Ambassadors of the Working Class. Argentina's International Labor Activists & Cold War Democracy in the Americas by Ernesto Semán (review)

Ambassadors of the Working Class delivers a compelling study of a diplomatic project, launched in the mid-forties by the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón, that sought to create a regional movement and challenge U.S hegemony in Latin America. In this "transnational history of the hopes and fears stirred by populist politics in the Americas" (5), Ernesto Semán follows the active militancy of Argentine labor attaches across different countries and contributes to ongoing debates about postwar democracy, modernization and citizenship during the Cold War.

From the very beginning, Ambassadors calls into question well-established historiographical interpretations that depict Latin American populism, and Peronism in particular, as totalitarian experiments. One of the book's most provocative arguments is that, although different from liberal views, populism did not represent the opposite of democracy, nor a threat to it. Quite the reverse: it integrated democratic values into an alternative political project based on national sovereignty, equality and social rights. Semán insightfully historicizes the construction and uses of derogatory images of populism in the U.S. In his view, it was the successful expansion of economic benefits to workers and urban classes in Latin America, which bore numerous resemblances to the New Deal's principles, that aroused fear among U.S. elites. After World War II, in contrast to the Latin American model, U.S. liberalism was increasingly unable to combine harmoniously capital and labor. It was in this context that the portrayal of Peronism as a potential threat took shape and became widely used in U.S. domestic discussions.

Apart from its implications at a regional level, the study of the labor attaches' program also illuminates some of the important transformations that Peronism brought to Argentine society. On one hand, this new diplomatic endeavor was part of the incorporation of working classes into key areas of the state's bureaucracy. The fact that most of the program's members came from humble origins and had previous experiences in the union's movement entailed the democratization of foreign relations, a realm formerly considered "the tearoom of Argentine aristocracy" (79). On the other hand, this program also revealed the multiclass character of the Peronist coalition. The detailed reconstruction of the attaches' training courses provided in Chapter 3 shows that not only former left wing activists were part of this enterprise. In fact, the staff of professors chosen to educate the new diplomats came mostly from the camp of nationalist Catholicism and based their classes on the Pope's teachings. This coexistence of diverse ideologies was a distinctive mark of the Peronist attempt to create a "postliberal state" (98) centered around the empowerment of industrial workers. In this process, a reinvigorated anti-imperialist tradition merged with the languages of class and nationalism in the forging of the new Peronist identity.

Through exhaustive work conducted at a variety of archives, Ambassadors recuperates the concrete functioning of these "apostles of social revolution" (68) in different places such as Bolivia, Guatemala, and Colombia, each of which were fundamental theaters of Cold War confrontations in the region. In order to spread Peronist principles and build ties with other Latin American workers' movements, the attaches were equipped with brochures, pictures and agitprop materials. These diplomats would also send back to Argentina regular reports about the living conditions in their host countries. In that regard, the attaches' views of the US and the USSR seemed to have been critical in the fashioning of Peronism as a third way between capitalism and communism.

Seman's close exploration of the attaches' activities also engages the changing chronology of Cold War in Latin America. Although the beginnings of the program coincided with the spring of populist governments, the assassination of Eliécer Gaitan in Colombia in 1948 marked...