Peronism the Conservative and Liberal Saint of Argentina

Peronism: All hail the conservative/Liberal Saint of Argentina.

In his work Maniana es San Per6n: Propaganda, rituales politicos y educaci6n en el regimen peronista (1946-1955), Argentinean historian Mariano Plotkin states that he does not strive to present a comprehensive history of Peronism, merely a portrait of the propaganda used by Juan Peron to secure the leader's hold on power. Yet within this approach, perhaps, one can divine the entire history of Peronism: for example, Peron called upon the working people, from which his wife Eva supposedly came, to come to his support in the streets. In contrast to previous strong-armed leaders, Peron appealed to the common populace to rally to his name, and strove to mobilize labor unions, youth groups, and other organizations to take to enforce his agenda on a grass-roots level. Yet Peron did not support labor unions and other institutions in a way that truly improved the plight of Argentinean workers. He used them to keep himself in power, but did not enable them to become long-standing agents of positive social change independent of Peronism. Instead, they became bullying entities, a kind of police force for Peronism, not for populism.

Peron's method of uplifting the working class was designed to keep his own regime in the seat of power. Rather than fundamentally reconfiguring the class system of the nation, he acted as a kind of benevolent monarch. He made displays of great largesse through Eva Peron's charitable Foundation. This changed a few individual's lives and won Peron many supporters, because of his skillful marketing of the charitable campaign, but it did not change Argentinean society or truly make it more functionally democratic or socially mobile.

Another example of Peron's simultaneously reactionary yet conservative approach, an approach that created an image of populism while still deploying conservative ideology was how he enfranchised women in Argentina. Of course, expanding voting rights to women was a laudable action. But Peron did so because he believed that women would support him, and thought that they would be enamored of him as a personality. He made much of his conservative, Roman Catholic appearance of piety and fidelity to the church. This ideal was also exemplified by his wife, 'Saint' Evita. Peron stated that women were more compassionate and had a deeper spiritual life then males, and this was why they should be allowed to make a contribution to politics, not because they should be taken seriously as enforcers of real, masculine state power. Women were used to evangelize the glory Peron, and to view him not as a saintly leader. Peron positioned himself figurehead, the center of a cult of personality, like a Catholic saint: that was why he desired female support.

Peron expanded access to education for the Argentinean poor, in another action that secured him many accolades. But the history that was taught in the classroom was re-written to praise Peron as a leader, much as it was in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany to praise the leaders of those regimes. Education was promoted because it was yet another way to serve the interests of Peron's state, not further the poor, individual's citizen's aspirations. Youth groups and youth organizations also became an important element in securing Peron's dominance over the nation, often through violence.

Peron did not fundamentally change the relationship between state and labor, state and individual -- he still wished to wield control, although he did value the role of the working class in supporting his personal agenda. He was less reluctant to embrace the image of the common worker than previous regimes, but he did in so in a way that did not truly empower institutions such as labor unions to act as voices for the voiceless. Instead, when he did collaborate with unions when he was coming to power or reasserting his power, it was to use them as his tool. Unions and student groups proved useful in harassing Peron's political enemies -- they allowed him to seem above the fray, while they were terrorizing the opposition through the use of illegal methods (Romero, 2002, p.212).

Still, given the alienation of the working poor from Argentinean society pre-Peron, some scholars, such as Daniel James, author of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946- 1976. have been tempted to view Peronism in a more positive light. In the mobilization of labor, James sees the decision of workers to support Peron as a fundamentally rational choice, and even if under Peron a new working-class culture did not fully come into fruition. Peronism did expand the notion of Argentine citizenship in a way that did not link it to class. James argues that workers did not blindly support Peronist propaganda but had "complex, ambiguous, frequently contradictory responses" to the types of media detailed in Plotkin's work, and they were critical consumers of the Peronist agenda (James, 1988, p.3).