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