Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939 (review)

Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939. By Sandra McGee Deutsch (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 491 pp. $60.00.

In Las Derechas, Deutsch makes an important contribution to Latin American political history by providing a genealogy of extreme right-wing political movements in the Southern Cone from the 1890s through the 1930s. As Deutsch points out, since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, historians have focused on leftist movements and revolutions, largely ignoring the right, despite the fact that right-wing governments have ruled Latin American nations for most of the twentieth century. Given the emergence of right-wing bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone during the 1960s and 1970s, Deutsch's focus on extremist movements helps to illuminate a long history of antidemocratic, reactionary, and fascist politics in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

After an introductory section on the intellectual and ideological precursors of right-wing movements, Las Derechas focuses on two crucial periods of extreme right-wing political mobilization. During the first period (World War I to the mid-1920s), right-wing civilians and military officers organized "ligas," paramilitary organizations designed to combat unions, the left, and immigration and promote "patriotism." Extreme right-wing groups in all three countries articulated nationalist and antiliberal ideology in response to both World War I and the spread of left-wing and labor movements. In Argentina and, to a lesser degree, Brazil, labor unrest and the social conflicts accompanying urbanization and export-led economic development were attributed to immigrant workers and business owners. In Chile, the Ligas were organized to combat Peruvian influence in the northern provinces taken from Peru during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). In all three countries, Ligas had ties to military officers and recruited from the middle and upper classes, though in Argentina and Chile, leadership was aristocratic and defined in tension with the social-reformist governments of Arturo Alessandri and Hip In all three countries, Ligas had ties to military officers and recruited from the middle and upper clasDuring the second period, the era of fascist movements (late 1920s to 1939), the Nazi Movimiento Nacional Socialista in Chile, the Nacionalista movement in Argentina, and the Integralista movement in Brazil established nationalist organizations to combat the "foreign" ideologies of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism and to establish a hierarchical and dictatorial state founded in a cult of masculine military heroism that would forge a third way between capitalism and socialism. Like the ligas, these movements articulated a radical critique of liberal political and economic values and a strong identification with Catholicism and corporatism. In Argentina and Brazil, the extreme right also reproduced the anti-immigrant and antisemitic ideologies of earlier movements (ironically the antisemitism of the Chilean Nazi party was more muted) and shared an antagonism toward labor in the left. All three movements maintained close ties to the conservative governments of the 1930s, although by the end of the decade, these governments turned on their paramilitary allies and repressed them violently.

While pointing out these fundamental similarities, Deutsch also underlines differences in the extreme right-wing movements of the 1930s that derived from specific national political, social, and economic conditions. Argentine Nacionalistas were more closely aligned with the aristocracy and its liberalism, while Chilean Nacistas and Brazilian Integralistas promoted a more radical anti-liberalism oriented to mass politics and popular mobilization. The strength of feminist movements in Chile and Brazil led fascist movements to incorporate women into their movements and certain feminist demands into their programs, while in Argentina, where feminism was a weaker social force, Nacionalistas made less of an effort to mobilize women. Although all three movements adopted and appropriated the tenets of Catholicism, their relationships with the Church differed. In Chile, Nacistas articulated a more secular stance, even while gaining the support of the Church, although in Argentina, Nacionalistas both overlapped and received support from the Church...