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 man who had made a fabulous fortune with a sensationalist newspaper. His house, surrounded by a tremendous park, was the incarnation 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