Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina

Letters to Juan and Eva Perón

Donna J. Guy

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780826338389
• eBook ISBN: 9780826338396
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In collecting hundreds of letters to Juan and Eva by everyday people as well as from correspondence solicited by Juan Perón, this book promotes a view that charismatic bonds in Argentina have been formed as much by Argentines as by their leaders, demonstrating how letter writing at that time instilled a sense of nationalism and unity, particularly during the first Five Year Plan campaign conducted in 1946. It goes beyond the question of how charisma influenced elections and class affiliation to address broader implications. The letters offer a new methodology to study the formation of charisma in literate countries where not just propaganda and public media but also private correspondence defined and helped shape political polices. Focusing on the first era of Peronism, from 1946 to 1955, this work shows how President Perón and the First Lady created charismatic ways to link themselves to Argentine supporters through letter writing.

CHAPTER 1

Early Correspondence and Eva’s
Creation of Charismatic Bonds

LETTER WRITING HAS forged bonds of communication between political leaders and members of the Latin American public for hundreds of years. During the colonial period not only elites but also educated Indians and mestizos (people of Indian-Spanish heritage) and mulatos (people of African and Spanish heritage) wrote to Spanish officials to plead for help or to criticize colonial policies. Even if people were illiterate, scribes or notary publics provided the literacy necessary for petitions. Indeed, the bureaucratic nature of the Spanish Empire required the existence of literate individuals who served as go-betweens for a generally illiterate public and a literate bureaucracy.¹

In Argentina literacy became important in urban areas where commerce, religion, and empire formed the basis of economic relations. Religious institutions and private tutors taught young people to read and write until public schools opened shortly after Argentina’s independence from Spain in 1810. Domingo Sarmiento, one of the first presidents of a united Argentina (which had been divided into the port area and interior during civil wars in the first half of the nineteenth century), became devoted to public education. Although self-taught, Sarmiento worked to promote literacy and public education even before becoming president in 1868. As head of state, he expanded the number of government-supported schools. His successor to the presidency, Nicolás Avellaneda (1874–1880), had served as his minister of education. This sustained commitment to public education enabled common people to write petitions and letters. Whether they used notary publics or wrote their own missives, widows, soldiers, and charitable groups increasingly and regularly petitioned the president and congress for financial support to carry out their endeavors.²

Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–1922, 1928–1930) became the most visible president before Juan Perón to encourage the poor to ask him for aid. Much like Eva Perón, Yrigoyen became known for his philanthropy, his willingness to meet citizens, and his compassion during his first administration. In fact he proudly acknowledged that he donated his salary to the publicly subsidized Society of Beneficence (Sociedad de Beneficencia) and permitted people to approach him for charity. An interesting letter from the archives of the Society of Beneficence reveals that Yrigoyen’s reputation for generosity led a young man, orphaned since the age of two months, to send a letter to the society in 1928 asking the group to intercede in his efforts to obtain an interview with Yrigoyen. He also wanted to find out his parents’ identity, but he obtained neither. We can surmise that this young man probably was neither the first nor the last to write to Yrigoyen. During his second campaign for the presidency, Yrigoyen had a propaganda film made in 1928 that extolled the philanthropic accomplishments of his political party, the Radicals. One might argue that Yrigoyen set a model of beneficence that also provided a way to bypass, rather than support, the society that had become a symbol of elite charity by the 1940s. He also did this by receiving petitioners at his home.³

Perón ascended to power through a military coup in 1943. By then Argentine citizens, both rural and urban, had long-standing needs, many of which were ultimately addressed by Juan and Eva. For countries involved in World War II, consumer demands had taken second place to the war effort. In Argentina, a desire for a better life resulted from other factors. The impact of declining world prices for grains and beef during the Depression, increased migration of poor Argentines to Buenos Aires in search of work, and the toll that these events placed on families and communities became a crisis by the 1940s. Not only did migrants see the difference between the way they had lived in the countryside compared to the better standards of living promised to organized urban workers by Perón, those who remained at home found themselves bereft of family and community support and unable to enjoy consumer benefits offered by the new democratic government. High postwar inflation rates did not help. Provincial governments had little to offer those left on the farms and ranches, while migrants turned to new sources of beneficence coming from Eva and her transit homes (homeless shelters, described below) and from Perón’s government.⁴

Immigrant communities needed personal friends with power, too. Between 1880 and 1914, hundreds of thousands of immigrants landed in Argentina, mostly settling initially in the city and province of Buenos Aires, as well as Santa Fe, Mendoza, and other provinces.⁵ Many lived modestly at best and by the 1940s confronted new realities both in Europe and in Argentina. They found themselves part of the aging population and often ill. Although few became citizens, immigrants could receive all social welfare services. Furthermore, their children born in Argentina automatically became citizens and part of the Argentine system; politicians ignored them at their risk. Thus it is no surprise, for example, that Perón went out of his way to court the Jewish community by making Argentina the first Latin American country to recognize the State of Israel in 1948 and by forming a community group to oppose the Anti-Peronist Jews. Indeed, Perón periodically met with different immigrant groups to gain their support, something that had not occurred since Marcelo T. de Alvear’s presidency (1922–1928). At the same time he retained strong support among many military men who had participated in the 1943 military coup, as well as among labor unions.⁶

Since independence, two Argentine realities existed. One, the most visible, included urban areas of the coastal region. The other comprised the interior where residents suffered from a shortage of reasonable housing, economic activities, and schools. Crop failures, changing prices for beef, and family disintegration increasingly led to population declines. The residents of coastal urban polities assiduously ignored rural areas and small towns of the Argentine countryside to promote lower food prices for Buenos Aires. Porteños had their own problems. The arrival of immigrants and then of new, mostly poor internal migrants led to the creation of many shantytowns and new political demands by urban dwellers. Under these circumstances, urban and rural people all sought a personal and emotive connection with the president, as well as solutions to perceived problems. This dichotomy changed urban landscapes and resulted in a steady migration to the capital city by people in search of jobs and succor while the provinces suffered. Migrants and those staying at home all needed to believe in a knight in shining armor.

Equally important, between 1936 and 1946 a silent but visible female demographic revolution took place in the capital city of Buenos Aires. It is this constituency of women, as well as children, that became the focus of Eva’s attentions. While historians have no national censuses to track population movements between 1914 and this period, the 1936 Buenos Aires census and the abbreviated 1946 fourth national census conducted a decade later, just as the first Peronist government took power, provided clear evidence of a massive demographic change. The censuses showed that while Argentina had always been viewed as a land of immigrants, mostly men, adult foreign immigration in the 1930s and 1940s had exercised little impact on the porteño population under the age of forty. The opposite was true in the case of female internal migration to the national capital. Women and their children, often needy, dotted the urban landscape.

While internal migration also occurred in provincial capital cities, the national capital proved to be particularly sensitive to this Argentine demographic shift. It was home to the port through which new immigrants arrived and the key destination for the greater number of internal migrants. Male immigrants had buoyed the masculinity rate to 116 percent in 1895 (that is, 116 males for 100 females). After 1914, however, many fewer immigrants, either male or female, stayed there, and the masculinity rate decreased to 99.3 percent in 1936 and 94.5 percent in 1947. These numbers, according to census takers, mirrored the situation in the United States and other countries that had absorbed the massive prewar immigration movements. However, casualties of war and increased war work in factories could not explain Argentina’s increased numbers of females in the capital city. The total number of female migrants of all ages almost doubled in Buenos Aires, from 214,556 in 1936 to 396,560 in 1947, despite migratory ebbs and flows. The 1947 population pyramid reflected both those who returned to the countryside, the new migrants, and the expansion of the female population. Women, especially after the rise of Eva Perón, became a principal political target for the new Peronist movement, and this reality encouraged plans for female suffrage.⁷

CHART 1. 1936 and 1947 Buenos Aires Male and Female Migration Comparisons

CHART 2. 1947 Buenos Aires, Males and Females

CHART 3. 1936 Buenos Aires, Males and Females

By the 1940s old social safety nets no longer proved useful, and migrants eventually turned to the new world of Peronist politics. Meanwhile, immigrants who were not citizens grew older and more dependent upon public welfare facilities. They, along with urban folks not employed in labor unions, turned to the president and his wife because they had problems that could not be resolved by other means. Letters became the medium of communication, in addition to personal meetings with the needy.

This chapter focuses on how Eva Perón’s activities responded to these demographic and economic realities. Beginning with the public’s exposure to Eva as a radio and movie star before she met Juan, it explores the various mechanisms she used to respond to the public’s need for charismatic bonds. She did not do this by closing the elite Society of Beneficence, but rather by creating new sources of public access to the president’s wife. The chapter also introduces the voice of the poor.

The Public’s Discovery of Eva

How did people come to know about Eva? They already knew about her as the star of several radio programs since 1939. She also had some movie parts and appeared regularly in magazines for devotees of radio soap operas and the cinema. So before she met Juan, she had a flourishing career with the help of her brother, Juan Duarte.⁸ While she earned very little, increasingly people recognized her. She became the first president of the newly organized labor union for performers in the broadcasting industry. She thrilled audiences, mostly females, with her enactments of famous women in history. After Juan met Eva in 1944, the young radio actress was quickly drawn to politics as well as to the dashing military man. Shortly thereafter, on a program entitled “The Soldier’s Revolution will be the Revolution of the Argentine People,” Eva and her script emphasized the ways that the 1943 military coup had helped people’s lives. She commented, “There was a man who could bring dignity to the notion of work, a soldier of the people who could feel the flame of social justice. . . . it was he who decisively helped the people’s Revolution.”⁹ Then Juan gave a talk penned by Eva’s scriptwriter. Here is clear evidence that Eva’s profession served as a training ground for the increasingly popular Juan. While his military experience taught him hierarchy and bureaucracy, Eva taught him the role of communications in the development of charismatic traits.

The first public speech by Eva came from the state radio station on July 25, 1946, and specifically asked the Argentine women who benefited from Perón’s campaign to help lower the cost of living. She began by greeting the Argentine women as descendants of those who helped fight for the nation. She went on to identify Perón as the person who would sacrifice everything for the happiness of the people from his position as secretary of labor and welfare. She urged women as wives, mothers, and girlfriends to support those who continued to fight for the people by not fearing to report sellers who raised prices, and not to pay prices higher than those established by the government.¹⁰ This speech showed her early interest in women’s issues, but not feminist issues, and her willingness to be a liaison between workers, women, and the future president.

Contemporary accounts note that Eva’s working-class background endeared her to the public at the same time that military and political critics were horrified by her lack of style, class, and demeanor. The number of letters to Eva began to soar once Juan became president. According to Navarro and Fraser, the newspaper La Democracia claimed that by May 1948 Eva received twelve thousand letters per day from petitioners, prompting her to organize her charities more formally. It is hard to verify the accuracy of this seemingly exaggerated figure, but the method used by the Ministry of Technical Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior eventually numbered the files coming from the presidency and to the Eva Perón Foundation (Fundación Eva Perón), revealing far lower counts.¹¹

The nature of the initial letters to Eva emphasized personal difficulties and the belief that Eva would understand the plight of the desperate. Characteristically, these letters included exaggerated salutations to Juan and Eva, as well as flowery and stylized language. Many, if translated verbatim, would appear to be very stilted compositions. Thus, while the salutations remain the same, the body of the petitions in translation reflect more modern language usage. We see this in a letter written by a single mother, a domestic servant hospitalized with diphtheria. This young woman felt compelled to deal with a secret she had never revealed, even to her own family. Thus she took the opportunity to request that Eva arrange for her six-month-old infant to remain in the foundling home, as no one back in her town in the province of Buenos Aires knew about the child. To that end she wrote on October 20, 1947:

Respectable Lady, first of all please forgive me for daring to write to you but I find myself in a desperate situation . . . and you are my only hope. I am a single mother living in Buenos Aires and my parents don’t know that I left the child in the foundling home . . . for six months and in December I will have to retrieve him—that is, in three days. But I don’t want to tell my parents and it is for this reason that I write to you. I know that one word from you to this home will persuade them to keep the boy for a while longer until I can take care of him in some other way. I will thank you with all my life and I have great faith in you as I always have in General Perón.¹²

She signed the letter with a name she admitted was not hers, but she gave the first two names of her child and claimed that that the foundling home would be able to identify the boy. She then wrote to the foundling home to tell them that she had already petitioned Eva using a false name. This was a clever move on her part, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Letter Writing and the Construction of Peronist Charisma
• Chapter 1 Early Correspondence and Eva’s Creation of Charismatic Bonds
• Chapter 2 Pensions for the Elderly and Infirm
• Chapter 3 Pent-up Needs Juan’s Plan de Gobierno
• Chapter 4 Reaffirming the Charismatic Bond The Segundo Plan Quinquenal
• Chapter 5 Children and la Patria
• Chapter 6 Charismatic Bonds How Long Can They Last?
• Conclusion Reflections on the Enduring Nature of Peronist Charisma
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index