Page 20 - Social Science.docx

Juan Peron’s Justicionalism and the Future of Argentina Juan Lazcano
Argentina, potentially the richest country in Latin America, has gone through myriad political and economic crises since the overthrow of the Juan Peron dictatorship in 1955. Peronism has been at the center of Argentine, and Latin American, politics since its inception in the period between 1943 and 1945. For many observers, Peronism will travel forever on the forking paths of Argentine history.1 Like many democratically elected Latin American presidents such as Hugo Chavez, Alerto Fujimori, Evo Morales, and Daniel Ortega, Juan Peron became a rich, rabidly authoritarian dictator who used the same democratic political institutions that brought them to power, to undermine their nation’s democracy.
A military dictatorship, the Groupo Obra Uunificacion (GOU), was a secret nationalist society formed within the ranks of high commanding members of the military that were able to gain political control of Argentina from 1943 until 1945. By this time, the urban working class was 90% literate, recent arrivals from the countryside, and were native Argentines, not European immigrants. Rising through the ranks of the GOU was Juan Peron, hero of the dispossessed, who entered the presidential election in 1946 on a nationalist and populist platform.2 During the two years prior to his ascendancy to the presidency, Peron was instrumental in bringing about the
Juan Lazcano ‘21, plans to study international relations in university.
1 Federico Finchelstein, "The Peronist Reformulation of Fascism," Contemporanea 17, no. 4 (October/November 2014), p. 615.
2 Thomas E Skidmore, Peter H. Smith, and James Naylor Green, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 259.
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