Democracy, Militarism, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1930–1966

Democracy, Militarism, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1930–1966

Author: Marvin Goldwert

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1477301860

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Until 1930, Argentina was one of the great hopes for stable democracy in Latin America. Argentines themselves believed in the destiny of their nation to become the leading Latin American country in wealth, power, and culture. But the revolution of 1930 unleashed the scourges of modern militarism and chronic instability in the land. Between 1930 and 1966, the Argentine armed forces, or factions of the armed forces, overthrew the government five times. For several decades, militarism was the central problem in Argentine political life. In this study, Marvin Goldwert interprets the rise, growth, and development of militarism in Argentina from 1930 to 1966. The tortuous course of Argentine militarism is explained through an integrating hypothesis. The army is viewed as a “power factor,” torn by a permanent dichotomy of values, which rendered it incapable of bringing modernization to Argentina. Caught between conflicting drives for social order and modernization, the army was an ambivalent force for change. First frustrated by incompetent politicians (1916–1943), the army was later driven by Colonel Juan D. Perón into an uneasy alliance with labor (1943–1955). Peronism initially represented the means by which army officers could have their cake—nationalistic modernization—and still eat it in peace, with the masses organized in captive unions tied to an authoritarian state. After 1955, when Perón was overthrown, a deeply divided army struggled to contain the remnants of its own dictatorial creation. In 1966, the army, dedicated to staunch anti-Peronism, again seized the state and revived the dream of reconciling social order and modernization through military rule. Although militarism has been a central problem in Argentine political life, it is also the fever that suggests deeper maladies in the body politic. Marvin Goldwert seeks to relate developments in the military to the larger political, social, and economic developments in Argentine history. The army and its factions are viewed as integral parts of the whole political spectrum during the period under study.


Military Government and the Movement Toward Democracy in South America

Military Government and the Movement Toward Democracy in South America

Author: Howard Handelman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780253105554

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Sophisticated investigations of governmental transition in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador. Discusses such issues as the undercurrents of popular discontent, and the recent progress toward increased civilian political participation.


God's Assassins

God's Assassins

Author: Patricia Marchak

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1999-10-12

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0773568212

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God's Assassins tells the story of state terrorism in Argentina through interviews with participants on all sides of this issue. They include military officers, "third world" priests, Catholic church officers who supported military objectives and methods, former members of guerrilla movements, survivors of prison camps, journalists, trade unionists, and others who experienced state terrorism in Argentina. Patricia Marchak combines excerpts from these interviews with documents and media reports from the time and her own insightful study of Argentina's history to provide an analysis of the process as well as the causes of state terrorism. The graphic and moving interviews in God's Assassins show the complexity of these causes and indicate that there is no simple explanation of the period. Was the head of a major guerrilla movement a double agent? Did the intelligence service actually believe it was engaged in the third world war? Why did the Catholic church turn on its own priests? Through her interviews, Marchak reveals much that will never appear in official documents.


The Cambridge History of Latin America

The Cambridge History of Latin America

Author: Leslie Bethell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 9780521465564

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This is an authoritative large-scale history of the whole of Latin America, from the first contacts between native American peoples and Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present day.


Latin America

Latin America

Author: Leslie Bethell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-06-13

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 9780521595827

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The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present. Latin America: Politics and Society since 1930 consists of chapters from Part 2 of Volume VI of The Cambridge History that provide a thorough account of political movements in Latin America. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.


Dictatorship, Democracy, and Globalization

Dictatorship, Democracy, and Globalization

Author: Klaus Friedrich Veigel

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0271048050

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The collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001, involving the extraordinary default on $150 billion in debt, has been blamed variously on the failure of neoliberal policies or on the failure of the Argentine government to pursue those policies vigorously enough during the 1990s. But this is too myopic a view, Klaus Veigel contends, to provide a fully satisfactory explanation of how a country enjoying one of the highest standards of living at the end of the nineteenth century became a virtual economic basket case by the end of the twentieth. Veigel asks us to take the long view of Argentina&’s efforts to re-create the conditions for stability and consensus that had brought such great success during the country&’s first experience with globalization a century ago. The experience of war and depression in the late 1930s and early 1940s had discredited the earlier reliance on economic liberalism. In its place came a turn toward a corporatist system of interest representation and state-led, inward-oriented economic policies. But as major changes in the world economy heralded a new era of globalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the corporatist system broke down, and no social class or economic interest group was strong enough to create a new social consensus with respect to Argentina&’s economic order and role in the world economy. The result was political paralysis leading to economic stagnation as both civilian and military governments oscillated between protectionism and liberalization in their economic policies, which finally brought the country to its nadir in 2001.


Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889-1954

Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society, 1889-1954

Author: Shawn C. Smallman

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-04-03

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0807860506

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For more than half a century, the Brazilian army used fear and censorship to erase aspects of its history from public memory and to create its own political myths. Although the military had remarkable success in promoting its version of events, recent democratization has allowed scholars access to new materials with which to challenge the "official story." Drawing on oral histories, secret police documents, memoirs of dissident officers, army records, and other sources only recently made available, Shawn Smallman crafts a compelling, revisionist interpretation of Brazil's political history from 1889 to 1954. Smallman examines the topics the Brazilian military wished to obscure--racial politics and terror campaigns, institutional corruption and civil-military alliances, political torture and personal rivalries--to understand the army's growing involvement in civilian affairs. Among the myths he confronts are the military's idealized rendition of its racial policies and its portrayal of itself as above the corruption associated with politicians. His account not only illuminates the origins of the military government's repressive and often brutal actions during the 1960s and 1970s but also carries implications for contemporary Brazil, as the armed forces debate their role in a democratic country.


The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the "Good Neighbor"

The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the

Author: Randall Bennett Woods

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2021-10-08

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 070063181X

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The Good Neighbor Policy was tested to the breaking point by Argentina-U.S. relations during World War II. In part, its durability had depended both upon the willingness of all American republics to join with the United States in resisting attempts by extrahemispheric sources to intervene in New World affairs and upon continuity within the United States foreign-policy establishment. During World War II, neither prerequisite was satisfied, Argentina chose to pursue a neutralist course, and the Latin American policy of the United States became the subject of a bitter bureaucratic struggle within the Roosevelt administration. Consequently, the principles of nonintervention and noninterference, together with “absolute respect for the sovereignty of all states,” ceased to be the guideposts of Washington’s hemispheric policy. In this study, Randall Bennett Woods argues persuasively that Washington’s response to Argentine neutrality was based more on internal differences—individual rivalries and power struggles between competing bureaucratic empires—than on external issues or economic motives. He explains how bureaucratic infighting within the U.S. government, entirely irrelevant to the issues involved, shaped important national policy toward Argentina. Using agency memoranda, State Department records, notes on conversations and interviews, memoirs, and personal archives of the participants, Woods looks closely at the rivalries that swayed the course of Argentine-American relations. He describes the personal motives and goals of men such as Sumner Welles, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Harry Dexter White, Henry A. Wallace, and Milo Perkins. He delineates various cliques within the State Department, including the contending groups of Welles Latin Americanists and Hull internationalists—and describes the power struggles between the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Board of Economic Welfare, the Caribbean Defense Command, and other agencies. Of special interest to students of contemporary history will be Woods’s discussion of the careers and views of Juan Peron and Nelson Rockefeller—for American policy contributed in no small way to Peron’s rise, and Rockefeller was the man chiefly responsible for the U.S. rapprochement with Argentina in 1944-45. Woods also gives special attention to the impact of the Wilsonian tradition—especially its contradictions—on policy formation. The last chapter, dealing with Argentina’s admission to the U.N., sheds some light on the origins of the Cold War. Wood’s investigation of the Argentine problem makes a significant contribution toward the understanding of U.S.-Latin American relations in the era of the Good Neighbor Policy, and provides new insights into the evolution of hemispheric policy as a whole during World War II. It reflects the growing emphasis on bureaucratic politics as a principal determinant of U.S. diplomacy.


Moving Forward, Looking Back

Moving Forward, Looking Back

Author: Sarah M. Misemer

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0838757650

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Many critical shifts in concepts of time and society's consciousness of modernity were derived from the railway and World Standard Time in the nineteenth century. These innovations restructred the way people viewed the world and dealt with "public" and "private" time. The forward, projectile motion along a linear track mimicked the passage of public chronological time. Conversely, the train also invoked a private, nostalgic view of tim as the traveler was yanked from his/her traditional view of the space/time continuum via the train's velocity. Travelers observed the landscape "disappear" in their backward glance from the window--although the landscape and interior compartment's space remained stagnant. This optical illusion caused passengers to perceive the world in new ways. Thus, the train unveils a conflictive blend of nostalgia and progress in the River Plate, as these countries move forward, but look back.