Juan Perón
Juan Perón was elected president of Argentina three times and overthrown twice, and Argentine politics has been organised around him ever since. He was an army officer who came to notice in the group of colonels that took power in 1943, and chose for himself the labour and social welfare secretariat — a minor office everyone else ignored. He then used it. He recognised unions, enforced paid holidays, pensions, severance pay and collective bargaining, and built a personal relationship with a labour movement that had never had a patron in government. His colleagues arrested him in October 1945, and on 17 October the unions filled the Plaza de Mayo and demanded his release; he came out and spoke from the balcony, and the day is still the founding festival of the movement. He was elected in 1946, with Eva Duarte beside him — an actress from a poor family whose foundation distributed housing, sewing machines and hospitals, who obtained the vote for women in 1947, and whose death from cancer in 1952 at thirty-three removed the movement's most effective figure. The economics worked while the postwar surplus lasted: nationalised railways, industrial protection, wages rising sharply. Then reserves ran out, inflation followed, and a quarrel with the church over divorce and civil marriage produced excommunication and a naval revolt. He was bombed out of the Plaza in 1955 and spent eighteen years in exile, returned in 1973 to a movement whose left and right wings were shooting each other, and died within a year. His third presidency and his death left the movement with no arbiter and a vice-president who was his third wife, and the army took over in 1976. Peronism has since produced governments of the left and of the right, all of them claiming him, which is what happens to a doctrine defined by loyalty rather than by content.
- Lived: 1895 CE – 1974 CE
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: president, military_leader, head_of_state
