of the dreams of a vibrant nouveau riche. Hundreds of cages of pheasants of all colors and all countries bordered the road. The library was filled only with extremely old books that he bought by cable in the auctions of European book collectors and was large and full. But more spectacular was that the floor of this enormous reading room was covered totally with panther furs sown together to form a gigantic cover. I knew that the man had agents in Africa, Asia, and the Amazon destined exclusively to collect the skins of leopards, ocelots, phenomenal cats, whose spots now shone under my feet in the ostentatious library… . This is how things were in the house of the famous Natalio Botana, powerful capitalist, who dominated public opinion in Buenos Aires.74
With the emergence of Crítica, the Buenos Aires press completed its transformation into a powerful commercial newspaper industry, and it was Botana the journalistic entrepreneur—the embodiment of capital—who most spectacularly and unequivocally replaced the politician-proprietors of the nineteenth-century model of the press.
The establishment and evolution of La Prensa, La Nación, and Crítica exemplify the complexity and journalistic variety in the structural transformation of the Argentine press from the modest economies of newspapers dedicated to the practices of factional journalism to the modern commercial press. Yet a host of other dailies also successfully competed for readership in Buenos Aires. Some of them would at times exceed La Prensa, La Nación, and Crítica in sales, but only occasionally would any surpass any of the three major dailies in influence or independent economic clout.
Of the major dailies, perhaps none suffered as many shifts in ownership and orientation prior to the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as La Razón. Founded in 1905 by Emilio B. Morales as a commercial newspaper independent of the nation’s political factions, La Razón was the nation’s leading evening newspaper until its eclipse by Crítica in the early 1920s. Morales sold the newspaper to the conservative journalist José A. Cortejarena in 1911, and after Cortejarena’s death the paper became the property of his widow, Helvecia Antonini, who delegated the direction of La Razón to a host of different journalists and administrators. This instability in the newspaper’s top management lent La Razón an increasingly amorphous market identity precisely as Natalio Botana consolidated that of Crítica, eroding at once La Razón’s base readership and its financial viability. By 1935 La Razón’s daily circulation stood at only 81,000—still large by contemporary Latin American standards, but a fraction of the over 250,000 copies of Crítica that porteños purchased each afternoon.75 Ironically, the financial weakness of La Razón ultimately made the paper exceedingly valuable in the 1930s. The paper’s sudden reemergence by the end of the decade reveals not only the degree to which the Argentine commercial press had become independent of state power and political factions in the previous decades, but just how decisive—and lucrative—the rearticulation of the relationship between state and press could prove.
On May 14, 1928, Buenos Aires’ first tabloid-sized daily appeared. Founded by the English immigrant Alberto Haynes, who had lain the foundations of the multimedia empire Editorial Haynes with the magazine El Hogar Argentino in the first years of the century, El Mundo had an immediate impact on journalistic practices in Buenos Aires.76 The physical size of the paper made it easier to read on the rapidly growing city’s crowded public transportation. Under the guiding principle that “what is good, if brief, is twice as good,” El Mundo carried national and international news stories synthesized in clear, simple articles, while editorials also remained short.77 Reporting and editorials also tended to mask any political sympathies in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible—El Mundo was, a frequent heading to its inside pages proclaimed, “the newspaper that aspires to be read in all homes.” The paper carried a variety of sections: theater, international news, film, literature, the lottery, “for women and the home,” and for children. Instead of the haphazard arrangement of the equally diverse content of Crítica, however, El Mundo readers found well-organized, consistently placed thematic sections. El Mundo became successful immediately, with daily circulation climbing to over 200,000 by 1935 and increasing by another 100,000 before the end of World War II.78 While Crítica’s rise came at the cost of La Razón, however, the growth of El Mundo had a very different impact on the newspaper landscape: with a price of five centavos—half that of the other major dailies—the Haynes paper tended less to draw readers away from the established press than to entice new ones or those who bought it as an additional paper. As a result, El Mundo generally escaped the kind of internecine polemics that permeated much of the popular press.
Among the major Argentine newspapers only Noticias Gráficas emerged directly from within the multiple crises unleashed in the 1930s. The paper (in its first month called simply Noticias) appeared on June 10, 1931, as an attempt by La Nación’s Jorge Mitre to occupy the gap in the evening market left by the suspension of Crítica after the military coup of September 6, 1930. At first a tabloid largely in the style of El Mundo, the paper benefited from conflicts within the administration and newsroom of the “new” evening paper Jornada, a thinly disguised Crítica surrogate. Alberto Cordone, director of Jornada/Crítica during Natalio Botana’s exile in Uruguay, joined the staff of Noticias Gráficas in September of 1931, bringing with him thirty colleagues.79 Noticias Gráficas quickly adopted the format of Crítica virtually in its entirety. The resurrection of Crítica proper in February 1932, however, placed serious strains on Noticias Gráficas, as increased competition in the newspaper marketplace together with strong attacks from the pages of Crítica eroded Noticias Gráficas’s readership. Despite renouncing his post at La Nación in favor of his brother Luís, Jorge Mitre failed to create a newspaper financially independent of La Nación. Through much of the decade Jorge Mitre continued to pass Noticias Gráficas’s bills for electricity, rent, newsprint, and other expenses to La Nación—much to the dismay of the morning paper’s shareholders.80 Businessman José Agusti finally rescued the paper from complete financial collapse in 1938 and remained as the proprietor and director of Noticias Gráficas until the daily came under Perón’s control in 1947. If Noticias Gráficas remained financially precarious for the entirety of its existence, its circulation nonetheless rivaled that of Crítica: in 1935 the paper’s three daily editions averaged 250,000 copies, and 270,000 copies in 1945.81
The federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 inaugurated a transformation of the city’s press unrivaled within Latin America, a process that only accelerated with the expansion of suffrage via the electoral reforms of 1912. Argentines were already among the world’s greater per capita consumers of newspapers, and the rapid growth and prosperity of Buenos Aires would make it exceptional in absolute terms as well. In 1928, the only three Latin American newspapers that consistently maintained daily circulation in excess of 150,000 copies were published there: La Prensa, Crítica, and La Nación.82 Even La Razón, battered by competition from Crítica for evening readers, outsold its nearest non-Argentine peer, Río de Janeiro’s A Nôite, by 10,000 issues daily.83 The gap only widened as the world economic crisis of the 1930s pushed still more Argentines into the Federal Capital and surrounding suburbs. By 1935, the city of Buenos Aires boasted just under 2.5 million inhabitants and had five daily newspapers—Crítica, Noticias Gráficas, La Prensa, La Nación, and El Mundo—each consistently selling well over 200,000 copies daily. Outside of Buenos Aires, only A Nôite maintained that circulation level. The total circulation of Buenos Aires dailies exceeded that of both Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.84 On the eve of the February 1946 elections that brought Perón to the presidency, the Buenos Aires newspaper market stood at nearly triple that of its nearest Latin American peer, Mexico City, with the city’s residents purchasing more newspapers than those of Río de Janeiro, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City combined.82
By the late 1920s the emergence of the commercial press had created a set
