Crítica
- Swindle Estimated at 500,000 Pesos
- Power Without Control: This Is What the Police Have Become!
- ARGENTINE CYCLISTS ARE IN PERU
Crítica's front page of 9 November 1926 led with a fraud inside the Buenos Aires police. The paper estimated the losses at 500,000 pesos and reported that the scheme surfaced when the pension fund issued membership cards, revealing many non-employees on the police rolls; a bookkeeper named Díaz admitted taking part and said the practice went back more than 20 years. An editorial turned the scandal into an attack on the police's secret funds, accusing the force of spending them to hunt workers and anarchists, to shadow Hipólito Irigoyen and to fill its cells with honest workers. A short wire from Arequipa reported that the cyclists Egidio Samer and Antonio Francescutti, riding from Buenos Aires to New York, had reached Peru.
Translation
Swindle Estimated at 500,000 Pesos
The matter, as we reported earlier, was uncovered after the Pension Fund handed out its membership cards, which made senior police officials notice that many people appeared who were not employees. Questioned, Díaz, who has worked as a bookkeeper for some time, said that he was indeed one of those who stole by that means, and added that this had been going on for more than 20 years.
Power Without Control: This Is What the Police Have Become!
For a long time the police have handled a considerable sum of money for secret expenses. That secret was an open secret. It was used to persecute workers and anarchists. At one time it was spent on the illusory surveillance of the revolutionary Radicals. Many thousands of pesos have been secretly spent to follow Mr. Irigoyen's footsteps. Hundreds of honest workers have ended up in police cells to justify the use of a large allocation.
ARGENTINE CYCLISTS ARE IN PERU
AREQUIPA, 9. – The cyclists Egidio Samer and Antonio Francescutti, who are making the Buenos Aires–New York raid, arrived in this city. They set out from the Plaza del Congreso in Buenos Aires on March 15,
Context
Botana's Crítica and the crime story
Crítica was founded in 1913 by the Uruguayan-born Natalio Botana, who is regarded as a pioneer of sensationalist media in Argentina, and the paper gave wide coverage to crime news. The police-fraud report on this page follows that formula: a large round figure in the headline, a scheme said to have run for two decades, and the confession of a named bookkeeper, Díaz. The 500,000-peso total is the paper's own estimate, introduced with "se calcula" (it is estimated), and the excerpt does not say who made the calculation or how. The scale of the fraud and its 20-year span therefore rest on Crítica's reporting rather than on any documented judicial finding.
The Policía de la Capital and its political past
The force the editorial attacks was the Policía de la Capital, created in 1880 when the federalization of Buenos Aires made the city the national capital; it policed the city until the Federal Police, created in 1943, gradually took over its duties. Its political role had long been contested. After the Radical Civic Union's failed revolution of 1905, a conservative congressman, retired Colonel Ramón Falcón, was appointed chief of police, and his repressive tenure ended only with his assassination in 1909. The editorial's remark that secret funds were once spent on the "illusory surveillance" of revolutionary Radicals points back to that era, when the Radicals were an insurrectionary opposition. Its charge that the same hidden budget served to persecute workers and anarchists is Crítica's accusation; the record cited here establishes the political use of the police before 1910, not the specific spending the editorial alleges.
Why the editorial names Irigoyen
Hipólito Irigoyen, whose movements the editorial says the police followed at great secret cost, was the Radical leader who had preceded Marcelo T. de Alvear as president and had chosen him as his successor. During Alvear's term (1922–1928), Irigoyen's rivals inside the Radical Civic Union broke away to form the Antipersonalist Radical Civic Union, although Alvear himself did not promote that movement. The Personalists who stayed loyal to Irigoyen used working-class symbols and rhetoric, and their control of Congress and the party machine secured his re-election in 1928. In November 1926, Irigoyen was thus the leading figure of one half of a divided governing party and the man who would win the presidency again two years later. That gives the editorial's claim political weight: it accuses the police of having secretly spent public money to follow the man who led the rival Radical wing, although the passage does not say when that surveillance took place. The histories of the split do not themselves document such surveillance, so the claim stands as Crítica's allegation.
Workers, anarchists and the police under Alvear
The editorial's charge that hundreds of honest workers were thrown into police cells to justify a secret budget belongs to a period of sharp labour conflict. In a 2016 history column for the left-wing La Izquierda Diario, Herman Schiller counted 519 strikes during Alvear's six years in office, many of them general strikes, involving more than 400,000 workers, and argued that police repression, long imprisonments and torture were no lighter than in other periods. Schiller writes as a partisan of the labour movement rather than as a neutral surveyor, but his account shows that the pattern Crítica describes, with anarchists and strikers treated as police targets, was a familiar grievance in the mid-1920s.
A cycling raid in a paper that invested in sport
The short wire from Arequipa on Egidio Samer and Antonio Francescutti reflects Crítica's interest in sport. At its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, the paper added a sports supplement alongside a cultural one, and Botana himself briefly presided over the Argentine Football Association in 1926, the year of this issue. The item records only the riders' arrival in Arequipa and their departure from the Plaza del Congreso in Buenos Aires on March 15; whether they went on to reach New York is not established here.
Original
Se Calcula que lo Estafado Asciende a 500.000 Pesos
El asunto, como hemos anticipado, fué descubierto a raíz de la entrega por la Caja de Jubilaciones de los carnets, lo que hizo notar a los empleados superiores de la policía, que aparecían muchos que no eran empleados. Interrogado Díaz que presta servicios de tenedor de libros desde hace tiempo, dijo que en etecto, éi era uno de los que robaban por ese medio y agregó que eso se venía haciendo desde hace más de 20 años.
Poder sin Control: ¡Así ha Salido la Policía!
La policía ha manejado desde hace mucho tiempo una respetable cantidad de dinero para gastos secretos. Ese secreto era un misterio a voces. Se empleaba para perseguir obreros y anarquistas. En alguna época fué gastado en la ilusoria vigilancia de los radicales revolucionarios. Para seguirle los pasos al señor Irigoyen se han invertido secrétamente, muchos miles de pesos. Cientos de honestos trabajadores han caído en los calobozos policiales para justificar el empleo de una fuerte partida.
LOS CICLISTAS ARGENTINOS SE HALLAN EN PERU
AREQUIPA, 9. - Llegaron a esta ciudad los ciclistas Egidio Samer y Antonio Francescutti, que realizan el raid Buenos Aires-Nueva York. Salieron de la Plaza del Congreso de Buenos Aires, el 15 de marzo,
Source: Source: Internet Archive / Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina