Rise of Peron and Argentine Military Politics
Hundreds of thousands of workers filled the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October 1945 and forced the release of Juan Perón, and Peronism dates from that afternoon. He was a colonel who had come to power with the military coup of 1943 and had taken the least prestigious post available — the labour department — and turned it into the most powerful office in the country. His method was to give organised labour what it had been demanding for decades and to make it dependent on him for it: collective bargaining enforced, wage rises, paid holidays, pensions, an end to child labour, and labour courts that decided for the workers. Union membership tripled. The rest of the officer corps, the landowners and the United States ambassador all concluded he was becoming dangerous, and in October 1945 he was arrested and taken to an island in the Plate. The unions called a general strike. Crowds came in from the industrial suburbs across the bridges, many of them barefoot in the heat — the descamisados, the shirtless ones — and stood in the square until he was produced on the balcony that night. He was elected president in February 1946 and re-elected in 1951. Eva Duarte, whom he married days after his release, ran the social foundation and secured the women's vote in 1947, and her death from cancer in 1952 at thirty-three removed the most effective part of the movement. He was overthrown in 1955, exiled for eighteen years, and elected again in 1973. Argentine politics has been organised around Peronism ever since, and every government since has been either Peronist or defined against it.
- Year: 1945 CE
- Category: Political
