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