Ambassadors of the Working Class

Ambassadors of the Working Class is cast “as a transnational history of the hopes and fears stirred by populist politics in the Americas and the competition between Peronist and U.S. labor diplomats for the conquest of the region's labor movement” (p. 15). It is more an engaging history of an idealistic peronista challenge to U.S. labor influences in the hemisphere. U.S. versus Argentine labor activisms was no competition; the United States was a bulldozer, Argentine successes uncertain. Even so, this is a terrific story, absorbingly told. In 1946 President Juan Perón marshalled a corps of government-sponsored worker-attachés who fanned out across the globe to promote the peronista revolution in worker rights. Strong sections of the book include those on three points of Argentine outreach to workers and students in Cuba, Colombia, and Bolivia. The impact of these efforts, though, was neither lasting nor transformational. Ernesto Semán argues convincingly that attaché descriptions of the United States and elsewhere represent a peronista international gaze and an insight into peronista identity formation. A decades-long overview of Argentine-U.S. relations, however, overplays Argentine antagonisms toward the United States, underestimates long-term bilateral financial and economic cooperation, and overpitches the importance U.S. policy makers attached to Argentina. Semán offers a two-page “close reading” of George F. Kennan's 1946, eight-thousand-word “long telegram.” What might this foundational document tell us of how “U.S. debates spurred by the rise of Perón echoed abroad?” (p. 62). The smoking gun is one word—Argentina—in one oblique passage: “This applies to such widely separated points as Germany, Argentina, Middle Eastern countries, etc.” (ibid.). Semán also makes a linked overestimation of the significance of the attaché program in the historical sweep of U.S. Cold War imperialism and hemispheric anti-American resistance. The attachés, he writes, “trigger[ed] serious and extended concern among U.S. officials and labor leaders ... [who] coordinated efforts to prevent the U.S.-based attachés from fulfilling their objectives on American soil” (p. 108). American Federation of Labor secretary George Meany and U.S. government officials had no interest in helping attachés spread the peronista word. There were hostile incidents but no serious, extended, or coordinated efforts

Competition (biology · Democracy · Economic history · Globe · Government (linguistics · Labor history · Labor relations · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

• Repensando el 17 de Octubre y la forja del lazo político peronista

  Open Access•Roy Hora•Prismas - Revista de historia…•2024

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