Argentina

on the World Today

Two years of personal regime have emptied the coffers of the richest nation in Latin America. Argentina’s foreign exchange fund has all but vanished. The gold reserve has shrunk, while money in circulation has increased more than 60 per cent, not to mention the vastly augmented mass of check money, bank loans, and rediscounted commercial paper which further extends the fiduciary margin.

The workers have had increases, benefits, vacations, and pensions on full pay. They have drawn 48 hours’ pay for 36 hours’ work. Wages have been equalized irrespective of output or classes of work, thereby putting a premium on inefficiency. Easy sick leave and absenteeism have cut deeply into working hours. Accordingly, industrial production has sunk 40 per cent since 1945.

The farm yield has decreased by an estimated 30 per cent. Staple crops like sugar have become dependent on subsidies; potatoes, which had always been plentiful, have to be imported; and certain experts are not joking when they predict that next year Argentina may have to import wheat.

Now the propaganda machine of the government has suddenly switched to the “battle of production.” By posters, radio, sound trucks, and newspapers, the worker is relentlessly hammered and adjured to produce more, to work one hour longer and save the country. But Perón is finding that demagogy works easiest on the down grade.

The farmers quit

Farmers are quitting the land in droves. They long ago realized that the huge state outlays have been possible only at their expense. They have been hit both as sellers and as consumers. The government buys the whole of the wheat crop at a low price and sells it abroad at a profit of 300 per cent. Perón has found a way to make the Argentinians pay for only one half of his program. The cost of the other half is borne by hungry Europeans.

Perón had figured out that it was a good idea to tax the farmers for the benefit of the townspeople, since farmers represent less than 35 per cent of the population; but when the farmer reduces his sown area or moves to the city, as 600,000 farmers have, the whole Five-Year Plan threatens to backfire. The farmer is essential not only as a producer of exportable wealth, but also as the steady internal consumer for the new industrial products.

The widely touted program for importing 300,000 immigrants a month into this “farming country without farmers” broke down at the first try. A couple of thousand Italians were brought in, who turned out to be fleeing fascists or shiftless urbanites; but meanwhile a tidy sum was netted in advance by the President’s cronies who owned the shipping company.

Meanwhile, exports are beginning to sag because of high prices. The ancient railroad system is breaking down perpetually; the new roads announced in the Plan have not been built — there would not be enough motor transport for them anyway because the dollars are gone without enough trucks having come in; and 500,000 tons of wheat, almost one tenth of the crop, have been lost because of transportation bottlenecks. The nation finds its reserves gone with little to show for it.

This is not to say that all of the Five-Year Plan is a hoax. It was hastily conceived and is inadequately staffed. But if does have some bright men and it does meet some real needs, such as oil extraction and power development. The whole Plan is keyed to a big rearmament program, which absorbs most of its effort.

Money down the drain

Today no one knows what state Argentine finances really are in, as published statements are often contradictory. No one can keep track of the money going in and out, probably not the Administration itself, since the IAPI, the central financing institute, which resembles an RFC with monopoly of foreign commerce, is somewhat in the condition of a bank account on which different people can draw checks without telling each other.

The man who is at the center of the web and is supposed to know, Miguel Miranda, has the business experience of a successful operator on the food market. But what he has done with the full gold reserve and the huge foreign exchange fund is a matter of controversy.

Certain facts are clear. He has turned foreign trade into a state monopoly to make more profits, but now he is running out of dollar funds, has had to introduce commerce and currency restrictions, and must fight the black market in dollars. The profits for IAPI, which he officially anticipated as 2 billion pesos, have turned out instead to be an equivalent loss. But an undetermined part of the state finance is run as Miranda’s private exchequer.

Democracy à la Plata

Parliament goes on, in a weird Chaplinesque vein; for is this not democratic rule by majority? But the government is loath to have its budget taken apart by an embittered opposition; so day after day, the Perónist majority refuses to show up, and the Chamber cannot sit for lack of a quorum. The President (of course a Perónist) calls sternly on police to round up the recalcitrant members; the chief of police comes back with three or four representatives. Still no quorum. Then the session ends, and Perón is able to invoke the Constitution, which states that if the Chamber “neglects to discuss the budget” at the proper time, it will be passed by default.

Behind the comic relief, however, lies the grim awareness that no one’s constitutional rights are safe, that the authorities condemn and confiscate property without recourse to Parliament, prosecute and sentence critics for the crime of “disloyalty" according to their own good pleasure. Twelve hundred professors, one fifth of the academic body, have been fired or have quit. “The immense majority of doctors,” stormed a Perónist deputy in the Chamber, “is against the President and his social ideals.” So are the engineers, for that matter, and the rest of the intelligentsia.

But Perón will import foreign technicians to run his machines; he will leave the peon unschooled rather than give work to 100,000 unemployed grade-school teachers whom he does not trust. The resulting incompetence in Administration circles accounts for many otherwise inexplicable blunders. If the landed aristocracy are officially reviled as “contumacious oligarchs,” few people will cry. But it is the real creators of Argentine industrial wealth in the past decades, the men of enterprising vision, who are being hounded to death.

There is no sense in looking for a coherence in Argentine fascism, for like its predecessors it simply exploits slogans and superstitions. “Rhythmic, integrated, harmonious,” and such adjectives are flung around to denote the mushroom growth of a flabby industry that never was exposed to competition. The average industrialist makes a long face if you ask him questions, because that is a must among the better people, but privately he is well contented and is hauling in money hand over fist.

For that is, finally, the most sinister aspect of the whole story: a parody of socialism which has succeeded in capturing the complicity of the people in an enterprise which is antisocial in the deepest sense. The People’s Revolution against the “usury of international capital” is rigging up a hasty and hazardous industrial system at the expense of agriculture at a time when so much of the world wants to exchange manufactured goods for food. The have-not protest has been turned into a monopoly which does not mind exploiting the world’s hunger by restricting its own food production and putting a usurious price on it.

Person’s strength

There are structures on which Perón can rely; they are the Church, the Army, and in a measure — the Communists. The Army he keeps happy with rearmament; to the Church he has given religious teaching in the schools. As for the Communists, whom he carefully treats with contumely in public, he knows that he needs them to run his machine, and that he can count on them. The Socialists keep aloof; there is no one but the Communists to provide him with capable and dynamic organizers.

An indeterminate but certainly considerable number of Perónist keymen are crypto-Communists. All the organs of the opposition have been suppressed — but the Communist weekly is allowed to survive. Both parties think they can travel a bit of road together without asking inconvenient questions. The disintegration of a democratic order is nothing to annoy the Communist Party.

Eva: Assistant Dictator

And then there is Evita — la Señora María Eva Duarte de Perón. The lady is a striking new departure in the technique of dictatorship, and an important precedent for future tyrannies. She is the perfect parody of the Triumph of Women’s Rights.

Before her accession she was a radio actress specializing in soap operas. But her expert acquaintance with her public has given her an insight into the psychology of the modern Common Man. Even in her most official addresses, her manner of speaking is that of a housewife starting a bread riot. It was she who, when Perón was out of office and in jail, re-established a liaison with the union leaders and brought, him back to triumph.

Since then she has gradually emerged into a full government position. Her suite and offices are the greater part of the Ministry of Labor, and there she receives deputations which follow each other all day long. In the new deity that the modern dictator represents, the feminine aspect has begun to take shape. Evita speaks with authority, yet need not be as responsible for her commitments as a male statesman; her generous emotions may well be supposed to lead her beyond cold reason of state. She is all that Hollywood queens should be in the world of synthetic fairy tales. She gives, both at home and abroad, on a more than royal scale.

Meanwhile the humble are encouraged to hope. As seamstresses, nurses, typists, and domestic cooks parade through the streets carrying posters of Evita in gorgeous furs and a gold lame evening gown, one realizes that while a certain side of her can be Comrade Commissar or National Glamour Girl or Drum Majorette of the Revolution according to need, the other side is a substitute for Our Lady of Guadalupe. She has a shrewd eye for that sort of thing. When asked what the poor folk would think of her sartorial expenses she cracked back: “It’s all right for bishops, isn’t it? And they haven’t worked half as hard as I have to get it.” For this is the time of secular religions.

But there is more to it than stage tricks. Securing the vote for women has paved Evita’s way into politics. The problem of dictators has always been to find a chief lieutenant and confidante who will not let them down in an emergency. Peron trusts her intuit ions, and calls her his mascot; he also relies on her stronger nerves.

Evita’s brazenness earned her painful snubs in Europe; nevertheless she performed the important move in the chess game that Peron could not have taken on himself at this time: that of the identification of Argentina with Franco Spain.

The opposition moves can be discounted, and it matters little whether the parties get together or not. They know that it would be impossible for them, even if they had the majority, to come back into power legally. They must wait for the regime to liquidate itself in a spectacular crash, and that may not come for quite some time.

For that, finally, is Peron’s great strength. He has led his people darkly and fearfully afar until they dread the idea of turning back. The worker knows that the state has to keep him going. The industrialist, that the state cannot afford to let him down. They have given up trying to follow the financial wizardries of a government that knows how to bribe everyone with everyone else’s money.