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