Edelmiro Farrell
Edelmiro Farrell was president of Argentina for two years and is remembered as the man who was president while somebody else became Peron. He was a career cavalry officer of Irish descent who had trained with the Italian army in the 1920s, and he came to power through the lodge of colonels that overthrew the conservative government in 1943 - a group hostile to the landowning oligarchy, suspicious of Britain and the United States, and determined to keep Argentina neutral in a war it thought would leave the country better placed than the belligerents. Farrell was war minister, then vice president, and in February 1944 he displaced the general who had led the coup and took the presidency himself. The government he headed was a military dictatorship: parliament closed, parties dissolved, universities purged, the press censored, and religious instruction restored to the schools. Its foreign position collapsed when the United States withheld recognition and then forced the issue, and Argentina declared war on Germany in March 1945, four weeks before the surrender, in order to qualify for the United Nations. What made the period matter happened in a minor ministry. Farrell's vice president also held the secretariat of labour, an office nobody had thought important, and used it to arbitrate strikes in favour of the unions, to extend pensions and paid holidays, and to build a personal following among industrial workers that no Argentine politician had ever had. In October 1945 the army arrested him; a general strike and a crowd in the square in front of the presidential palace obliged Farrell to release him within nine days. Farrell then held the election of February 1946, which his own vice president won, and handed over. He lived another thirty-four years in obscurity, outliving the movement's founder by six.
- Lived: 1887 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
