Juan Perón

Juan Perón: The Colonel Who Rewrote Argentina

On 9 October 1945 a group of rival officers forced Colonel Juan Domingo Perón out of the government and had him arrested. Eight days later, the labour confederation he had spent two years cultivating filled the Plaza de Mayo and would not leave until he was released. He walked out onto a balcony that night and Argentina acquired a political movement it has never since been able to shed. Argentines still mark 17 October as Loyalty Day. Perón married Eva Duarte five days later.

Lobos to the Alps

He was born on 8 October 1895 in Lobos, in Buenos Aires Province, into a family of mixed Spanish, British, French and Tehuelche ancestry; a great-grandfather had been a prosperous shoe merchant, a grandfather a physician. He entered the National Military College in 1911 at sixteen and graduated in 1913, distinguishing himself at boxing and fencing rather than in the classroom. Posted to Paraná in Entre Ríos, he was mediating labour disputes as early as 1920 — an unusual assignment for a young officer, and a formative one.

The decisive education came abroad. Between 1939 and 1941 he was sent to study mountain warfare in the Italian Alps, attended the University of Turin, and served as military attaché in Rome and Berlin. He watched Mussolini's Italy at close range and drew a conclusion that would define him: that the fascist achievement worth stealing was the mass organisation of the working class, and that it could be detached from totalitarianism and married to something he called social democracy. Whether that detachment was ever completed is the argument that has followed him for eighty years.

The Ministry Nobody Wanted

Perón took part in the 1943 military coup against Ramón Castillo and then asked for the Department of Labour — a backwater his fellow officers were happy to concede. He proceeded to turn it into the most powerful office in the country. He raised it to cabinet rank in November 1943 and used it to deliver, in rapid succession, minimum wages, paid holidays, accident compensation and labour courts. Union leaders who had spent decades being beaten by the state found themselves negotiating with a colonel who gave them what they asked for. By 1945 the CGT was not a constituency he courted; it was an instrument he owned.

That is what the October crisis proved. His rivals removed a man and discovered they had also removed the government's only link to a million workers. In the February 1946 election Perón, running with Hortensio Quijano, won decisively.

Social Justice and Economic Independence

The first presidency spent Argentina's wartime windfall on a wholesale reordering of national life. Perón nationalised the Central Bank, the railways, the merchant marine and the utilities, and created IAPI, a state monopoly over grain exports designed to squeeze the landed oligarchy and fund industry. Women received the vote in 1947. Some 650,000 public homes were built. Real wages rose roughly 35 per cent between 1945 and 1949. His doctrine, justicialismo, promised social justice and economic independence, and for a few years appeared to be delivering both.

Eva Perón made it visible. Her foundation, established in 1948, ran on an annual budget of around $50 million and built schools, clinics and more than 25,000 homes, distributing them personally in scenes that fused welfare and devotion. She was the movement's emotional engine, and when she died in 1952 the machine lost the part that could not be replaced.

The arithmetic caught up faster than the mythology. The $1.7 billion in wartime reserves was exhausted by 1948. Commodity prices fell, imports rose, the peso lost 70 per cent of its value between 1948 and 1950, and by 1952 workers' purchasing power had fallen about 20 per cent from its peak. Perón's second term, won in 1951, was a long defensive action. His campaign against the Catholic Church — divorce legislation, the deportation of two priests — turned a wounded regime into a besieged one. In June 1955 pro-Church military aircraft bombed the Plaza de Mayo, killing some 300 civilians. In September the Revolución Libertadora deposed him.

Eighteen Years Away

He went to Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama and finally Spain, and stayed abroad for eighteen years while his party was outlawed and his name legally unspeakable. It made no difference. Peronism without Perón proved ungovernable, and every Argentine government of the period was defined by its posture toward a man in Madrid. When Héctor Cámpora won the presidency for the Peronists in 1973 and cleared the way, Perón returned — to the Ezeiza massacre, in which the movement's left and right wings opened fire on each other at his welcome rally. He was elected president again in October 1973 with his third wife Isabel as vice-president. His final months were consumed by the same civil war inside his own coalition, with his minister José López Rega running the Triple A death squad, credibly accused of hundreds of extrajudicial killings. He died on 1 July 1974. Isabel succeeded him, and the country fell into the military dictatorship of 1976.

Why Juan Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is political invention: Perón built a durable mass movement out of a constituency nobody else had thought to organise, and gave it a language, a calendar and a liturgy. Argentina's workers had existed as a grievance before 1943; after him they existed as a bloc with a name. The insight was to fuse material delivery — wages, holidays, pensions, housing — with a dignity narrative that made the recipients feel recognised rather than pitied. Half a century after his death, Peronism remains the pivot of Argentine politics, claimed by governments of the left and the right, which is a strange kind of proof. Historians who reject the fascist label do so on real grounds: he mobilised workers rather than the frightened middle class, pursued no expansionism, and had to bargain constantly rather than command.

The counter-case is heavy. This was charismatic and organisational skill, not intellectual depth: his own writings, including *La Comunidad Organizada*, are derivative, and his economics was a resource windfall spent quickly and then defended badly, ending in stagflation and devaluation. He dismissed more than two thousand university professors, among them the Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay; he nationalised broadcasting, controlled newsprint, closed *La Prensa* and jailed opponents such as Ricardo Balbín. Under his government Argentina sheltered Nazi war criminals — Mengele arrived in 1949, Eichmann in 1950 — through ratlines run with official complicity, even as the country admitted more Jewish immigrants than any other in Latin America. And the movement he designed to be inseparable from himself could not survive him: it turned its guns on itself at Ezeiza and on its own citizens through the Triple A. A genius of mobilisation who leaves behind a machine that eats its members has proved something about power, not about governing.

Legacy

Argentina has spent every decade since 1955 arguing about him and has never produced a settled verdict, because the movement is still active and still contested. He remains, by any measure, the most consequential Argentine of the twentieth century — the man who wrote the country's political grammar and then left it unable to speak any other language.

Achievements

• Grand Cross Special Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany — 1953
• Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• Educated at Nation Military College
• Worked as military officer, politician and statesperson