Crítica
- FASCIST MOBS SAVAGED THE YOUTH WHO ATTACKED MUSSOLINI
- After the Attack, Mussolini Showed Great Unconcern
- FOURTEEN STAB WOUNDS!
Crítica's front page of 1 November 1926 was given over to the attempt on Mussolini's life and what followed it. The lead story described in graphic terms how, within a minute and a half, Fascists hoisted a shapeless mass into the air, and that mass was the young boy accused of the attack. A shorter column reported that Mussolini showed great unconcern afterwards: on reaching Forlì he was greeted by a Fascist demonstration and chatted calmly with officials and relatives. At the foot of the page, an editorial headed 'Fourteen stab wounds!' argued that the press should record not the attack on Mussolini but the other assault behind it, the one that grieves free peoples.
Translation
FASCIST MOBS SAVAGED THE YOUTH WHO ATTACKED MUSSOLINI
In a minute and a half, the Fascists raised a shapeless mass high into the air. It was the young boy
After the Attack, Mussolini Showed Great Unconcern
On his arrival at Forlì, "Fascism" gave him a demonstration of sympathy, and the dictator chatted calmly with the authorities and members of his family
FOURTEEN STAB WOUNDS!
What the newspapers ought to record is not the attack on Mussolini, but the other one, the one behind it, the one that fills free peoples with anguish
Context
Anteo Zamboni, the 15-year-old lynched in Bologna
The 'young boy' of the lead story was Anteo Zamboni. On 31 October 1926 a shot was fired at Mussolini as he rode in an open car through Bologna, and it led to the lynching of the 15-year-old; this edition appeared the following day. Crítica's headline takes for granted that the youth had attacked Mussolini, and its opening lines dwell on the speed and ferocity of the Fascist crowd that seized him. Later scholarship is far less certain about his guilt. The terrorism specialist J. Bowyer Bell judged that the boy was likely innocent and that the affair was either a put-up job or a plot among Fascists. The page therefore preserves a contemporary picture of the lynching's brutality, while the question of who actually fired the shot remains disputed.
Attempts on Mussolini and the laws of 1925–26
Zamboni's was the fourth attempt on Mussolini in roughly a year, and the series helped the regime justify sweeping powers. The former Socialist deputy Tito Zaniboni was arrested on 4 November 1925 for plotting to shoot Mussolini, and laws enacted in late 1925 enabled the suppression of any oppositional political organisation. On 7 April 1926 Violet Gibson fired a pistol that grazed Mussolini's nose, and on 11 September 1926 the anarchist marble worker Gino Lucetti threw a bomb at his car at Porta Pia in Rome, injuring four others. The Bologna attempt in turn resulted in laws creating Mussolini's secret police. Taken together, the 'leggi fascistissime' of 1925–26 made the Fascist party the only one permitted and established the OVRA secret police and a special tribunal for state security. Against this background, the editorial's insistence that the real story was 'the other' attack, the one that grieves free peoples, reads as the paper's own charge that the assault that mattered was the one on Italian liberties.
Crítica and the Italian community of Buenos Aires
Crítica, founded by Natalio Botana and published from 1913 to 1962, was in the 1920s the most widely circulated newspaper in Latin America, and it wrote for a country deeply shaped by Italian immigration. Between 1880 and 1930 about two million Italians left their country to settle in Argentina. Gian Luca Croce's study of the community between 1923 and 1943 finds that these emigrants rejected the control of the mother country and reacted vigorously against the Fascist project, and that antifascism never lost its force among Italians in Argentina, which became one of the world centres of the fight against authoritarianism. The page's vocabulary of 'Fascist mobs' and its appeal to 'free peoples' sit comfortably within that climate. Croce's findings describe the community as a whole; the page itself shows Crítica's position only through its headlines and tone.
The Associated Press in Buenos Aires
By 1926 an American wire service had been established in the Argentine capital for nearly a decade. The Associated Press opened a bureau in Buenos Aires in 1917, and the city's daily La Nación subscribed to its service in 1919. AP did not begin reporting in Spanish until 1 October 1941, so any AP material that reached a Buenos Aires paper in 1926 arrived in another language and was put into Spanish in the newsroom. That local rewriting helps explain the tone of Crítica's page: the dispatches about Bologna and Forlì are presented under headlines such as 'Fascist mobs savaged the youth', in which the paper's own judgement frames the reported facts.
Original
TURBAS FASCISTAS SE ENSANARON CON EL JOVEN QUE AGREDIO A MUSSOLINI
En un minuto y medio, los fascistas levantaron en alto una masa informe. Era el jovencito
Después del Atentado Mussolini Démostró Gran Despreocupación
A su arribo a Forli, el " fascismo " lo hizo objeto de una demostración de simpatía, y el dictador conversó tra [?] quilamente con las autoridades y miembros de su familia
¡CATORCE PUÑALADAS!
Lo que deberían consignar los diarios no es el atentado contra Mussolini, sino el otro, que hay detrás, el que llena de congoja a los pueblos libres
Source: Source: Internet Archive / Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina