MARIO RECIO

President of one of the most important and international appreciated Argentine graphic production plants, Establecimientos Gráficos Impresores S. A., Mario Recio lives his activity with passion responding to a vocation that he feels all his life. “It could be amazing but being 11 and 12 years old I knew that the printing shop was my place”, he said.

He was born in Buenos Aires on 29th October 1938, Victoria Ciminelli and José Recio’s son, modest working people. His father had a typographical printing shop at Nueva Pompeya quarter and, in a time, the family home was into the same shop. Together with his elder brother and sister, José Félix and Victoria Mercedes, Mario did some jobs in the printing shop since being child. And he liked it. But his father wanted that at least one of his children went on the high school. The fate intervened. The father felt ill gravely – hemorrhagic pancreatitis – and his elter brother and sister didn’t want to take on charge the shop because of familiar frictions. Giving up the second course of the high school Mario, who was only 13 years old, led the printing shop and so he remembered it: “Having my father in convalescence I was in the front of the workshop to bring it forward, with all the complexity and responsibility that fact means. I had to lead elder men, long-timed typographers, which collaborated accepting my orders. I worked more than anybody worked. I learnt to calculate the purchase of the material we needed. I got to keep clients and suppliers holding a relation of equals, at the point that some of them began to think I was elder than I looked, and in that way all the workshop was around me”.

The experience made him realize about his ability for growing in the activity. About his 17 years old important facts happened in such a sense. He knew Beatriz Lucía Aróstegui, his first sweetheart, who he got married on 10th October 1964 and she is his children’s mother: Pablo Christian (25-IV-66), Marcelo Alejandro (26-VI-67) y Sebastian Gabriel (6-III -77). In the same time, showing his business vision, Mario made a bold proposal to his father: to go on leading his father’s shop without getting salary during the day but at night to be allowed using the facilities for his own account. That meant to sleep every other day, in spite of that he fulfilled accurately the duties he had assumed. Besides, together with Beatriz, on a motor scooter that had been the payment for a work to his father, Mario went along the Buenos Aires roads to get the service stations be his customers. “That scooter marked my life”, he says smiling. But the true is that having 19 years old he had already got a small capital and he became independent. His future father-in-law helped him and gave him a place in his home to set up his first typographic printer that he still kept as souvenir. “At the end of the first working year I had already overcome largely my father’s workshop that he took all his life for building it”, Mario commented.

The fulfilment of the army service compelled him to change the rhythm, but partially because he worked with his printer on Saturdays and Sundays.

Coming back to the civil life, and from 1961, Mario’s enterprise started to grow unstoppably, which is kept at the same intensity up to the present. By 1968, having very first-line customers, then Impresores S.C.A. had become in the largest Argentine typographic enterprise with four vertical Givot machines and for Rotoras machines, a true revolution at that time.

Seeing the market’s requirements and the technology’s possibilities, Impresores entered in rotogravure-offset adding the first Cabrenta small size offset machine in 1968. The success that was got and the customers’ reliance encouraged, in the first years of the ’70, two used one-colour (59x82 size) offset Heidelberg machines were added, preparing so on steady bases the technical rush that was close.

In 1978 other essential step was given. “While the people was entertained travelling to Miami, to Europe or the most different places in the “give me two” time, we went on investing on machinery”, Mario says. In those times, from Germany he imported two new larger sized (71 x 102) four colours Heidelberg machines, the first machines of such a type for Latin America. At the same time all the machines that were needed for binding and copy were added, and with them one of the edgy workshops was configured in Argentina.

From the starting, together with investing on machinery, the enterprise was purchasing new neighbouring real states, with them the suitable facilities for the activity were built. First the building the firm has in the Buenos Aires quarter of Liniers and the in 2003 the amazing field Establecimientos Gráficos Impresores has in the Industrial Pilar Park, in the province of Buenos Aires. There a building with all the facilities and specific requirements for the graphic industry production. The equipment in all the divisions are constantly renewed, at the point that is difficult to find some machine or equipment that overcome two years. It’s remarkable that Mario’s enterprise is one of the chosen by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen A.G. to launch their brand’s novelties in the world.

This Argentine company’s huge expansion – this company produces cardboard packaging, paper labels and promotional material – arose often suspicious. Without bitterness but with good mood Mario relates that capitals from the most different origin were attributed to him, from the Vatican to the army power, in spite of the fact that during the last dictatorship the company suffered four housebreaking.

Explaining the key of his successful business development, Mario strongly affirms that it’s because of “tenacity, perseverance and love, and betting always on the working culture”. And he exemplifies emphasizing proudly: “I’m happy that my three sons are in the same activity, perhaps because they were also grown up in a graphic workshop, perhaps because they lived their parents’ love to the works, and it will be for these two things or perhaps for other things more, that they as us are leading this company that is now an integral industry everyday”.

Overcoming a disease’s consequences Mario goes on in activity, because to work in the graphic industry investing his gift and his accumulated experience goes on being his great vocation and he enjoy it at full.

For all that, on December 2008, FAIGA (Argentine Federation of the Graphic Industry and Allied Industries) has just offered to Mario Recio the homage for his fifty years that were devoted to the effort and to the fight to get the top excellence in the graphic industrial production. Likewise CONLATINGRAF (Latin American Confederation of the Graphic Industry) includes Mario’s personal and professional courses in the Gallery of Graphic Celebrities as example and guide for the young graphic generations.