approval and equally unexpected presidential veto of a newsworker pension law, tensions between journalists and newspaper proprietors became impossible to contain within the mutualist Círculo de la Prensa. Working journalists around the country organized a national confederation, beginning the process of transforming provincial mutual aid societies into labor unions. In the Federal Capital, however, the proprietor-dominated executive committee of the Círculo de la Prensa reversed course, leading to a split in the organization and the creation in Buenos Aires of the most militant of the new journalist unions.
Taken together, the persistent crises unleashed in September 1930 profoundly shook the foundations of the Argentine commercial press. Though often appearing little more than the product of broader ideological and political change, the tensions that permeated the Argentine press’s entire network of relationships in the 1930s also marked a surfacing of fundamental conflicts created by the commercial development of the newspaper industry since the 1880s. Far from a linear process, the forging of new relationships between the commercial press and political factions, together with clashes over the nature of the press and the social role of journalism, set a series of precedents and left a web of unresolved tensions. Ambiguous, intricate, and profound, these press conflicts would ultimately prove crucial to the Peronist transformation of the newspaper industry in the following decade.
The New Partisan Press
While the Argentine commercial press stood out among its Latin American peers for the immensity of its circulation levels, it had also attained an equally notable independence from specific political factions. The political upheavals of 1930 to 1943, however, seriously eroded the distance between political actors, important sectors of the newspaper industry, and institutions of the Argentine state. President Augustín P. Justo (1932–38), head of the governing Concordancia coalition’s uneasy alliance of Conservatives, Anti-Personalist Radicals, and members of the newly formed Independent Socialist Party (PSI), created not only a fictitious democracy, but a sympathetic “independent” media apparatus. Himself partyless and lacking an autonomous and organized base of popular support, Justo looked to the enormous power of the commercial press as a mechanism for both generating public consent around his administration and disciplining his political rivals. In the process, he and his associates created a web of hidden connections between political power and media power that only become all the more entangled with the rise of Peronism after 1943.
Ironically, the process through which a new, and very different, version of factional journalism emerged coincided almost precisely with the symbolic consolidation of Crítica as a successful commercial newspaper. In mid-1927, the transfer of the newspaper’s offices to Avenida de Mayo 1333 coincided with a series of conflicts with the printers of the Socialist-dominated Federación Gráfica Bonaerense.8 When, in the midst of Socialist calls for a boycott of Crítica, a dissident group of Socialists left the party to form the Partido Socialista Independiente, Botana not only lent extensive coverage to the PSI’s founding congress, but threw the full weight of his paper behind the new organization.9 More an example of the enormous political latitude that the vast circulation of his paper allowed him than of any subservience to the still tiny political apparatus of the PSI, Botana’s support remained within the kind of independent political endorsements common within the commercial press—though set in Crítica’s typically hyperbolic and strident journalistic voice.
It is only in the wake of Yrigoyen’s victory in the presidential elections of 1928 (in which he enjoyed Crítica’s backing) that Botana began to tie the fate of his paper to the triumph of a particular political project.10 As the government of the seventy-eight-year-old president faltered, Crítica began a spectacular series of personal attacks against Yrigoyen and his followers, painting the president as senile, isolated, and deaf to open calls for insurrection.11 More tellingly, Botana himself became a key figure in the negotiations between civilian conspirators like Independent Socialists Federico Pinedo and Antonio De Tomaso and rival military leaders Generals Justo and Uriburu, while the offices of Crítica began to fill with political and military figures on the eve of the uprising.12 The call for general civilian mobilization in support of the uprising came through the sirens and loudspeakers at the newspaper’s offices on the morning of September 6, 1930, where, despite police attempts to block the newspaper’s distribution, printers smuggled issues of Crítica to waiting vendors.13 The central role that Crítica and Botana played in the ousting of Yrigoyen was lost on no one: the paper had increased its average circulation to over 350,000 for the month of September, with descriptions of the actions of Botana and the Crítica journalists during the course of the “Revolution” providing much of the paper’s copy.14 In the public parades celebrating Uriburu’s presidential oath two days later, firefighters stopped in front of the Crítica offices to sing the national anthem.15
The tension between the conspirators of September emerged into the open just over a month after Yrigoyen’s fall, when PSI leaders openly called for a quick return to constitutional rule.16 Crítica endorsed the call, and tested the limits of official censorship when journalist Luís María Jantus denounced police procedures against dissidents. In reporting Jantus’s subsequent exile, the paper informed readers that the state of siege prohibited further comment but that “the people should judge” the incident.17 Not surprisingly, on November 15 Crítica’s Paris correspondent, Edmundo Guibourg, warned Natalio Botana that “the police of Buenos Aires are hungry for you” and that Leopoldo Lugones Jr., head of the police’s section of Political Order, embodied a particularly dangerous threat.18 Botana’s own refusal to ally himself with the de facto government by accepting Uriburu’s offer of Argentina’s Parisian embassy further aggravated the tense relationship between the powerful newspaper owner and the regime, and, in particular, between Botana and acting minister of the interior Matías Sánchez Sorondo.19
Though opposition from the pages of Crítica remained muted due to the state of siege, even simple characterizations of Uriburu’s proposed corporatist reforms as “disquieting” had a significant effect.20 Provisional authorities privately credited the “waning enthusiasm for the September Revolution” among the general public to the actions of the “opposition press,” and clumsily sought to counter those effects through state propaganda.21 Yet, as Uriburu and his corporatist allies succumbed to pressure from General Justo, the Independent Socialists, and Crítica, as well as a host of other social forces, and called elections in the province of Buenos Aires for the following April, animosity only mounted.
Botana had now become personally involved in factional politics to a startling degree, while the circumstances of the Uriburu regime’s retreat from power made his—and Crítica’s—commitment irreversible. On April 15, 1931, Antonio De Tomaso penned an article in the paper declaring the electoral defeat of the government in the province of Buenos Aires earlier that month and the subsequent annulment of election results a clear sign of the regime’s lack of popular support.22 In response, Sánchez Sorondo ordered the suspension of Crítica for forty-eight hours and that of the Independent Socialist Party paper Libertad for ten days, threatening to make those closures permanent.23 Crítica essentially ceased comment on local politics in favor of coverage of events in Spain, the growing importance of tango in Paris, and ambiguous political cartoons lamenting the retreat of democracy around the globe.24 Still, Sánchez Sorondo’s resignation from the cabinet three weeks later only made the situation for Botana more complicated: as his final act, the minister of the interior followed through on his threat and decreed Crítica’s indefinite closure.25 Immediately, the federal police detained Botana, his wife, Salvadora Medina Onrubia de Botana, and scores of Crítica journalists, while Leopoldo Lugones Jr. himself raided the newspaper’s offices in search of incriminating documentation.26 After three months of prison at the hands of Lugones—an experience the officer ensured was far more traumatic for the Crítica owner’s wife than for Natalio Botana himself—the Botana family left for exile in Spain.27
Sánchez
