Argentina: Ghost from the Past

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There was something to what he said. The 2,528,000 Argentines who voted Per&243;nista cast their ballots more for a neo-Per&243;nism represented by their own angry young labor leaders and politicians than for the aging ex-dictator himself. What Per&243;n represented in the 1940s and 1950s —and what the neo-Per&243;nistas copy in 1962—is the vision of a dynamic leader able to fulfill the Argentine little man's rising expectations today, and not in some far distant tomorrow.

Not Like Mussolini. The extravagant despotism of Juan Per&243;n's reign brought Argentina close to ruination, but his dynamism also brought the drowsing, pastoral land violently into the industrial 20th century. Tall, athletic and dashing. Per&243;n was a champion army swordsman, a crack shot, a headlong skier. In Rome just before World War II. he listened eagerly to Dictator Benito Mussolini's jut-jawed harangues on Italy's destiny. "Mussolini."he said later,"was the greatest man of our century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his mistakes."

In Buenos Aires officers' clubs, Per&243;n exuded the Argentine vivo's beef-fed vitality: in public, he had a crowd-warming, million-candlepower smile. As leader of a secret organization of officers, he burst into power in 1943. The next year his followers marched into the President's study and. with guns leveled, threw the President out. The successor made Perón Vice President and Secretary of War. Perón quickly consolidated his power by putting his men in control of the upsurging industrial trade unions, long suppressed by the country's ruling clique of landowners.

Sneer to Slogan. The strongman soon took up with a small-time radio actress named Maria Eva Duarte. Ambitious, shrewd and sleek, she proved a perfect dictator's helpmate. When a postwar wave of democratic fervor temporarily detoured Per&243;n and he was jailed, Evita rallied his trade unionists to march—50,000 strong, some of them shirtless—into the center of Buenos Aires to take over the city. The afternoon paper La Critica scoffed at the "shirtless ones" ("descamisados"); Per&243;n turned the sneer to a slogan. "I want to clasp the descamisados to my bosom!" he shouted before crowds of chanting workers. "You're dirty, and I'm dirty. We're both dirty together." In 1946 he rode into the presidency with 55% of the vote. Evita took over the Secretariat of Labor, and started pushing out money. When railway workers asked for 40% higher wages, she said: "I think they should get 50%." Telephone workers asked for 70%, hoping for 35%. They got 70%. As a way of getting back at snooty Buenos Aires society women who froze her out of their charities, she founded her own Social Aid Foundation. It built costly homes for the aged, for working girls, for indigent mothers. Her blonde hair drawn back, her dark eyes flashing, Evita showed up at workers' rallies in jewels and Paris gowns that cost the foundation some $40,000 a year.