How an obscure labour office made Juan Perón Argentina's dominant politician
In 1943 Colonel Juan Perón took charge of Argentina's labour department, then a minor office. Within two years he had used it to win over the unions so thoroughly that when rivals forced him out and arrested him, crowds filled the Plaza de Mayo until he was freed. Argentines still mark that day, 17 October.
Born on 8 October 1895 in the town of Lobos, Perón was the son of parents who married only in 1901; his great-grandfather had come from Sardinia, a heritage he later spoke of proudly. Sent to a strict Catholic boarding school in Buenos Aires run by his grandmother, he entered military college at 16 and shone more at boxing and fencing than in class. As a young officer he mediated a long labour dispute at the forestry firm La Forestal in 1920. He was sidelined after backing the wrong general in the 1930 coup, a move he later regretted, yet went on to teach military history and write on it.
Between 1939 and 1941 he studied mountain warfare in the Italian Alps, spent a semester at the University of Turin and observed governments across Europe, including Mussolini's. He concluded that a social democracy could be an alternative both to liberal democracy, which he saw as disguised plutocracy, and to totalitarian regimes. Back home he took part in the 1943 officers' coup and made the labour department a cabinet-level secretariat. His reforms brought labour courts, severance pay, paid holidays across the workforce, minimum wages for rural workers and a year-end bonus of one-twelfth of annual pay. Fundraising after the 1944 San Juan earthquake made him a national figure, and there he met the radio actress Eva Duarte.
Elected president in 1946, he pursued industrialization, made university tuition free, and with Evita extended the vote to women and built half a million houses. His government also fired, jailed or exiled dissidents and controlled the press, and several prominent Nazi war criminals found refuge in Argentina. Re-elected by a landslide in 1951, he lost Evita soon afterwards and fell out with the Catholic Church. In June 1955 pro-Church military units bombed the Plaza de Mayo, killing 300 civilians, and a coup soon removed him.
Exiled in Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama and Spain, he returned in 1973 and won a third term, the only Argentine president elected three times. He could not calm the violence between his movement's left and right wings, and died on 1 July 1974. His third wife, Isabel, succeeded him. Supporters see the Peróns as champions of workers; critics call them demagogues.
Source: Juan Perón
