he was one of the more prominent figures, to embrace the kind of protofascist political projects of which he had become increasingly enamored. Sánchez Sorondo’s formal break with the PDN and the Concordancia came precisely because of his resistance—literally alongside the brownshirted Legión Cívica Argentina—to Justo’s ouster of Governor Martínez de Hoz in early 1935.39
Botana’s own role in provoking such divisions within the PDN were, at the time, notorious. As Natalio Botana’s son recalls, the Crítica owner’s belligerence toward Sánchez Sorondo “was a personal problem” as much as it was political.40 Beginning in mid-1932, Crítica carried a long-running series of caricatures of the senator with exaggerated nose and pointed ears, labeling him the “Gravedigger” for his role in Uriburu-era repression and condemning what the paper claimed—accurately—was the senator’s increasing fascination with Italian Fascism. In addition, the paper ran numerous denunciations of Sánchez Sorondo’s association with the Legión Cívica Argentina, claiming that the group intended to attempt a “Revolución Fascista” that would place the senator at the head of an Italian-style dictatorship.41 Botana even used this rumored fascist putsch as a reason to excoriate the “serious press” for propagating the “venom of skepticism against the present institutional situation” through its admittedly tepid criticism of electoral fraud, and for failing to report news of the fascist plot.42
At the same time, Botana also ran a series of articles against the senator’s business interests that would eventually create significant legal troubles for the Crítica owner. Beginning in mid-August 1932 and running through the end of the following month, Crítica carried five stories proclaiming the grocery chain Almacenes Reunidos Sociedad Anónima (ARSA)—on whose board sat not only Sánchez Sorondo, but General Uriburu’s son Alberto Uriburu—a “trust” and the profits its owners reaped “ill-gotten.”43 In the same pages, the paper’s caricaturists added a series of advertisements parodying the senator’s grocery stores, with slogans like “ARSA: Where your peso is worth less” and “Buy today, because the municipal inspectors are about to close our doors!” and a fake promotion proclaiming that all customers would receive a coupon redeemable for public employment “once our owner Matías Sánchez is dictator.”44 The tactic echoed past Crítica public campaigns, but with an important difference: now, attacks on the ARSA were not extortionate, but designed purposefully to discredit the whole range of activities of a specific political figure.
Botana’s success in fomenting divisions within the PDN as a means of weakening powerful rivals to Justo, Pinedo, and De Tomaso often sat uneasily with the simultaneous necessity of maintaining cohesion within the Concordancia as a whole. The directness and vehemence of some Crítica attacks occasionally threatened to turn the paper into more than a mere counterweight to Justo’s more organized rivals. After several such incidents, Antonio De Tomaso wrote to President Justo, “I spoke for a long time with Botana. I told him of your displeasure. Today there will be an article saying that the harmony of the [Concordancia’s] leaders has been established.”45 In the same message De Tomaso reaffirmed Botana’s desire “to be at the service of the government” and relayed to the president Botana’s request for better information from the federal police.46 Perhaps even more importantly, the attacks on Sánchez Sorondo’s ARSA brought a well-publicized series of calumny cases against Botana, for which the Crítica owner at one point stood condemned to five and one-half years in prison and $43,900 in punitive damages.47 The cases against Botana not only threatened the Crítica owner with stiff legal penalties, but served as an ongoing headache for Botana, Justo, and Pinedo in the mid-1930s.48 Botana’s actions against Sánchez Sorondo, then, threatened to envelope rival Concordancia figures, either directly or indirectly, in the kind of legal disputes that might weaken not just Conservatives, but the cohesion of the Concordancia as a whole.
Crítica was by no means the only commercial newspaper with close ties to the government, even if it did lie at the center of President Justo’s media strategy. As Natalio Botana’s legal problems mounted, President Justo and Federico Pinedo began exploratory discussions with a number of journalists and newspaper proprietors regarding the creation of a “neutral” commercial newspaper closely tied to the government. One plan submitted by two journalists at El Mundo called for massive state advertising subsidies to create a new “independent” newspaper that “at no time would use the expression ‘supported by the government,’” but would clearly serve the interests of General Justo.49 Although the journalists did not explicitly state from where the “great amount of capital” needed to launch the paper might come, they did propose that at least two-thirds of the newspaper’s operating costs come in the form of sustained government advertising. In this way, the projected paper might maintain the kind of productive infrastructure that would allow it to “orient the people in the midst of the enormous political disorientation that reigns,” bringing them toward the kind of “cleansed” Radicalism that Justo ostensibly represented.50
Though Pinedo and Justo rejected the offer, their reasons for doing so are revealing of the tensions inherent within this particular model of partisan journalism. Although both men understood that maintaining the appearance of objectivity and independence was crucial to gaining readers’ confidence and establishing the legitimacy of a newspaper, they found investing in a new paper with no preexisting readership too risky and expensive.51 What’s more, Pinedo pinpointed a potential problem with the arrangement that a decade later would gravely afflict Juan Domingo Perón in his own initial dealings with newspaper owners: “The proposal fails … in the base itself, since even if it were viable, its authors offer no serious moral guarantee to back their agreements. A newspaper destined to fulfill an official government function could only be possible by giving its direction to a man of absolute confidence, or better, an ideological confidant of the general.”52 The proposal did bring Pinedo to suggest that at some point in the future a more selective official daily “might become necessary in order to bring the presidential word not to the great public, which doesn’t matter, but to specific sectors.”53 Thus, President Justo had a clear idea not only that any journalistic ally must remain closely tied to himself through political affinity (as was clearly the case with Botana) or, perhaps, near absolute economic dependence, but that the kind of broad public appeal of a newspaper like Crítica did not necessarily lend the government legitimacy with potentially more influential sectors of Argentine society.
The proposal by the El Mundo journalists also did not prosper, in part, because a far better prospect soon presented itself. In 1935, Helvecia Antonini de Cortejarena, proprietor of La Razón, approached Minister of Economy Federico Pinedo for help in managing the paper’s mounting debt and fending off an administrative intervention in the newspaper by an increasingly intrusive group of creditors.54 The end result was a complex relationship between Pinedo, Justo, and Ricardo Peralta Ramos (son-in-law of the paper’s owner) mediated through the recently created Central Bank and a handful of other state agencies. While, as Ronald Newton has observed, “no one knows the full story” of La Razón’s connections with different national and international political groups, it is clear that President Justo and Federico Pinedo became far more involved in the internal affairs of the newspaper than most suspected.55
For Justo and Pinedo, control of La Razón raised the prospect of privileged access to a reading public that differed sharply from that of Crítica. In their internal evaluation of the newspaper—based, it appears, on information assembled by Peralta Ramos in mid-1935—the drop in circulation that had resulted from La Razón’s competition with Crítica in the 1920s had nonetheless left a potentially prosperous (if dangerously indebted) business.56 While the circulation of the paper had fallen to approximately 81,000 copies daily, advertising had increased, signaling, the author of the evaluation concluded, that La Razón remained attractive to advertisers because of its readers’ “undoubted acquisitive power.”57 An established paper with name recognition, a sizable middle- and upper-class readership, and an existing advertising
