuato, just outside the Federal Capital, resembled that of a younger, more avant-garde Hearst; it included a spectacular mural by Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.73 The reaction of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who visited Don Torcuato with Federico García Lorca, is typical of the mix of fascination and unease that the aura surrounding Botana and his newspaper inspired:
We were invited one evening by a millionaire like those that only Argentina or the United States could produce. This was a rebellious and self-taught
