"Exclusive Domination" or "Short Term Imperialism:" The Peruvian Response to U.S.-Argentine Rivalry, 1946-1950

Peru lives in a psychological moment of singular confusion," Argentine Ambassador Hugo Oderigo wrote in 1947, suggesting that "the United States and Argentina are its two great realities. It is attracted to our country by the community of historical origin, lives our reality, and recognizes the greatness" of General Juan Domingo Perón. On the other hand, the hegemonic United States, with its vast wealth and modern industrial order, offered promise for the future. In the years following the Second World War, both Perón and the Harry S. Truman administration forced two Peruvian presidents to choose between what one Lima journalist called "short-term Argentine imperialism" and the "exclusive domination which the Great Democracy of the North today exercises."¹ Perón's road promised rapid industrialization and liberation from foreign exploitation through statist corporatism and membership in a "southern bloc" of economically-integrated South American states, while Washington stood as the guardian of a new global order based on liberal capitalism and multilateral commerce. This conflict represents an important international aspect of what has heretofore been considered a domestic struggle within Peru from 1945-1949.

This clash between Perón's populist vision and the liberal capitalism preached by the Truman Administration—itself one phase of the larger U.S. campaign to promote what would later be called the "Washington consensus"—remains an overlooked aspect of post-war South American history, which tends instead to focus on the emerging Cold War as a major factor in the events of 1946-1950.² It is true that anti-communism in Europe and Asia distracted U.S. policymakers from events in their traditional "Good Neighborhood," but in the case of Peru, however, it played virtually no other role. Indeed, the State Department, preoccupied with its Argentine rivals, displayed apathy toward the crisis of Peruvian democracy and ignored the pleas of the most formidable anti-communist force in Peru as it came to embrace General Manuel Odría's military dictatorship in 1949. Still, the Peruvian leaders were far from helpless as they responded to Argentine and U.S. pressures, and did so with a sophistication and skill that Washington never fully appreciated.

When President José Luis Bustamante launched his ill-fated "three year fight for democracy" in 1945, he stood almost alone as a centrist, torn between the conflicting demands of both a reinvigorated left, in the form of Víctor Haya de la Torre's Alianza Popular Revolucionara Americana (APRA), and the landed oligarchy, embodied in agricultural barons Pedro Beltran, Enrique Gildermeister, and their Alianza Nacional.³ APRA, well-organized and hardened by fifteen years of persecution, clearly represented the dominant political force in Peru and the only party with any real mass support. Haya de la Torre had been instrumental in securing Bustamante's victory in what was perhaps Peru's first truly democratic election in 1945, but APRA viewed the president as a figurehead. If he proved to be sufficiently pliable, he was simply to implement its agenda, and if not, he was a fairly minor obstacle to its ultimate assumption of power. On the other hand, Beltran's Alianza, representing the agroexporter "merchant aristocracy," incorporated dissident labor factions and communists marginalized by APRA's imminence into a loose anti-APRA coalition that was equally determined to dominate Bustamante. "Few [other] governments," Bustamante correctly lamented, faced the "political incidents and social conflicts which almost daily disrupted the general tranquility." His misfortune was only compounded by the emergence of Perón's challenge to the hemispheric order.⁴

Perón had risen to power in Argentina by meshing organized labor and the army into a political juggernaut, maintained by relatively equal parts demagoguery, real achievements in the realm of social welfare, and a promise of "economic independence" from foreign and oligarchic exploitation. Once in the...