Contemplating a Caudillo
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
Contemplating a Caudillo Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina By Robert Crassweller Norton. 432 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of zoology, University of California,...
...He has tracked down many rumors and labored to separate fact from fiction, no mean undertaking where Juan Perón is concerned, and very nearly impossible for Evita...
...By then Evitahaddied...
...Crassweller's point that the roots of social instability can be traced to Spanish colonial institutions is hardly novel, and the explanation of how huge masses of immigrants could be assimilated into an increasingly malignant political culture without having much impact on it remains elusive...
...maybe he needed to pro ve to himself that he could win a major struggle without her...
...When Berlin fell, Leftist students in Buenos Aires chased a pro-German university rector out of his office and burned his portrait of 19th-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, while the governor of Tucumân declared official mourning for the Reich...
...Perón understood his own people all too well: He knew they were fickle, that they demanded perfection in their leaders, and that they had no hope of getting it...
...The Peróns' own writings—or ghostwritings—are exercises in autohagiography, and the opinions of their enemies are even less reliable...
...The big problem with Crassweller's book is not his handling of Perón...
...Robert Crassweller, biographer of the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, is the latest intrepid Norteamericano to plumb the Argentine psyche...
...The Peróns and their sycophants falsified their histories all along, even forging the birth registry at Evita's birthplace of Los Toldos to make her retroactively legitimate (and a few years younger than she was...
...Though Crassweller had few Argentine credentials beforehand, he did his homework well...
...The country remains inscrutable, no matter how much good scholarship is done on it from the outside...
...This vapid and doomed class—so brilliantly portrayed in Maria Luisa Bemberg's recent film Miss Mary—cheered Braden on to ever-more-undiplomatic actions that merely enhanced Perón's popularity with the masses...
...Crassweller dwells at length on the prePerón days of military machinations, Fascist subversion and American diplomatic ineptitude that culminated in the titanic contest between Perón and U.S...
...Sourrouille's 1975 Economic Policymaking in a Conflict Society: The Argentine Case for the multiplicity of recent "rifts...
...Yet it is difficult to see that things would have been very different had Washington understood...
...Crassweller spends three pages cataloguing what Peronism was not...
...My only successor is the Argentine nation...
...Ambassador Spruille Braden in 194546...
...His political biography of Juan Domingo Perón is built on the proposition that the late Caudillo was the ultimate incarnation of Argentine political culture, not a savior but a historical inevitability...
...But he has nothing new to say about pre-Perón Argentina, his moderate revisionism notwithstanding...
...This device is neither necessary nor successful, and is best ignored...
...Still, his book deserves to be read—with a slightly jaundiced eye—by anyone seeking to comprehend the phenomenon of Perón himself and to place Argentine history since Perón in context...
...The fact is that there have been many rifts, and they do not flow into one...
...Having risen byplotting, he expected plots and thought he could pinpoint where they would be hatched...
...The mere fact that Crassweller comes down somewhere in the middle suggests he deserves a respectful hearing...
...In Buenos Aires, meanwhile, the economy sputters and there is growing talk of a Peronist victory in the November legislative elections—despite a total lack of program, policy, or Peróns...
...As for the repression, it was in time distributed among all sectors evenhandedly, although the Caudillo much preferred the rhetoric of violence to the real thing...
...With wartime passions cooled, one must agree with the author that Braden was ill-informed and ill-advised (though it does seem overly revisionist of Crassweller to portray the Fascist conspirators of Ray Josephs' Argentine Diary as affable, bumbling nincompoops...
...the ideological fervor of the premature filofascista General José F. Uriburu and the reasons his post-coup reform program failed are dealt with perfunctorily...
...In any event, he failed...
...This was definitively demonstrated in José Luis de Imaz' 1964 Los que mandan, the benchmark of Argentine sociology...
...If that was the author's objective, however, he is only mildly successful...
...Ihavenoheirs," said the Caudillo...
...Intellectuals hate Perón not out of love for the order he swept away but for his ruthless politicization of the academy, and for his coopting of the class struggle to the detriment of Marxism...
...The author glosses over the role of Rosas and misses the opportunity to develop the story of the 1930 coup, which more than anything else made Perón an inevitability: While the incompetence of the doddering Radical President Hipólito Yrigoyen is stressed, the fascistic flirtations of the intelligentsia are barely mentioned...
...The central tragedy of Argentine politics has been the elevation of intransigence to the premier civic virtue...
...It may be read as a sequel to Mark Falcoff and Ronald Dolkart's 1975 Prologue to Perón...
...His best definition of what it actually was reads oddly at best: "an authoritarian populist movement strongly colored by Catholic social thought, by nationalism, by organic principles of Mediterranean corporatism, and by the Caudillo tradition....' He also quotes a Perón flunky who defined Justicialismo as "a doctrine whose object is the happiness of man within the society of mankind through the harmonizing of material, spiritual, individual and collective forces, appraised from a Christian standpoint...
...He was too shrewd to lead his country into war like Mussolini, but not shrewd enough to manage the tricky economy effectively...
...The oligarchs were bom-again defenders of "freedom," motivated not by morality or fear of the Axis but by sheer terror of the unwashed masses roaming the streets chanting for Perón...
...Crassweller would probably agree that Argentina is comprehensible only to those who share the Argentine sense of the absurd...
...Perón may not have been a Nazi stooge, as he has often been depicted since the War, but there can be no doubt that he was a complete opportunist...
...see also R.D...
...He sealed his regime's doom by waging an anti-clerical campaign that led to his excommunication...
...The latter grievance is largely unfounded, since the Argentine Left was a splintered, ineffectual mess with no prospect of victory anyway...
...Crassweller is better on the economic background, the Ottawa Conference and the Roca-Runciman agreement...
...Foggy Bottom was thoroughly confused...
...And his return from exile almost two decades later was a tragic fiasco...
...Mallon and J.V...
...For a reasonable and in the main factual chronology of the Perón era and its aftermath (ending with the election of Raul Alfonsin in October 1983), there is no better reference in English than this book...
...He had no coherent doctrine...
...A passionate democrat, the ambassador nonetheless moved in Argentina's oligarchic, Anglophilic, Rural Society circles where he heard what he wanted to hear—and it was not the voice of the common man...
...No wonder labor racketeers, Trotskyites, agrarian revolutionaries, and neo-Fascists could (and still do) claim to be the real Peronists...
...The author apparently moved easily from Trujillo to his present subject, having already described in his earlier biography the brief sojourn Perón made in Santo Domingo after being overthrown by the 1955 "Liberating Revolution...
...Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of zoology, University of California, Davis Every once in a while the rest of the world rediscovers Argentina, scratches its head, and moves on...
...That will not satisfy either those who detest his memory or those who revere him as a saint— and I have yet to meet a mentally competent Argentine over 30 with a dispassionate view of Perón...
...Crassweller is sure to be accused of trying to rehabilitate Perón, and perhaps he deserves at least some rehabilitation...
...like his model Mussolini he made up his ideology as he went along, and ultimately its contradictions were to do him in...
...it is, rather, his attempt to unify Argentine history around a recurrent theme of social discord he calls the "Great Rift...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 5
