Juan Peron

Juan Domingo Peron was born on October 8, 1895, in Lobos, a farming town in Buenos Aires Province, to Mario Tomas Peron and Juana Sosa Toledo ^[1]. His parents were not married at the time of his birth, and the family's circumstances were modest. When Juan was young the household moved south to Patagonia, where his father tried his hand at sheep ranching near Rio Gallegos and later in Chubut. The harsh southern climate and isolation of those years left a mark on the boy, who was sent back to Buenos Aires around 1904 to live with relatives and attend school ^[2].

At sixteen he entered the Colegio Militar de la Nacion, the national military academy, graduating in 1913 as a second lieutenant of infantry ^[1]. The army offered a path upward for a provincial youth without wealth or family connections, and Peron took to it. He was a capable athlete, excelling at boxing and fencing within the service, and he showed an early aptitude for instruction, spending much of his junior career teaching at the Escuela Superior de Guerra, the army's staff college ^[2]. There he wrote texts on military history, including studies of the campaigns of the eastern front in the First World War, work that gave him a professional reputation beyond his rank.

Peron's political education began in earnest during the 1930s. He played a minor part in the 1930 coup that toppled President Hipolito Yrigoyen, then served as a military attache in Chile. Between 1939 and 1941 the army posted him to Italy, where he observed Mussolini's regime at close range and studied mountain warfare with Alpine units ^[3]. He returned to Argentina convinced that mass politics, organized labor, and the state could be fused into something durable, a conviction that shaped everything he later built.

In June 1943 a secret military lodge known as the GOU (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos), in which Peron was a leading figure, overthrew the civilian government of Ramon Castillo ^[1]. Peron asked for what seemed a backwater post: the National Labor Department, soon elevated to a Secretariat of Labor and Welfare. From that office he transformed his career. He settled strikes on terms favorable to workers, extended pensions and paid holidays, backed collective bargaining, and pushed through the Statute of the Peon, which for the first time gave rural laborers minimum wages and basic protections ^[4]. Union membership grew rapidly, and the unions grew loyal to the man who delivered.

By 1945 Peron was simultaneously vice president, war minister, and labor secretary, and his rivals inside the military decided he had become too powerful. In October of that year he was forced from office and detained on Martin Garcia island. What followed became the founding legend of his movement. On October 17, 1945, huge crowds of workers, later mythologized as the descamisados, the shirtless ones, filled the Plaza de Mayo demanding his release, and the government gave way ^[3]. Days later he married the actress Eva Duarte. In the presidential election of February 1946, running against a broad opposition front that enjoyed open sympathy from the United States embassy, Peron won decisively ^[1].

Peron took office in June 1946 with congressional majorities and a treasury swollen by wartime export earnings. Any honest account of Juan Peron achievements begins with labor and social policy. Real wages for industrial workers rose sharply in his first years, the social security system expanded to cover millions who had never had it, and paid vacations, the aguinaldo (a mandatory annual bonus), and workplace protections became standard ^[4]. His government wrote many of these gains into the amended constitution of 1949, which also permitted presidential reelection.

Economic nationalism was the second pillar. The state purchased the British-owned railways in 1948, nationalized the central bank, the telephone system, and gas and dock services, and created a state trading agency, the IAPI, that bought grain and beef from farmers and sold them abroad, using the margin to finance industry ^[5]. Two five-year plans directed investment toward domestic manufacturing. The strategy produced visible results while export prices held, but by the early 1950s droughts, falling terms of trade, and inflation forced a turn toward austerity and even a petroleum contract with Standard Oil of California, a reversal that unsettled nationalist supporters ^[3].

His wife became a force of her own. Eva Peron ran the Eva Peron Foundation, which built hospitals, schools, and housing and distributed aid on a vast scale, and she championed the law of 1947 that gave Argentine women the vote ^[6]. Women cast ballots in a presidential election for the first time in November 1951, when Peron was reelected by a wide margin. Eva's death from cancer in July 1952, at thirty three, removed the regime's most magnetic figure and, many historians argue, weakened its bond with the poor ^[6].

The record had a darker side that no Juan Peron biography can omit. Opposition newspapers, most famously La Prensa, were harassed and expropriated. Dissident politicians and union leaders faced jail or exile, universities were purged, and the courts and radio came under government control ^[3]. Argentina under Peron also admitted a number of fugitive Nazi war criminals, among them Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, a matter documented by later investigations and government commissions ^[7].

The second presidency unraveled quickly. Economic strain narrowed the room for wage gains, and in 1954 Peron entered an open quarrel with the Catholic Church, a former ally, over education, divorce law, and the church's role in public life. After clergy were deported and Congress moved toward separating church and state, the Vatican excommunicated officials responsible in June 1955 ^[1]. That same month navy aircraft bombed the Plaza de Mayo in a failed coup attempt, killing more than three hundred civilians, and crowds retaliated by burning churches in Buenos Aires ^[3].

In September 1955 a broader military rising, calling itself the Revolucion Libertadora, forced Peron from office. He took refuge on a Paraguayan gunboat and began eighteen years of exile that carried him through Paraguay, Panama, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic before he settled in Madrid in 1960 ^[2]. In Panama he met Maria Estela Martinez, a dancer known as Isabel, whom he married in 1961.

The governments that followed banned the Peronist party and even public mention of his name, yet the movement refused to die. From Madrid, Peron conducted politics by letter and emissary, encouraging rival factions, unions, youth organizations, and eventually armed groups on the left, each convinced it carried his true mandate ^[5]. The proscription of Peronism made stable civilian government nearly impossible, and Argentina cycled through weak presidencies and military juntas for two decades.

By the early 1970s the military regime of Alejandro Lanusse, facing guerrilla violence and mass protest, concluded that Argentina could not be governed against Peronism. Elections in March 1973 brought the Peronist stand-in Hector Campora to the presidency, and Campora promptly resigned to clear the way for his chief ^[1]. Peron's definitive homecoming on June 20, 1973 turned to tragedy when rival Peronist factions opened fire on the enormous crowd gathered at Ezeiza airport, leaving at least thirteen dead in what became known as the Ezeiza massacre ^[8].

In September 1973 Peron won a third presidential term with about 62 percent of the vote, with Isabel as his vice president ^[1]. Now seventy eight and in poor health, he tilted against the Peronist left he had once encouraged, publicly expelling the Montoneros' youth wing from the Plaza de Mayo on May Day 1974, while right-wing paramilitaries linked to his welfare minister Jose Lopez Rega began assassinating leftists ^[8]. His economic program rested on a social pact between unions and business that briefly restrained inflation.

Peron died of heart failure on July 1, 1974, at the presidential residence in Olivos ^[1]. Isabel succeeded him, presiding over accelerating violence and economic collapse until the military deposed her in March 1976, opening the most brutal dictatorship in Argentine history.

Peron married three times. His first wife, Aurelia Tizon, a schoolteacher he wed in 1929, died of uterine cancer in 1938; the couple had no children ^[2]. His second marriage, to Eva Duarte in October 1945, became one of the most famous political partnerships of the twentieth century, ending with her death in 1952. His third wife, Isabel Martinez de Peron, became the first woman in the world to hold the title of president of a republic when she succeeded him in 1974 ^[1].

Away from politics Peron cultivated the image of a sportsman and plain talker. He fenced competitively as a young officer, skied, rode, and kept dogs, including a poodle named after which several successors were named in turn. He wrote constantly, producing books of doctrine such as La comunidad organizada and Conduccion politica that codified his ideas about the organized community and political leadership ^[5]. Even his remains were drawn into the country's feuds: in 1987 vandals broke into his tomb in Chacarita cemetery and cut off the corpse's hands, a crime never solved, and in 2006 his body was moved to a mausoleum at his former estate in San Vicente ^[8].

Half a century after his death, Peronism remains the central fact of Argentine politics, a movement elastic enough to contain free-market reformers like Carlos Menem in the 1990s and left-leaning presidents like Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in the 2000s, all claiming his mantle ^[5]. The Partido Justicialista he founded has won more presidential elections than any other Argentine party since 1946. Among basic Juan Peron facts, perhaps the most telling is that no stable governing coalition in Argentina has been assembled without either Peronists or a front defined by opposition to them.

Historians continue to argue over the balance sheet. Admirers credit him with incorporating workers into national life, building the welfare state, and giving the poor political dignity; critics point to censorship, personality cult, fiscal excess, and the sheltering of war criminals ^[3]. Scholars have long debated whether his system was a Latin American cousin of European fascism or a distinct form of popular nationalism; most now treat it as its own category, usually labeled populism, with Peron as the archetype studied worldwide ^[5]. In Argentina the word Peronist still describes not just a party but an identity, which is a kind of immortality few politicians achieve.