His entire regimes was marked by a dislike from many on both the right and the left sides of his politics, form writers to doctors and especially the military (Brennan; Romero). Much of the peasant, labor, and servant class, however, especially those Argentineans who were still most closely identified with the indigenous groups of people in the country, strongly supported Juan Peron and his wife Eva. Her death, in fact, seemed to signal the beginning of the end of Peron as his popular support began to wane significantly and his own behavior, both politically and privately, grew increasingly erratic (Romero). As this base began to erode out from underneath him, the oppositional social forces gained in strength, culminating in Peron's eventual overthrow.
Peron's political practices, while more concretely observable than his ideology or his social base, in many instances, are in some ways more difficult to codify. His nationalization of resources, corporations, and manufacturing concerns seemed to mark a certain socialist attitude, but the essential incorporations of the labor unions at the same time reflected capitalist tendencies, which were strengthened by the way some of the companies were run (Romero, 120-3). What essentially emerged, by the end of Peron's time in power, was a certain paranoid authoritarianism (Brennan, 32-6). Strategy and manipulation became...
His authoritarian control over certain parts of the government and national industry have led Peronsim to be equated with fascism by some, while the continued respect of the peasant class for the leader and the promotion of equality and opportunity that he was able to achieve mark him as a true liberal and Socialist for others. Essentially, Peronism is something of a balance -- or perhaps an imbalance -- between the two. It is a nationalization that still manages to marginalize certain elements, and a freedom that extends to economics but not to things like the press and speech. Peronism reflects an attempt to control the populous to enforce equality, and like all other such attempts, it failed.
Works Cited
Brennan, James. Peronism in Argentina. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998.
Romero, Luis Alberto. A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002
