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Menem’s Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Torcuato S. Di Tella
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Extract

On 14 May, 1989, Argentinians Elected The Peronist Carlos Menem as president, causing the first constitutional transfer of power to the opposition since 1916. The situation is so unfamiliar that quite a few Peronists are behaving in their newly acquired positions, particularly in some cultural and mass communication spheres, as though the change had been the result of a violent takeover. After all, the first Peronism was heralded by the nationalist military coup of 1943, and its second coming, in 1973, was the result of a combined strategy of electioneering and guerrilla tactics. Those were the days when many Peronists repeated Mao Tse-tung's dictum that ‘power comes from the barrel of a gun’, and such intellectual habits die hard. Culturally the authoritarian components are still strong in Peronism, partly because most of the progressive, liberal or left-of-centre intelligentsia have flocked to the Radicales or to small leftist parties, renouncing their sympathies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they thought Peronism was the harbinger of revolution, owing to its working-class composition. This, of course, creates a cultural vacuum in Peronism, which has to be filled by whoever comes or remains from the old days. However, many things have changed in the Argentine political climate, and despite the many stragglers the country is becoming accustomed to a pluralist institutional structure.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1990, pp. 85 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1990

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References

1 I leave the word Radicales in Spanish to distinguish it from the English term. In the Argentine context it refers to a moderate, very centrist party, with only a small ‘radical’ wing.

2 I may refer the reader to my articles on the Argentine situation, which appeared in the Government and Opposition issues of Autumn 1982 and Spring 1984.

3 See especially Schmitter, Philippe, ‘Corporatism is dead: Long Live Corporatism!’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Waisman, Carlos, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and their Structural Consequences, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has a very interesting and critical description of the industrialization process in Argentina.

5 The President’s team won, 1–0, but the goal was made by Maradona.

6 The word liberal has in most of Latin America a meaning opposed to what it has in the United States, and to some extent in Europe; it has come to be used almost as a synonym of neoconservative. Because of this I use the compound liberal-conservative to make the meaning clearer.

7 For a recent analysis of the prospects of the Right, see Edward L. Gibson, ‘Democracy and the new electoral Right in Argentina’, unpublished paper presented to the Latin American Studies Association Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 1989.