Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption

3. The War on Speculation

 3 The War on Speculation In Argentina the end of World War II was soon overshadowed by the start of Perón’s presidency. Whether this momentous transition represented the dawn of a new era or the further decline of the Republic depended on the side of the growing partisan divide on which one stood.While political tensions showed few signs of easing, the fears of postwar economic collapse that had long preoccupied observers soon vanished. For the remainder of the 1940s, Argentina entered a phase of impressive expansion, the beneWts of which were felt widely. Naturally, oYcials in the Perón administration took credit for this prosperity, presenting it as concrete evidence of a socially just nation in the making. When contrasted with the war’s devastation and the sacriWces of reconstruction abroad, the county’s good fortune in the immediate postwar years only added to its renown as a land of plenty. Yet no sooner had the world war ended than a diVerent war began in Argentina, not a conXict between nations but rather, as deWned by the country’s authorities, an internal struggle.It was a contest to safeguard the living standards of the Nueva Argentina but framed in far more vivid terms by Peronists as a crusade against the nation’s economic enemies. “It is not tolerable after having raised salaries to just and reasonable levels,”proclaimed Perón in a June 1947 speech,“that by the indifference of state agencies and the lack of scruples on the part of certain dishonest merchants, the working population suVers wrongs that I am inclined to impede at all costs.”1 In response the government assembled a veritable arsenal of weapons to stamp out “unjust” forms of exchange. These included price controls on all manner of consumable wares and police inspections of retail shops and manufacturers (with The War on Speculation i  accompanying Wnes,jail terms,and other punishments).State-led campaigns sought to mobilize consumers in support of these measures. Recalling his career as an army oYcer, Perón referred on occasion to these initiatives as the “Guerra al agio” or “Guerra contra la especulación”—the war against usury or speculation. Given the recent global conXagration that had left hundreds of millions dead, injured, and displaced, the metaphor of warfare may seem to have been an odd choice for the Argentine president.But the commitment to “antispeculation”was not merely rhetorical posturing. Creeping inXation threatened income redistribution among working Argentines, while proWteering limited their access to local products and unsettled the regime’s inward-oriented strategy of economic growth. Given the high stakes,the defense of purchasing power became an object of widespread concern and controversy. Amid postwar abundance, Peronists waged campaigns to discipline the quotidian spaces of the marketplace and household. Antispeculation measures thus expanded the terrain of national politics outside the old liberal boundaries, highlighting the new economic dimensions of citizenship while creating opportunities for popular collaboration that drew on traditions of protesting unethical exchange. Naturally, other issues competed for attention on the Peronist agenda, and the regime lavished considerably more publicity on its achievements in labor reform, national planning, and social welfare. The question of spending power, however, was impossible to ignore, largely because it was inseparable from these high-proWle issues. As a result, consumer contests provide a window onto struggles to realize promises of digniWed living standards in everyday life,and they reveal the competing cultural understandings of the moral economy that Peronism brought to the surface of public life. It may be tempting to view the “war on speculation” as an idiosyncratic exception , and Perón’s overheated rhetoric facilitates this conclusion. Yet the impulses underlying the domestication of markets in Argentina were part of a moment of global challenges to the hegemony of free-market principles. In the wake of the Great Depression,Latin American states experimented with exerting greater regulatory power over daily commerce.2 Consumer subsidies,price controls,and other regulatory mechanisms were ubiquitous the world over,even in capitalist bastions; the U.S. federal government created the OYce of Price Administration, which at its peak boasted 250,000 paid staV and volunteers entrusted with monitoring the marketplace.3 These policies were accompanied by political eVorts to modify liberal citizenship, principally by asserting an active role for “citizen consumers” in line with new modes of nationalism. The rights and duties of citizen consumers  I The War...