Juan Perón

Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine army officer and politician who served as president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and again from 1973 until his death in 1974. Drawing his support from industrial workers and trade unions, and helped by his second wife Eva Perón, he raised wages, expanded social welfare and nationalised key industries, while ruling in an authoritarian way that silenced the press and jailed opponents. The movement he founded, Peronism, has dominated Argentine politics ever since.

Perón was born on 8 October 1895 in Lobos, in the province of Buenos Aires, where his father managed a rural estate. He entered the national military college at sixteen and became an infantry officer, an instructor and a writer on military history and strategy. He was a keen sportsman who excelled at boxing and fencing. In 1930 he took a minor part in the coup that overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen. In 1939–1941 he was posted to Italy as a military observer, and he was impressed by the way Benito Mussolini's regime organised workers and the state, though he later described his own aims in different terms.

On his return Perón joined the GOU, a secret lodge of nationalist officers that took power in a military coup in June 1943. He took the then minor post of head of the Department of Labour, which he turned into a secretariat and used to build alliances with the trade unions. He backed strikes, supported collective bargaining and introduced pensions, paid holidays and protections for rural workers, gaining a mass following among the working class. By 1944 he was also minister of war and vice-president.

Alarmed by his growing power, rival officers forced him to resign and arrested him in October 1945. On 17 October huge crowds of workers marched into the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to demand his release, and the government gave way. The date became the founding day of Peronism. Days later he married Eva Duarte, a radio and film actress. In the presidential election of February 1946, he campaigned against the open interference of the United States ambassador, Spruille Braden, and won by a margin of about eleven points.

Perón called his doctrine justicialismo, presenting it as a third way between capitalism and communism. With the reserves Argentina had built up during the Second World War, his government bought the British-owned railways, nationalised the central bank, telephones and other utilities, controlled foreign trade through a state agency and promoted industry. Real wages rose sharply, union membership grew to millions, and the working class gained a share of national income it had never had before. Women won the vote in 1947, largely through Eva's campaigning, and her foundation built hospitals, schools and homes and distributed aid on a vast scale. A new constitution in 1949 entrenched social rights and allowed the president to be re-elected, and Perón won a second term in 1951 by a margin of more than thirty points.

His rule was also authoritarian. Opposition politicians, among them the Radical leader Ricardo Balbín, were imprisoned, and hundreds of opponents, including the dissident labour leader Cipriano Reyes, were held in police detention centres where torture was routine. Newspapers were censored, bought up or closed, and the leading independent paper, La Prensa, was expropriated in 1951. Universities and the courts were purged, and public employees and schoolchildren were expected to show loyalty to the regime. Argentina also became a refuge for many Nazis and collaborators after the war, including the Holocaust organisers Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, who arrived with false papers through escape networks that Perón's government tolerated and in part organised.

From 1949 the economy deteriorated as export earnings fell, inflation rose and the reserves were spent. Eva died of cancer on 26 July 1952 at the age of 33, depriving Perón of his most effective ally. In 1954 he turned against the Catholic Church, which he suspected of backing an opposition party; his government legalised divorce and ended religious education in state schools. On 16 June 1955 navy aircraft bombed the Plaza de Mayo in a failed attempt to kill him, killing more than 300 civilians, and that night Peronist crowds burned churches in Buenos Aires. In September 1955 a military uprising, the self-styled Liberating Revolution, overthrew him.

Perón went into exile in Paraguay, Venezuela, Panama, where he met the dancer María Estela Martínez, known as Isabel, and the Dominican Republic, before settling in Madrid in 1960 under the protection of Francisco Franco. He married Isabel in 1961. In Argentina the military banned Peronism and even the mention of his name, but his movement survived through the unions and he directed it from abroad. Weak civilian governments alternated with coups, and in the late 1960s left-wing Peronist guerrillas, the Montoneros, and right-wing Peronists both claimed to speak for him.

The military regime finally allowed Peronists to stand in elections in 1973, and Perón's stand-in, Héctor Cámpora, won in March. When Perón returned for good on 20 June, gunmen from the Peronist right opened fire on leftist groups in the crowd of hundreds of thousands at Ezeiza airport, killing at least thirteen people. Cámpora resigned, and in September 1973 Perón was elected president for a third time with about 62 percent of the vote, with Isabel as vice-president.

Back in power, Perón sided with the unions and the right of his movement against the left, publicly breaking with the Montoneros in May 1974. Political violence escalated, and his minister of social welfare, José López Rega, organised the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, a death squad that murdered left-wing activists. Perón died of heart failure on 1 July 1974 in Olivos, near Buenos Aires. Isabel succeeded him but was overthrown by the military in March 1976, opening the darkest dictatorship in the country's history.

Perón remains the central figure of modern Argentine politics. Supporters credit him with giving workers dignity, rights and a political voice, and with building a welfare state and national industry; critics see a demagogue who ruled as a strongman, crippled democratic institutions and left economic policies that fed chronic inflation. Peronist parties, in many ideological shades, have governed the country for much of the time since his death.