Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption

7. Ironies of Adjustment

 7 Ironies of Adjustment As the Perón Wants to Know letters Xooded government oYces with popular recommendations on national planning, state authorities embarked on their own revamping of the New Argentina. In the immediate postwar years, policymakers envisioned income redistribution and development as largely complementary aims. By the early 1950s, however, Perón’s advisers began to conclude that the country had hit an economic wall: deteriorating conditions demanded policy changes to ward oV full-blown crisis and,equally worrisome,to ensure their political survival. Rather than present redistribution and development as mutually exclusive, state oYcials identiWed the incommensurable elements of each.Mass consumption came under particular scrutiny, for high spending power was now considered at odds with the investments needed for recovery. In their eyes, preserving the revolución justicialista necessitated restraining those aspects of the vida digna now deemed threatening to national progress. Naturally, not all Peronists shared this outlook. As I have shown, many ordinary Argentines longed for an escalation, not moderation , of redistribution and market regulation. Political leaders, however, set other priorities. They reframed the national economy as a Weld of intervention and launched stronger campaigns to eVect changes in the behavior of Argentina’s population. They sought not just to contain consumption or overcome turbulent markets but also to Wnish transforming a “disorganized”populace into a more disciplined citizenry. OYcialshadgoodreasontobeconcerned,andtwoproblemsstoodouttothem as especially troubling. The Wrst was the country’s deteriorating balance of payments .Agricultural output plummeted in the early 1950s following severe droughts. Earnings from Argentina’s meat and grain exports failed to match demand for im-  I Ironies of Adjustment ported raw materials and industrial inputs. This bind, typical of Latin American countries in the era of import substitution, choked growth and deepened debt. These imbalances contributed to a second cause for unease: spiking inXation.1 Despite antispeculation campaigns, policymakers tolerated mild inXation in the mid-1940s; after all, it acted as a mechanism for income redistribution when combined with higher union contracts, social beneWts, and rent controls. But as production slackened and wages stagnated, the climb in prices went from being a daily worry for consumers to a major state preoccupation.Across the region,these conditions often sundered reformist coalitions and populist movements, because economic turbulence could all too easily energize opponents and widen internal divisions among former allies. Against these odds, however, Perón’s administration implemented policies that allowed it to weather the economic storm of the early 1950s. Although longterm dilemmas remained,the regime escaped the fate of the many others caught in balance of payment and inXationary quandaries. In fact, contrary to what one would expect,Peronist authorities succeeded in widening their political base during this diYcult period.The movement’s mediating networks staked their presence in local communities,while state-orchestrated mobilizations of support continued to expand on a massive scale. With these achievements, the regime seemed primed for a lasting consolidation of power. Yet here, too, Peronism deWed expectations. Perón ultimately completed only half his second presidential term, for his government was overthrown by military coup on September 16, 1955.SuVering from neither economic calamity nor mass defections, the Nueva Argentina crumbled in just a few months when met by stiVening resistance from anti-Peronist groups. Thus a perplexing combination of resilience and fragility characterized the Wnal years of Peronist rule. Part of this story can be found in the way the recasting of consumption as an element of the vida digna reXected broader changes in social citizenship and state power.This “late period”(1952–1955) has received comparatively less scholarly attention,and it is too often collapsed into teleological narratives of an “exhausted” regime mired in inevitable decline. As a result, the paradoxical relationship between economic reorientation and political innovation remains poorly understood. It is clear that in response to mounting problems, state planners slowed income gains for the working class. These dynamics may seem at odds with the received wisdom about Peronism as a form of “populism,”a political style commonly associated with reckless clientelism and spendthrift policies. But Peronist authorities, like other populists, were not uniformly focused on disbursing largesse. Rather, they demonstrated a preoccupation with restricting certain types Ironies of Adjustment i  of spending, especially those acquisitive practices deemed destabilizing, immoral, or wasteful. Naturally, subaltern actors pushed the limits of equilibrium, but perhaps more signiWcantly,the downturn encouraged greater engagement with Peronist networks, which oVered nonmarket alternatives to...