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Is There Any Hope for Argentina?
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17528 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
3,298 Words |
| Author
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Lowell Gustafson
Lowell Gustafson teaches Latin American studies and
international political economics at Villanova University. |
"Our hap [fortune] is loss, our hope but sad despair," Shakespeare wrote in King Lear. This has often seemed to be the Argentine national motto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the wish to be as "rich as an Argentine" was common among Europeans, who saw the sons of the estancieros (owners of large farms) living well as they traveled throughout the continent.
In 1912, a new electoral law was passed ensuring greater democratic participation by the emerging middle class, represented by the Union Civic Radical Party. But the military began a half century of domination of politics in 1930, and in 1946 the populist Gen. Juan Perón increased the pace of state intervention in the economy and encouraged the consumption of the nation's resource base. The trend toward democratic capitalism had been reversed.
In 1955, Perón was forced into exile by coup. He had heavily taxed the agricultural sector, which preferred paying taxes to having land expropriated, and then used this money - and the foreign currency reserves built up in previous years - to pay for social programs. But the reserves ran out, the rural sector cut back on production, and Perón could no longer afford his programs. His former supporters, at that point, saw no advantage in opposing Perón's enemies in the military and the church.
The anti-Perónists in the military, who had disliked Perón's power base in the unions, would not allow his party to field candidates in any elections after 1955. They did allow Radical Party presidents to be elected on two occasions but each time threw them out when they were about to legalize Perónist electoral participation.
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