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’