Monday, March 18, AD 2024 10:02pm

PopeWatch: Peron

Rorate Caeli reminds us that one of the keys to understanding Pope Francis is to look at Argentinian Dictator Juan Peron:

 

In 2014, we said the following on the Francis Pontificate:
The current situation of ecclesiastical politics might perhaps be better understood by those who have a grasp of three important concepts in Hispanic (Spanish and Spanish-American) political tradition: Caudillismo, an ancient and powerful political concept, system, and idea that is deeply ingrained in the Hispanic mind and experience, regardless of the theoretical political system in place; Caciquismo, a very peculiar and mostly Latin American version of Caudillismo; and the Argentine hazy political sub-concept of Caudillismo and Caciquismo known as Peronismo, which transformed the highly successful Argentine Republic of the early 20th century into what it is today.
This week, we were sent a link to a video of Argentine tyrant Juan Domingo Perón in an interview conducted in July 1973, 46 years ago. This is what Perón says in the video:

Also Mao [Zedong] says this: “The first thing that a man must discern when he leads is to establish clearly who are his friends and who are his enemies.” And to dedicate himself — it’s not Mao who says this, I say it: “To the friend, everything. To the enemy, not even justice!” [Laughter in the background.] Because in these things one cannot have dualities.
This attitude is all very familiar to whoever watches the Vatican closely in the present. At that moment in history, Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio SJ was very close to the Peronist movement.
Yep, with this Pope we definitely got a man from the peripheries, to use one of the Pope’s favorite cant phrases.
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Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Monday, July 15, AD 2019 3:34am

Jorge Bergoglio aka Pope JPII as in Juan Peron II.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, July 15, AD 2019 5:51am

Disagree. Rule by entrepreneurial caudillos is something that largely evaporated in Latin America nearly 50 years ago. The military regimes operating in Latin America after 1969 had a corporate personality and typically rotated the Presidency among a series of officers through one mechanism or another. You also see instances of the collegium of chiefs of staff or flag rank officers asserting discipline over errant leaders. You had a number of exceptions, but these were qualified in various ways.

Although there was a cult of personality around Peron, his movement began with an exercise in institution building: the promotion of trade unionism when he was minister of labor during the military regime which ruled from 1943 to 1946. Peron obtained office through competitive elections and built a political party which could and did survive him. (Though nowadays, there’s an array of political parties which claim Peron’s organization for their pedigree).

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, July 15, AD 2019 6:28am

Disagree Art. Peronism has remained a very live reality in Argentina,

I agree. However, Peron was not a caudillo of the usual sort. A caudillo stands at the center of a small social network which promotes him and then disappears when he does. Even the Somozas multi-generational patrimonial regime (which captured a large share of the country’s productive capacity) fell completely to pieces in less than a year and never had any constituency in subsequent years.

Peron’s rhetorical strategies and oddities are delineated by Jacobo Timmerman in his memoir of the period. The American Universities Field Staff composed an assessment of Argentina which was published in 1963 that’s consistent with your thesis. The political parties of the day consisted of people who understood state power as a means of redistributing resources to your particular clientele. (The degenerate sort of political science I was taught 35 years ago conceived of this as the whole point of political life, not merely in decayed political societies like Argentina, but in the United States).

Perón Rules
Perón Rules
Saturday, July 20, AD 2019 10:29pm

Sorry but you are wrong.

Perón was against Caudillismo and he stated it in his clases of Political Driving ( “Conducción Política”; in the strategic sense of the term) in the Peronist School in the fifties.

Caudillismo consist generally in a rural and wealthy type of leader with the carisma to utilize a group of men in a informal way.

Perón was a modern populist “conductor”. His job was to organize the masses, ignorants and opressed, to transform them into The People an make them a strong base of power and at the same time elevating them from pseudo-slavery to a combative organization in order to confront with the Rural Oligarchy and some Proto-Industrial Capitalist.

Perón, as a strong Catholic, was simply following the Encyclicals of Pio XII -and specially regarding this subject- his “1944 Christmas Radio-Message”, in wich he states this distinction between mass and people.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, July 21, AD 2019 3:14am

Perón Rules

In 1929, Argentina’s real gross domestic product per capita was 71% that of the United States (and higher than that of any European country). In 1973, it was 50% that of the United States. In 2016, it was 35% that of the United States. Chile’s at these three points in time was 40%, 26%, and 40% that of the United States. Uruguay’s was 43%, 29%, and 37%. Paraguay’s was 8% that of the United States in 1973 and 16% in 2016. Argentina lagged a generation or two behind Chile and Uruguay in establishing competitive electoral systems in their national politics, accomplishing this only in 1912. After a generation, you allowed your political order to decay into a 40 year long mud wrestling match between the Peronist movement and the military. NB, Chile and Uruguay had competent (if cruel) military regimes which affected a salutary reset in the political economy of those places. Argentina’s terminal military regime did manage to suppress the domestic terrorist gangs (with a great deal of collateral damage), but left you with tens-of-billions in sour loans from New York banks and quadruple digit inflation.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. And that means repudiate everything Juan Domingo Peron stood for.

Perón rules
Perón rules
Sunday, July 21, AD 2019 3:27pm

Guys: don’t fall for all that stupid anti-Peronist propaganda.

He was overthrown by the actions of the Navy, wich criminally bombarded the streets of Buenos Aires MURDERING HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE and later threatening to destroy the La Plata Oil Refinery (can you even imagine the U.S. Navy killing innocent Americans just because they don’t like the president, by the way?).

Perón came to power with the full endorsement of the Military and the Church. What happened later on was that some priests (not all of them) started to become scared of the increasing power of the Peronist Movement and his influence on all the social spheres. It was so big that the country was being reshaped completely in a new cultural direction. It was a revolution. Some “conservatives” were scared. So, some priests essentially started to do politics and every force of opposition started to gather near the image of “the Church” (despite not all the Church being anti-Peronist). This priests became allies with the enemies of the Peronist Movement: Socialists, Comunists, Progressives, Masons and some Conservatives of the “Radical Party”. Yes. As crazy as it sounds.

But the real enemy behind all this groups was the Rural Oligarchy and its armed ally was the Navy. So in June of 1955 they painted some planes with the phrase “Christus Vincit” and went to kill Perón and hundreds of innocent people in the name of Christ.

Then, when the coup was controlled, some groups (no one really knows who they were) started to attack some Churches. Perón tried to stop this but the millitary forces couldn’t do much because they needed to keep defending some key places of the cities. Perón didn’t have anything to do with that. He gave the order to stop them, never to attack anyone or anything because he was in a defensive position.

Later on, in September of the same year, he resigned and escaped because he didn’t want to engage in a potentially catastrophic civil war. So, he managed to save his life and run to Paraguay. Immediately the new masonic military regime started to kill and encarcerate Peronists and, surprise, they ignored the Church completely. They knew that they will have to deal with a lot of soldiers loyals to Perón in the next years, not to mention the millions of clandestine militants. They stole the momified body of Evita, they partially destroyed it and then they raped it (if that act of necrophilia is not satanic, nothing is) then they send it to Europe.

And of course, the new Regime (they called this whole operation “Liberating Revolution”) started to print lies about the Peronist government. That it was “corrupt” and saying things like Perón was a “pedophile” manufacturing fake letters, and exposing jewels…and all that circus. Anyway, they couldn’t “de-Peronize” the country, no matter how hard they tried. You cannot destroy that wich is true only using lies.

Regarding the “economical critique” of the Peronist Regime: that’ just nonsense. That statistics are not accurate. Why? Because they started it with a few countries as reference, and later on, they aggregated a lot more. So, it appears that after Perón Argentina went down hill, but that’s not true. Argentina growed a lot during the Perón years. What changed was the ammount of countries as statistical reference. So, of course, it’s seems like before Perón Argentina was in a better shape, and that’s because the comparative reference was smaller. And also, before Perón Argentina was an agricultural country ruled by an Oligarchy. So, it doesn’t matter if the PIB was large, because it was concentrated in a small number of wealthy people. The objective of Perón was modernization and industrialization. That’s why his number one enemy allways was the Rural Oligarchy.

That’s the true. Perón was indeed a Catholic and as one, he aided Franco’s Spain when the Spaniards were starving, without asking anything in return. The priests who allied themselves with the comunists are a lot more responsible for what happened.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, July 22, AD 2019 3:58am

Regarding the “economical critique” of the Peronist Regime: that’ just nonsense. That statistics are not accurate.

Well, why don’t you write the World Bank and the Maddison Project and explain to them your patented method for producing ‘accurate’ statistics. I’m sure they’re awaiting your wisdom with bated breath.

Mr. Peron Rules, everybody lives in a world where normative discourse is challenging (if not impossible for most). Everyone also lives in a world Jasper Johns described thus: “It’s an achievement to see anything clearly, because we cannot see anything clearly”. That having been said, dopey NPCs are a useless nuisance in any discussion. There are few places in this world outside of Tropical Africa which have had worse economic performance than the Argentine Republic, whether you can bear to acknowledge it or not. People like you made it happen, and it will continue to happen until such time as people like you are shown the door.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, July 22, AD 2019 6:52am

It is one of the dismal lessons of the twentieth century that, once a state is allowed to expand, it is almost impossible to contract it.

It is not impossible at all, as was demonstrated in the 25 years which succeeded the publication of this statement.

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