got tonkaed wrote:btownmeggy wrote:heavycola wrote:Congratulations meggy. What were you studying?
Thank you. I was studying Latin American History.
hey i have a question that you might be able to help with, that one of my profs never seemed to answer for me (thought it was pretty unrelated to the course).
was there a similar sense of public empowerment when peron first came to power in argentina as there was later on when allende came to power in chile? Ive seen some documentaries on the latter, and feel like i understand it a little bit better, and i was wondering if it was all that similar to the beginning of peronism or at least what people expected of peronism.
Peron certainly enjoyed massive political support among the "popular" classes, as did Allende. However, there are some major differences between HOW each man rose to power and the international political climate that surrounded their ascent.
Peron was a military man and his first taste of great political power was after a military coup in which he was a leading figure. He was pretty lucky during this military coup (which was moderately supported by Argentineans of various class backgrounds), in that he was named head of the Department of Labor, where he forged ties with Argentina's already-powerful labor unions. It's these connections, I believe, that garnered him a reputation as a man of the people, a populist, and his various Presidencies.
Allende, on the other hand, had been an important Chilean politician for decades before his election to the Presidency. He was kinda like one of the various U.S. politicians who year after year runs for President. Over these years and years of political involvement, Allende formed an increasingly stronger corps of supporters. First, moderates, then left-leaners, and finally hordes of students and workers. However, if I'm not mistaken, when he finally won the Presidency, it was just barely! 30-something percent.
When Peron came to power, it was amidst the first wave of post-WWII Latin American populism. Those these governments weren't wonderfully popular with the United States, in large part because of their policies of Import Substitution Industrialization which hampered US investment in the region, they were tolerated as long as they avowed their anti-Communist tendencies. When Peronists supported Peron, they were struggling against national economic elites, for little more than better wages and a say, however small, in national politics.
With Allende, the situation was very different. The Cuban Revolution, in 1959, had an enormous impact on Latin American and the "Third World" in general. The Cuban Revolution, representing itself as a the "first rout of US imperialism" gained a following among others who themselves as victims of economic neocolonialism. (Unfortunately for Allende, Arbenz, and many many others, becoming anti-US, in the highly polarized world of the Cold War, was interpreted by the U.S. as being pro-, or at least amenable to, Communism and thus ripe for intervention. After all, look what had happened in Cuba.) Meanwhile, Latin American scholars were developing "Dependency Theory" which held that the wealth of Europe and North America was explicitly and inextricably due to their exploitation of the underdeveloped world. When Allende supporters lined up behind him, they were struggling against what they saw as an international political system of neocolonialism and exploitation.
Sorry this is kinda disorganized, it's a very big question with lots of variables. I've touched upon just a couple of them.