Mitos, paradojas y realidades en la Argentina peronista (1946-1955)

Economic nationalism was an integral part of Perón’s repertoire of populist politics. It remains one of the most enduring images of that era and among the most important of Perón’s legacies to Argentine political culture. In Mitos, paradojas y realidades, Noemí Girbal-Blacha demonstrates the extent to which Peronist discourse was often contradicted in practice. The Perón governments of the 1940s and 1950s did represent a rupture in Argentine economic policy in some ways but also a continuation of the liberal tradition in others. Girbal-Blacha makes use of the recent opening of archives of public banks, such as the Banco Industrial (later the Banco Nacional de Desarrollo, or BANADE), to study Peronist economic policies through the avatars of the nationalized banking system and public credit.A recognized authority on Argentine agrarian history, Girbal-Blacha devotes an early chapter to the history of industrial credit in the “Nueva Argentina.” Though interested readers are advised to consult Marcelo Rougier’s more thorough and authoritative study on the topic, Girbal-Blacha does echo Rougier’s findings on banks’ preferential treatment of large, established industrial firms. Perón may have extolled the “small and medium bourgeoisie” in speeches, but the state-controlled banking system showed no reluctance to favor SIAM–Di Tella and other large industrial firms—holdovers from the liberal era so reviled in Peronist discourse. In addition, despite Perón’s boisterous claims of “economic independence,” Girbal-Blacha (like Rougier) offers a devastating indictment of Perón’s policies. The overwhelming majority of these loans, to large and small industrial firms alike, were not intended to increase economies of scale or to improve technology and efficiency—thereby establishing the foundations of a genuine economic independence—but rather to pay off debts and to cover wage bills and bonus payments (aguinaldo).Similarly, Girbal-Blacha’s painstaking study of loans to the agrarian sector demonstrates that, despite publicly excoriating the landed oligarchy, big agriculture did not fare badly under Perón. Indeed, it was favored with the “vuelta al campo” begun in the early 1950s to contend with declining agricultural productivity and the bottlenecks this created for the industrial sector. Yet Perón’s government also represented change in the countryside. The most original and interesting chapter deals with the financial support for agricultural cooperatives. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, largely to circumvent the speculative behavior of the commercial firms and middlemen, the cooperative movement was greatly strengthened under Perón. A movement originally centered in the pampean provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, cooperativismo under Perón took on national dimensions. The author presents a fascinating and well-documented case study of the financial support offered to Chaco cotton cooperatives, undoubtedly one of the most important factors (though not the only one) in cementing the Chaqueña bourgeoisie’s support for Perón’s government.The book’s focus on the banking system is a powerful one, and it offers an important and illuminating new angle on the history of the Peronist state’s economic policies. Perhaps a weakness of the book is the failure to consider this history from the side of business. When it does, on occasion, address entrepreneurial history, the book suffers from a certain glibness. It castigates the Argentine bourgeoisie for failing to take advantage of a lost opportunity of immediate postwar economic prosperity without analyzing why (if true) it failed to do so. Her book actually reveals that the bourgeoisie, rather than failing, simply worked the system and took advantage of policies to deal with the constraints and opportunities established by Perón’s government. Plant modernization and the search for foreign markets were difficult, if not impossible, with economic policies coming from the top that worked against them.The book contains some factual errors—for example, the description of CGE president Jose Ber Gelbard as the onetime “president of the powerful Federación Económica de Tucumán” (p. 45), an organization that Gelbard never even belonged to, let alone presided over. This indicates, to me, that the author did not approach the study of business with anything like the rigor that she employed in investigating the state policies that affected business. But given our rudimentary knowledge of business and business history for these years, such errors (and there only a few) are understandable and do not detract from the overall worth of the volume. The final picture she leaves us is of a Peronist government that represented both continuity and change. Large, established industrial firms continued to monopolize the lion’s share of credit, but small industry also had unprecedented access to the banking system. The big estancieros represented in the Sociedad Rural Argentina benefited most from the reoriented priorities of the second administration, although regional agrarian economies also flourished through financial support for the cooperatives.The frequent disconnect between Peronist economic nationalism as a discourse and as an actual policy perhaps explains the lavish credit bestowed on mass communications—the press, radio, and film—making possible the funding of the Peronist state’s elaborate propaganda machinery. The subject of the book’s final chapter, such support came at the expense of public investment in the economy and serves as a nice metaphor for Peronism’s fundamentally contradictory nature

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