About El Cohete a la Luna

El Cohete a la Luna

El Cohete a la Luna - The Rocket to the Moon - is a digital investigative and political analysis site based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published in Spanish at elcohetealaluna.com. It was launched on 10 December 2017 by the journalist Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most influential investigative reporters, after his departure from the newspaper Pagina/12, where his Sunday columns had been a fixture of Argentine political life for three decades. The site publishes a weekly Sunday edition of investigations, politics, economy and human-rights reporting, built around Verbitsky's own long-form analyses and the work of a distinguished group of collaborators. In 2019 it won the ETER award for best informative website. Few Argentine digital outlets are so completely identified with a single journalist; El Cohete a la Luna is best understood as the independent platform Verbitsky built when no existing newspaper remained willing, or able, to contain him.

Horacio Verbitsky before El Cohete

Verbitsky's standing explains the site's instant importance. For thirty years he was the defining columnist of Pagina/12, the left-leaning Buenos Aires daily founded in 1987, and his books - among them The Flight, his account of the confession of naval officer Adolfo Scilingo about the death flights of the last dictatorship, published in English by The New Press in 1996, and The Silence, on the secret links between the Catholic Church and the Navy Mechanics School - made him internationally known as an investigator of the dictatorship, the armed forces, the intelligence services and the Church. Presidents negotiated with him, feared him and attacked him; his Sunday column was required reading for the Argentine political class whether they agreed with it or not.

Departure from Pagina/12 and the blanqueo investigation

The immediate cause of El Cohete a la Luna was a conflict over a single investigation. In 2017 Verbitsky had revealed, in Pagina/12, that relatives and friends of President Mauricio Macri and other senior national officials had benefited from the government's tax amnesty - the blanqueo de capitales, the capital-legalisation scheme. The revelation embarrassed the government, and Verbitsky left Pagina/12 in the aftermath. Interviewed by the Agencia Paco Urondo at the launch of his new portal, he was explicit about the connection: he had initially conceived El Cohete as a platform for publishing his Sunday analyses precisely because Macri had been so annoyed by the blanqueo investigation, and his intention was to continue that investigation, because there were many more data than had already been published. The new outlet's first edition, he announced, would deal with the blanqueo in full; at the presentation he declared that the dog does not shut up - el perro no se calla, a reference to his well-known nickname, el Perro.

Launch: 10 December 2017

El Cohete a la Luna went live on 10 December 2017 - the anniversary of Argentina's restoration of democracy in 1983, and two years to the day after Macri took office. It was conceived, in Verbitsky's description, as a digital medium that would publish investigations, scoops and analysis, initially organised around his Sunday pieces - restoring, on his own platform, the weekly appointment with readers that Pagina/12 had provided for a generation. The name, playful and defiant at once, announced both distance and ambition: a rocket of his own, aimed at the moon, after leaving the newspaper that had been his home.

The launch was not a solo act. Verbitsky announced that collaborators would include Eduardo and Victoria Basualdo, Elizabeth Gomez Alcorta, Damian Loreti and Adrian Paenza, among many others to be announced gradually, and he reported receiving thousands of requests to participate that the team was processing slowly. The names spanned economics, law, human rights and science communication - a map of the intellectual world the site intended to convene, and a signal that El Cohete would publish far more than one man's column.

The Sunday edition

The site's rhythm is its most distinctive formal feature. Where digital natives compete on continuous updating, El Cohete a la Luna publishes a weekly edition, appearing on Sundays, in the tradition of the Sunday newspaper and of Verbitsky's own column. Each edition is organised around his central note - a long, densely documented political analysis that frequently sets the terms of the following week's debate, quoted and answered in radio programmes and rival outlets - accompanied by investigations, essays and columns from its collaborators on the economy, the courts, human rights, culture and international affairs.

Syndication and republication extend its reach: Verbitsky's central notes from El Cohete are routinely republished or summarised by allied outlets such as the AM 530 Somos Radio site and Plaza de Mayo Info, so that the Sunday edition circulates far beyond its own homepage. The model revives, in digital form, an older political temporality: in a media system of permanent urgency, El Cohete asks to be read once a week, at length, and then argued about for six days.

What it investigates

The site's agenda follows its founder's lifelong beats, widened by its collaborators. It investigates the economic complicities of the dictatorship and the continuities between that era and the present; the intelligence services and the security forces; the judiciary and its political entanglements; the Catholic Church; economic policy, debt and the distribution of income; and the human-rights movement whose history Verbitsky has chronicled for decades. The blanqueo investigation that provoked the site's founding was the template: documentary, sourced from inside the state, aimed at the intersection of political power and private wealth, and published in full knowledge that it would anger a president.

Its political position is within the broad Peronist and kirchnerist conversation, but not obedient to it: Verbitsky's Sunday notes criticise allied governments in detail when he judges them to have failed, and his analyses of the internal disputes of Peronism - its candidacies, its leaders, its strategies - are read inside that movement as interventions, not commentary. That combination of proximity and independence is the source of both the site's influence and its controversies.

Recognition

In 2019, two years after its launch, El Cohete a la Luna won the ETER award for best informative website. The prize, recorded in reference accounts of Verbitsky's career, recognised the improbable fact that a weekly digital publication built around long-form text had established itself among Argentina's most consequential news sources, competing for influence with the continuous-news operations of the multimedia groups. The award also marked the site's acceptance by the journalistic profession it had been founded partly in defiance of: an outsiders' platform, honoured as the year's best informative site.

Editorial character

El Cohete a la Luna is unapologetically an author's medium. Its authority derives from its director's record - the dictatorship investigations, the books, the decades of sourced reporting inside the Argentine state - and its pages carry the marks of that method: documents, names, dates, institutional histories and long memories brought to bear on the week's events. Its collaborators, drawn from academia, law, economics and journalism, publish under the same ethic of the documented essay rather than the news brief. In an Argentine digital market structured by speed, the site is the counter-example most often cited: slow, weekly, textual and influential.

Place in Argentine digital media

The site belongs to the small class of Argentine outlets created when a major journalist leaves a legacy institution and builds a digital house of his own - but it is the most successful of them, because Verbitsky brought with him not only readers but a subject matter, a method and a network of collaborators that no other Argentine columnist could match. Its founding also marks a date in the history of Pagina/12 and of the Macri era: the moment when an investigation into a president's circle became too uncomfortable for the newspaper that published it, and continued instead on a rocket of the investigator's own construction.

Continuing publication

El Cohete a la Luna continues to publish its Sunday editions from Buenos Aires: investigations, political and economic analysis and human-rights reporting, centred on Horacio Verbitsky's weekly note and the work of its collaborators. Eight years after a president's annoyance set it in motion, the rocket is still flying - weekly proof of its founder's launch-day promise that the dog does not shut up.