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Chapter 5: The Stalemate, 1955–1966
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. . . . . 131 The day after the coup—if not before—the heterogeneity of the front that had conspired to overthrow Perón could be seen. General Eduardo Lonardi headed the new government and declared himself provisional president, thereby indicating his resolve to restore constitutional order. Surrounded by Catholic groups—the most active but also newcomers to the opposition— and by nationalist military figures, the leader of the Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution) proclaimed that there would be “neither victors nor vanquished” and sought to find common ground among the principal forces that had backed Perón, particularly the unions. In his opinion, the nationalist and populist movement that Perón had founded continued to have merit, provided it was appropriately purged of its corrupt and undesirable elements . The unions showed themselves to be conciliatory with the new government , though in many working-class quarters—in Avellaneda, Berisso, and Rosario—there were spontaneous demonstrations against the military. But Lonardi’s partisans shared the government with representatives of more traditional anti-Peronist groups, backed by the navy, the most monolithic of the three armed service branches, whose spokesperson was the vice president, five The Stalemate, 1955–1966 Vice Admiral Isaac F. Rojas. In the army, after an internal struggle, the supporters of an open rupture with the fallen regime prevailed. On November 13, 1955, barely two months after having been designated president, Lonardi was forced to resign and was replaced by General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, a man closer to liberal and anti-Peronist sectors, while Rojas remained in the vice presidency. The episode quickly revealed the complexity of Peronism’s legacy. The formula with which that movement had been concocted—authoritarianism, nationalism, and populism, born of the exceptional wartime and immediate postwar conditions—had already reached a crisis point around 1950, when the world began to enter a more normal situation. Perón himself undertook a significant reorientation in his policies to bring them into harmony with the new circumstances. The characteristics of his movement, the social forces that supported him and that he himself had mobilized and created, prevented him from moving decisively in that new direction. With Perón fallen from power, those same social forces constituted an insurmountable obstacle to his successors’ efforts to realize their declared objective of rebuilding a democratic coexistence lost years ago and also—albeit less clearly—to reorder substantially society and the economy. In 1955, that reordering was encouraged and even demanded by a world in which new challenges loomed, after a stage in postwar reconstruction had concluded and amid the Cold War. The slogans of the Liberating Revolution in favor of democracy coincided with political tendencies in the West, where liberal democracy—both in practice and as a cause—clearly marked off the boundaries with the totalitarian East. As in Peronist Argentina, in the United States and Europe the state decisively intervened, presiding over economic reconstruction and mediating complex agreements between business and labor. But this increasing power of the state—of the interventionist and welfare state—was accompanied by an integration and liberalization of economic relations in the capitalist world. In 1947, the Bretton Woods monetary agreements established the dollar as the global currency, and capital began to move freely again in the world. Those countries shut off from the outside world grew fewer in number, and multinationals began to establish themselves in markets that had previously been prohibited. For the countries whose economies had grown based on the internal market and in carefully protected fashion, as in the case of the Latin American, particularly ArgenA Histor y of Argentina in the Twentieth Centur y 132 . . . . . [3.234.177.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:05 GMT) tine, economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—a financial entity that had enormous power in the new context—proposed so-called orthodox policies: stabilizing the currency by abandoning unrestrained monetary emission , ceasing to subsidize “artificial” sectors, opening markets, and stimulating traditional export activities. Nevertheless, an alternative policy gradually began to be formulated, elaborated especially by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). ECLA proposed that the “developed” countries help the “underdeveloped” ones to eliminate the factors responsible for their backwardness through appropriate investments in key sectors, accompanied by “structural” reforms, such as agrarian reform. From that point on, the “monetary” and “structuralist” remedies competed in public opinion and as government policies. It might be thought that both strategies were in the end complementary, but for the time being they had different...