Читать книгу The Fourth Enemy - James Cane - Страница 12

2

JOURNALISM AND POWER IN THE IMPOSSIBLE REPUBLIC

The appearance of a newspaper should be an occurrence of interest in society … precisely because a newspaper forms part of nothing less than the “power of the state,” of those tacit powers of the state.

—Senator Matías Sánchez Sorondo, June 7, 1934

Journalism can never be a function of the state.

—La Nación, October 7, 1933

The military movement that ended the presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen rode a broad wave of support. For months the Yrigoyen government had failed to respond to the first devastating moments of a world economic crisis that threatened to undermine the foundation of the political opening that had brought his party to power fourteen years earlier. At best, the agonizing disarray of the administration only seemed to confirm the dangerous ineptitude of the Radical Party’s Yrigoyenist wing; at worst, it signaled the ultimate consequences of an inherently decadent political liberalism that right-wing Argentine Nationalists had denounced since the 1910s.¹ Sectors of the military, Nationalists, Anti-Personalist Radicals, Conservatives, rival factions of Socialists, and, perhaps most vocally, Natalio Botana and Crítica, formed a common front for the ouster of the aging president. On September 6, 1930, the first military coup in modern Argentina met little resistance.

The breadth of the political convergence that toppled Yrigoyen, however, belied the depth of agreement surrounding the goals of the “September Revolution.” For de facto president General José F. Uriburu and his closest allies, the movement was to be more than a simple change of administration. They viewed the chaos of the final year of Yrigoyen’s government as the disastrous but logical culmination of the 1912 Sáenz Peña Law’s expansion of suffrage and thus as an indication of the need to transform Argentina’s “individualist democracy” into a corporatist-inspired “functional democracy.”² Convinced of the inevitability of their own victory, the de facto authorities held elections in the province of Buenos Aires in April 1931, only to find far too many Argentines unprepared to jettison constitutional liberalism in favor of the corporatist vision advocated by Uriburu. Even worse, provincial voters seemed unwilling to abandon en masse the party of Yrigoyen. The electoral defeat quickly and publicly splintered the anti-Yrigoyen alliance that had brought the military to power. Having revealed their own lack of public support, the de facto authorities called national elections, and, in February 1932, Uriburu passed the presidential baton to his rival, General Augustín P. Justo, a coconspirator in September 1930.³

The failure of the Ubriburu experiment reveals that if, as Mariano Plotkin and others have shown, a prolonged crisis of liberalism had permeated the country since the late 1920s, that crisis was as ambiguous as it was profound.⁴ The shattering of a liberal consensus that had buoyed Argentine political and economic life since the 1880s did little, in itself, to establish the legitimacy of competing projects like that of Uriburu and his allies. In addition, the stubborn refusal of the Radical Party and its popular base to accept the fall of Yrigoyen as a terminal defeat collided with the equally determined coalition of forces united by little more than a shared resolve to block the Radical’s full resurgence. This impasse found a curious solution: a liberal democracy sustained through thinly veiled and repeated electoral fraud.⁵ By 1935, even the defeated Radicals had resigned themselves to participation in what Tulio Halperín has called an “impossible republic”: one whose political order, for its own continuity, “saw itself obliged to systematically violate the principles invoked as its source of legitimacy.”⁶

The survival of constitutional liberalism as the normative basis for the Argentine political order after 1930, however, owes as much to the ideological breathing room ceded by liberalism’s own malleability as it does to the failure of rival political projects. Indeed, core conceptions of liberalism retained their broad appeal and political utility not despite, but because of their sustained modification by a set of basic pressures: government attempts to generate popular acquiescence to authoritarian and semiauthoritarian rule; the increasing appeal of expanding state power as a pragmatic response to the world economic crisis; repeated attempts by the political Right to forge an alternative project; and the heightened class tensions that accompanied the country’s rapid economic reorientation. A wounded liberalism staggered on as the dominant language of the political sphere and the republic’s guiding political philosophy, owing much of its resilience to its own rearticulation, equivocal transformation, and regular transgression in practice.

These convulsions of the social order with which the Argentine commercial press was linked from birth sent shock waves throughout the press’s entire network of relationships. The rapid expansion of the Buenos Aires press in the previous decades had placed the newspaper industry at the heart of social communication and the generation of public consent, while the shattered political consensus and disintegrating party structures of the 1930s made the press increasingly valuable as an instrument in factional disputes. Yet changes in public attitudes toward the relative legitimacy of journalism, together with a generalized—and well-founded—public suspicion of the political process, precluded a simple resurrection of the factional press. The power of the commercial press as a shaper of public consciousness, unlike that of its nineteenth-century counterpart, rested in good measure on its perceived autonomy from specific factional struggles. Nonetheless, by the late 1920s, the consolidation of the commercial press had created the conditions for a new and potentially more effective model of factional journalism: now, instead of politicians delivering a convinced public to a newspaper on the basis of shared partisanship, powerful commercial dailies could deliver a reading public—convinced or not—to politicians. As a result, when sections of the mass commercial press became tightly linked to specific political factions in the impossible republic, the links were on a far grander scale than those of the previous century’s factional press, and based on a markedly different network of relationships between journalists, newspaper proprietors, public, and politicians.

For the press as a whole, the growing acceptance from across the political spectrum for an expansion of state power to meet the multiple crises of the 1930s clashed with key elements of the traditional consensus around press rights and prerogatives. The brief experience of corporatist dictatorship under General Uriburu brought a sudden imposition of an unexpected, if temporary, level of state restrictions on the commercial press. The replacement of that dictatorship by a sham democracy did little to guard the press’s underlying juridical principles from constant threat. At the same time, the continued periodic invocation of the state of siege, with its suspension of constitutional guarantees, made official censorship a factor in the newsrooms of all the major Buenos Aires dailies.⁷ While these states of siege were, by definition, exceptional and temporary responses to immediate crises, moves to permanently alter the juridical foundations of state-press relations also emerged in the course of the 1930s. Although both a legislative attempt by right-wing senator Matías Sánchez Sorondo and an executive decree of President Justo failed in the face of fierce resistance, the implications were clear: the traditional interpretation of the constitutional guarantees regarding the press that had made the Federal Capital so amenable to the emergence of Latin America’s largest commercial newspaper industry faced serious challenges.

Finally, the newspaper industry’s continued expansion placed even greater strain on traditional liberal conceptions of journalism practice and the nature of newspaper institutions. In the course of the 1930s, the growing class divide within the newsroom suddenly emerged into the open just as labor militancy rose and the Argentine Congress became more willing to entertain worker demands. Following the surprising congressional 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 Sorondo expected the closure of Crítica to at once eliminate the most vocal opponent of the regime among the major commercial dailies and send a chilling message to the rest of the press. Instead, the measure placed Botana’s daily directly in the hands of Uriburu’s principal rival, General Justo. In the confusion surrounding his detention, Botana managed to ensure the survival of his paper by transferring legal ownership to his political allies. Federico Pinedo—who together with Antonio De Tomaso had emerged as the ideological force behind Justo—received the stock certificates for the Crítica publisher Sociedad Poligráfica Argentina, and Justo immediately assumed the presidency of the company, placing De Tomaso and Pinedo on the board of directors.²⁸ The move, which legally made Crítica the property of figures too powerful to persecute, saved the paper from oblivion.

It also, for the first time since Emilio Mitre’s death in 1909, placed the ownership of a major Buenos Aires newspaper directly in the hands of a presidential contender. On August 8, 1931, the Sociedad began to edit Jornada, a thinly disguised Crítica surrogate, setting the “new” newspaper directly at the service of General Justo’s presidential campaign. Jornada, in addition to painting the retired general as a man of “great civilian spirit,” launched a series of attacks on Justo’s rivals, the Alianza Civil’s Lisandro de la Torre and Nicolás Repetto.²⁹ The characterizations of the candidates of the Alianza, however, reveal the role that Jornada played in the Justo campaign strategy: rather than portraying the Alianza candidates as incompetent, the paper repeatedly warned abstentionist Radical Party supporters that de la Torre intended to extinguish Radicalism and taunted supporters of the Socialist Repetto that the vice-presidential candidate had lost his leftist credentials.³⁰ In the absence of an extensive, organized political apparatus, Jornada served at once as a vehicle of communication for the Justo campaign as well more specifically as a tool for mobilizing the Buenos Aires popular classes around the candidacy of the general. Unlike the papers of the nineteenth-century political press, Crítica had a long-established, relatively loyal mass audience that Botana had cultivated for over a decade; Jornada sought to deliver that public to General Justo.

Only on February 20, 1932, when Justo assumed the presidency and lifted the long-running state of siege, did Crítica proper—and Natalio Botana—return to the streets of Buenos Aires. Crítica continued as a mouthpiece of President Justo, Minister of Agriculture Antonio De Tomaso, and, after mid-1933, Minister of Economy Federico Pinedo until well after the Justo presidency ended in 1938. As the decade progressed, not only did Crítica remain a reliable bastion of support of the Concordancia government, but Botana himself served the Justo administration in even less transparent ways. In early 1933 Natalio Botana served as Justo’s informal ambassador to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst, lobbying for U.S. support of Argentine trade negotiations with the British Empire.³¹ When opposition senator Enzo Bordabehere was assassinated on the chamber floor in July 1935, Botana and Justo sought to push the news from the headlines by launching a Crítica campaign to create a popular cult around tango singer Carlos Gardel, who had died the previous month in an airplane crash in Colombia. “Natalio understood it,” his son Helvio would later recall; Gardel “was the symbol of happiness, of criollo purity adequate to oppose the moment of discredit and deception that shook the republic.”³² A year later, Botana facilitated—at Justo’s behest—a bribery scandal that successfully tainted several members of the opposition Radical Party who had only recently ended their electoral abstentionism to participate in the fraudulent democracy.³³

Crítica served as President Justo’s connection to a set of urban social classes far better organized by the opposition Radical, Socialist, and even Communist Parties than by members of the Concordancia coalition, and it necessarily did so from a decidedly leftist political position. Alongside paeans to Pinedo’s economic policies lay denunciations of Mussolini and Socialist-Realist drawings exalting Argentine workers as the true producers of the country’s wealth and national progress.³⁴ In addition, the paper continued to employ prominent members of the Argentine Communist Party like Ernesto Giudice, Cayetano Córdova Iturburu, Raúl González Tuñón, and José Portogalo—ironically, even as the Justo government continued a policy of repression against the Party. Botana also set his newspaper firmly behind the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, organizing fundraising for the Spanish government through Crítica, employing Spanish exiles as contributors, and sending Communist Party members González Tuñón and Córdova Iturburu as special envoys to the Republic.³⁵ Thus, despite the clearly conservative orientation of the Concordancia government and its neutrality on issues like the Spanish Civil War, Crítica served to associate President Justo and the economic policies of Federico Pinedo with the more left-leaning and antifascist positions that held sway among the Buenos Aires popular classes.

To dismiss such positions as merely opportunistic, or as a manipulation of Botana by Justo, however, runs contrary to the volumes of anecdotes affirming Botana’s genuine commitment to antifascism and other popular causes.³⁶ The exact nature of Botana’s relationship with President Justo, Federico Pinedo, and Antonio De Tomaso is far from clear, and the dearth of documentary evidence that might illuminate that relationship is no accident: the uncertainties surrounding Crítica ownership and finances, after all, had shielded the paper in 1931 and 1932. Indeed, the effectiveness of Crítica as a mobilizer of passive support for the Justo administration rested in good part upon the opaqueness of Botana’s personal relationship to the president, and thus on the believability of Crítica as a voice with, at the very least, great autonomy from the government. The reading public does not appear to have purchased Crítica in ever-increasing quantities throughout the decade of the 1930s because of the paper’s support for Justo. Judging from the manner in which editors allocated space in the paper and the repetition of certain topics, Crítica continued to solidify its readership base through variations of its usual material: its early coverage of breaking stories; sensationalistic crime reporting; campaigns around popular causes like support for Republican Spain; attention to labor disputes; attacks on rival newspapers; and exaltation of the paper itself as a living embodiment of the urban popular classes. The relationship between Botana, Justo, Pinedo, and De Tomaso was symbiotic, with Crítica delivering a popular audience to a sector of the Concordancia coalition and Botana receiving in turn an unparalleled political access to a powerful group of public officials with whom he genuinely sympathized both personally and ideologically.

This convergence between the agendas of Botana, Justo, Pinedo, and De Tomaso is also evident in another Crítica function that came into prominence after February 1932: the public disciplining of President Justo’s Concordancia “allies.” Within the Concordancia’s alliance of Conservatives, dissident Radicals, and Independent Socialists, it was clearly the Conservatives of the province of Buenos Aires, who had rebaptized themselves the Partido Demócrata Nacional (PDN), that wielded the most extensive political machine. Justo’s exclusion of prominent Buenos Aires Conservatives from his cabinet in favor of PSI members like De Tomaso and dissident Radicals like Leopoldo Melo left the president in a potentially awkward situation vis-à-vis the Concordancia’s most powerful political organization. In his own conflicts with the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Conservative Federico Martínez de Hoz, Justo could not rely on the support of an organized political apparatus; instead, he depended on the selective use of executive power and on divisions within the PDN that might work in his favor.³⁷ It is precisely in attempts to foment these divisions and weaken the PDN’s power within the Concordancia that Botana’s and Justo’s interests again converged, and in which Crítica proved particularly useful.

A long series of unrestrained and even sensationalistic denunciations against police brutality and torture under the Uriburu regime—especially at the hands of the Botanas’s jailer, Leopoldo Lugones Jr.—occupied much of Crítica’s pages in the first months of the Justo government.³⁸ Yet attacks against a prominent member of the Concordancia itself ultimately carried with them more far-reaching consequences not just for Botana, but for the Argentine press as a whole. Uriburu’s former minister of the interior Matías Sánchez Sorondo had become a powerful senator for the province of Buenos Aires in the same elections that brought Justo to the presidency. Uneasily ensconced as an informal bridge between the PDN and the far-Right Nationalist movement, the senator sought to push his party, in which 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 base appealed to Pinedo and Justo for precisely the reasons that the El Mundo journalists’ project failed. A detailed financial study of the newspaper also seemed to suggest that, with administrative trimming and debt relief, La Razón could quickly become an important newspaper once again.

The recovery of La Razón depended largely upon an investment of “approximately three and a half million pesos” in order to “pay individual creditors, [and] acquire machinery and newsprint,” as well as a more general rationalization of the newsroom—including barring Cortejarena’s widow from any decision making at the paper.⁵⁸ Together with a pressing debt of $2.5 million that La Razón still owed the Banco Hipotecario—headed, since 1933, by former Crítica administrator and Botana confidant Enrique Noriega—the newspaper required a combination of investment and debt relief at a level approximately equivalent to twice La Razón’s entire cost of production for the period March 1935–March 1936.⁵⁹ By late 1936, Pinedo and Justo had paid the paper’s creditors and seen to the purchase of new machinery to modernize La Razón’s format and printing capacities by drawing funds from the Pinedo-created Central Bank, leaving a $5 million debt frozen in the bank’s Instituto Movilizador de Inversiones Bancarias.⁶⁰

Through the Central Bank, President Justo and Federico Pinedo essentially purchased favored access to La Razón’s audience. Yet the value of the paper depended in large degree not on its overt identification with the president, but with the maintenance of La Razón as a plausibly independent newspaper. A Justo and Pinedo La Razón would remain flexible in its political orientation, much as Crítica remained, as a means of both expanding its circulation and generating reader confidence: “Without becoming oppositional, the newspaper should have its freedom of opinion… . La Razón should praise the good works of the government and criticize it in the appropriate cases. A political newspaper is never a commercial success. The orientation should be made intelligently and in agreement with the editors.”⁶¹ Indeed, the political latitude granted La Razón allowed the paper’s newly appointed director and ostensible “primary shareholder,” Ricardo Peralta Ramos, to assume a stance that would both minimize conflicts with Crítica and appeal precisely to that public that rejected Crítica’s workerist and protopopulist style. The two papers essentially divided the evening market along political lines, with Crítica intransigently anti-Fascist and even pro-Soviet in international matters and La Razón openly supportive of the Italian, Spanish, and German Fascist experiments.

Both papers, of course, painted President Justo in a sympathetic light consonant with these divergent political stances and in ways that appealed to Crítica’s and La Razón’s distinct reading publics. Rumors—most likely true—would later suggest that this arrangement corresponded less to the political tendencies of Peralta Ramos than to the “coaching” given him by Botana.⁶² Regardless, La Razón’s editorial embrace of international fascism marked a sudden but lucrative turn for Peralta Ramos: in August 1935 the paper had denounced Stalin and Hitler as essentially equal, but in May 1937 La Razón published a special issue entitled “Resurgent Germany,” supposedly edited at Goebbels’s Berlin offices, for which the director allegedly received as much as $1 million.⁶³ Few familiar with the paper could deny that La Razón’s political line followed its funding sources.

The transformation of La Razón proved incredibly successful. Thanks to the paper’s capital improvements and layout modernization, circulation steadily increased beginning in 1937. By 1945, La Razón had more than fully recovered from its financial crisis ten years earlier to achieve a circulation of 238,000 and had come to control eighteen radio stations across the country.⁶⁴ While some might attribute this resurgence to the journalistic genius and administrative acumen of Ricardo Peralta Ramos and editor Félix Laíño, clearly other important factors had also came into play. Peralta Ramos owed—literally—the conditions for much of La Razón’s remarkable comeback to President Justo, Federico Pinedo, and the Central Bank that they had created.

La Razón’s success, however, was also President Justo’s. Bereft of a coherent political apparatus, General Justo depended in part on the support that a sympathetic media voice might generate. That both Crítica and La Razón had long-established, successful traditions of interpellating sociologically and ideologically distinct sectors of the Argentine public granted the Justo administration positive exposure across the political and class spectrum. This transformation marked neither a simple return to the hyperpoliticized factional journalism of the previous century nor a mere expansion of the still vital tradition of political journalism embodied in newspapers like the Socialists’ La Vanguardia, the Yrigoyenist La Época, or the Nationalist La Fronda and Crisol. The importance of Crítica and La Razón for the Justo administration resided neither in their overarching ideological consonance with General Justo nor in their utility as a forum for the elaboration of specific political principles to be embraced by Concordancia militants. Neither Crítica nor La Razón stood as unequivocal and explicit mouthpieces of Justo and his closest allies; the diametrically opposed political stances of both papers on a host of issues only bolstered the appearance of an editorial independence that was not altogether fictitious even as it lent greater weight to their convergence in support of the agenda of key figures of the Concordancia. Unlike the organs of traditional partisan journalism, Crítica and La Razón proved valuable as vehicles for generating popular acquiescence to the semiauthoritarianism of the Concordancia governments precisely insofar as both papers outwardly adhered to the models of journalistic autonomy that had come to dominate the commercial press prior to 1930, and that continued as normative within the newspaper industry. More than a mere weapon in factional struggles, then, this new version of partisan journalism also served the much broader mission of generating both active and passive consent for the regime among broad swathes of Argentine society.

President Justo’s media strategy significantly altered the network of relationships between political power and media power that had emerged over the previous three decades. The web of economic, legal, and political threads that linked Natalio Botana and President Justo and the complex financial ties that made Ricardo Peralta Ramos dependent on the continued goodwill of administrators at the Central Bank remained at once confusing and largely opaque to the reading public.⁶⁵ This was no accident: the legitimacy and effectiveness of this new form of factional press rested precisely upon public perceptions of an autonomy that, in the final instance, proved only slightly less illusory than the democratic principles that the Concordancia repeatedly invoked but continually violated. In this, the sympathetic media apparatus assembled by General Justo—at the time unprecedented in its scale—would serve as an important precursor to a far more extensive, ambitious, centralized, and disciplined quasi-state media project that helped the consolidation of Peronism a decade later.

State Power and the Commercial Press

If the relationship between political factions and sectors of the Argentine commercial press changed abruptly with the military coup of September 1930, a broader transformation facilitated that shift: the expansion of the regulatory powers of the Argentine state. In its most obvious manifestation, the Uriburu regime’s invocation of extraordinary state-of-siege powers of censorship limited the actions of the commercial press on a scale not seen since the previous century. But the closure of Crítica had also inadvertently solidified the connections between General Justo and that newspaper. The subsequent creation of the Central Bank and its Instituto Movilizador, similarly, gave Justo a new and powerful mechanism for the creation and maintenance of a set of friendly newspapers.

Uriburu’s sweeping but temporary use of state power for censorship and Justo’s surreptitious use of the Central Bank also coincided with attempts to take a series of permanent, institutional steps intended to change fundamentally the relationship between the Argentine state and the press as a whole. These moves did not always prove successful. Such initiatives do, however, reveal the increasing tensions between an ideological environment characterized by a growing consensus around the beneficial potential—even necessity—of new forms of state activity, and the operation of a commercial press whose juridical basis, professional ideology, and public legitimacy had long rested on the antistatist elements of Argentine liberalism.⁶⁶

The first of these measures emerged precisely as public enthusiasm for the Uriburu regime began to wane. Crediting this erosion of popular support to the government’s failure to completely contain the actions of opposition newspapers, Lieutenant Colonel Emilio Kinkelín, the secretary of the presidency of the provisional government, created the “Sección Prensa” under his own authority.⁶⁷ Kinkelín defined the Sección Prensa’s overriding mission as the “channeling of public opinion toward the high purposes of [the provisional government]” by disseminating the opinion of “the people’s leaders in order to detract from all tendentious propaganda that seeks to diminish the merit of the works being done after the revolution.”⁶⁸ Rather than a mere mechanism for the enforcement of censorship, then, the new institution had multiple functions that went beyond purely negative attempts to restrict newspaper content. In effect, Kinkelín sought to make the Sección Prensa a state agency of public opinion formation, a task ostensibly reserved for—but far too important and delicate to be entrusted to—the private organs of the fourth estate.