Parsing Peronismo
Why writing about politics in Argentina is much harder than writing about politics in Spain
It’s hard to write about politics in Argentina in a way that’s both faithful to reality and comprehensible to people not already soaked in Argentine life.
Stop whining, get on with it, I don’t subscribe to listen to your belly aching.
OK. Let me explain a bit more. Take Tamara Tenenbaum and Gildo Insfrán. The former is the nation’s premier feminist/lgbt theorist, a fierce defender of the rights of trans people, militantly anti-Zionist despite her father having been murdered by Iranian agents, a best-selling author, a media personality, and an all-terrain public intellectual, la Judith Butler que supimos conseguir, you might say. The latter has been the governor of Formosa Province for the last 28 years and is likely to remain so as long as his health allows it. Human rights in Formosa don’t exist. All that exists is the will of Insfrán to remain in power. Tenenbaum and Insfrán are both Peronistas. Without googling I could think of a dozen similar pairings that in any other country would be at the opposite ends of the political spectrum but that in Argentina are on the same side.
So what, all major political parties contain a range of views.
We’re talking about a lot more than differing views here. And anyway, Peronismo isn’t a political party.
Excuse me?
The Partido Justicialista is simply an electoral vehicle, the vast majority of Peronistas don’t belong to it.
What does it mean to be Peronista then, if Peronismo isn’t a political party?
There’s a huge literature devoted to attempting to define “Peronismo.” Its origins lie in 1930s corporativism; society organised with a place for everyone, and the individual expected to stay in his or her place. It was heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching, as was fascism in Italy where the movement’s founder, Juan Domingo Perón, served as military attaché from 1939 to 1942.
None of that’s very relevant today. Peronismo isn’t a political party, to some degree it’s a political movement but more than that it’s an intuition of political and national identity that arches over a wide range of ideologies and that’s probably shared by a majority of Argentines.
It’s not fascism, it’s not socialism, it’s not neo-liberal, it’s not social democratic, it’s not democratic, it’s not anti-democratic but it can be any of these and more at a particular juncture in Argentine history. Its political form is whatever it needs to be at a particular moment.
Come on, Peronismo has always been about fighting for the rights of workers, and for human rights in general. That’s what my Spanish socialist friend Antonio told me, at any rate.
It’s true that Perón’s first and second governments extended and systematised existing employment rights. The price workers paid for those rights was absolute loyalty to the leader and his movement; no getting funny ideas about independent trade unions, still less self-organisation. It’s equally true that with the help of the official Peronista trade unions Peronista President Carlos Menem privatised state industries and services and threw hundreds of thousands of workers out on the street. We’re still suffering the consequences of that today in Rosario and Greater Buenos Aires and other urban centres where kids whose families haven’t seen stable employment for two generations have taken to crime to earn a living.
My Spanish friend tells me Menem wasn’t a true Peronista.
He says that because he’s a Spanish leftist and Spanish leftists have an uncontrollable urge to romanticise Peronismo. Even Peronistas who despised Menem recognised him as one of their own.
But surely you’ll concede on human rights, at least.
No. Peronistas have both suffered and inflicted terrible human rights abuses. The state terrorism that culminated in the 1976-1983 military dictatorship began under the auspices of the democratically elected Peronista government that preceded it, determined to exterminate leftism in all its forms. Both the AAA death squads and the members of Montoneros they murdered were Peronistas. President Menem pardoned the military leaders convicted at the 1985 Juicio a las Juntas (opposed at the time by official Peronismo), men responsible for scarcely imaginable savagery and mass murder. President Kirchner pushed for those pardons to be annulled when he came to power even though he had never previously shown the slightest interest in human rights. He supported forgiving and forgetting the mass human rights violations of the armed forces when that was the thing to do as a Peronista politician and supported Menem when Menem was the guy you had to support and had no problem whatever with the pardons when they were promulgated.
It’s rarely about principles for Peronistas, it’s about what works at a given moment, what appears to be the current expression of the national will. That’s why Milei’s government is full of people who until recently were convinced Kirchneristas (the predominant expression of Peronismo over the last two decades) and passionate about human rights, or at least said they were when it was convenient for them to do so. Milei is now lo que hay (what there is) in national politics and if you want a political career, you’d better get with it, no dark night of the soul necessary, you’re still Peronista and if Milei falls well then, you’ll just surf the next wave that rolls in.
I think I’m getting the idea but whenever the Financial Times mentions Peronismo it describes it as “left-leaning.”
As I said before, it’s not left-leaning, nor is it right-leaning. Such classifications miss the point, it’s Peronismo.
With the exception of internecine conflicts in the regional nationalisms, Spanish politics is readily comprehensible to outsiders. The PSOE is the rough equivalent of Labour in the UK, the Democratic Party in the US and the SPD in Germany. The PP is the rough equivalent of the Conservatives (though increasingly more like Reform) in the UK, the GOP in the USA and the CDU/CSU in Germany (though drifting closer to the AfD). Peronismo is completely different to all the above and makes things much more complicated in Argentina than in Spain.
So what you’re saying is that you can’t learn about Argentine politics without understanding Peronismo first.
Yes. And at the risk of sounding all Zen, I’d even say that you can’t learn about Argentine politics without internalising it first.
I’m getting a headache, I think I’d better lie down for a while.
No worries, having a headache is the natural result of trying to think seriously about Argentine politics.
I always explain Peronism as an identity-disguised-as-ideology, almost an ethnicity. The key idea is thet some perfect social harmony was reached in 1945-1955, where the True People™️ knew their place and had their leader, and every Peronist has something to fantasize about that period (a personal anecdote from a grampa who was gifted a toy by the regime, or a cherrypicked utopian policy that was unsustainable in the long term). Eversince Peronism has been sustained by nostalgia and the desire to restore that lost paradise by suppressing Those Who Took It From Us™️. Materially, this translates into a coalition of parasitical elites who feed off the status quo