The Shadow of Juan Peron

The elementary years were generally good for me. Still deep in the awkward stages, I didn’t like going to school, but I found lots of subjects to hold my interest. Fourth grade with Mrs. Miller was challenging with that impossible Palmer handwriting, and sixth grade was tough because Mrs. Holder didn’t appreciate the Goldwater sticker and quote on my notebook. Fifth grade, however was a delight, with the kindly Mrs. Kessler effortlessly keeping good order among her 40 charges, including me. She was firm, but she smiled often and made it clear that she loved her work and loved us. I basked in her glow and gave her my best efforts.

The school system was declining without us knowing, but still pretty decent in many ways. The New Math came along in 4^th grade and permanently crippled my math skills. Classes were very large for our pig-in-the-python boomer cohort, one class I remember had 42 students, but only one teacher per class was allowed or needed. We still had the real slate blackboards, smooth as butter and satisfying to write on with white or yellow chalk, unless we were called up against our will. I can still remember the scent of chalk dust from the long erasers made with foam rubber, a piece of wood, and a leather covering on the hand side. I also remember the euphoria of being given the task of going outside at the end of the day to knock the dust out of all the room’s erasers on the brick wall around the corner. Special privileges already, and a taste of the freedom that would come with the dismissal to humpbacked yellow school buses in less than an hour! Of course, with that many students in each class, my turn for cleaning erasers seemed to come around about as often as a blue moon. I still didn’t know what a blue moon was, but I liked the song by the Marcels that came out in 1961.

There was no ADHD diagnosis yet, and corporal punishment was still legal and used often enough to strike fear into every child’s heart. If you were a boy whose age was still in the single digits or even age ten or eleven or more, you just had to find a way to curb your own excesses. Believe me, we had motivation!

I found most learning to be just plain fun and so interesting! Reading and spelling and geography especially were subjects I welcomed almost every day that year. We had all been taught to read phonetically, so we’ve enjoyed reading ever since. We read the instructions and read the stories and read about other places and times giving us plenty of distractions.

We had a geography textbook that year. I think the one that featured Pierre, Peter, and Pedro as a way to expose us to cultures in Canada, the States, and Mexico might have been third grade, but the fifth grade geography was better. We focused for quite a time on South America, a place I had heard of but didn’t know much about. My older brothers had globes and world maps and we subscribed to the National Geographic, so I had seen strange people and places from around the world, but this particular geography book captivated me right away.

We learned the names of the countries and made maps. The Guyanas were always tricky, but we devised our own memory helps. Country by country, we learned about national assets and characteristics, languages, currency, mountains and rivers, natural resources, the people, and more. For example, only the Guyanas and Brazil didn’t use Spanish as the main language. They spoke Portuguese in Brazil because of a line the Pope drew way back when. The Portuguese got an early start in the exploration business and left their signs in many places. All in Portuguese, of course. Except for these, every place else down there was Spanish all the way.

Many of the countries were easy to memorize. Chile ran like a stringbean along the west side of the continent between the Andes and the Pacific for more than 2500 miles! It’s only 2400 from New York to Phoenix. Chile has loads of copper and nitrates. Bolivia, landlocked but blessed with rich tin deposits like in Cornwall, might have been the source of metal for some of those cans of peaches I liked. Paraguay, landlocked further south and the poorest of all the South American countries, drew our pity. Venezuela literally sat on a lake of oil, so they were doing fine. Brazil was huge, nearly as big as the US, and boasted the Amazon River and basin along with that new ultramodern capital city, Brasilia. Everybody knew that the Sugar Loaf and the Christ the Redeemer statue stood high over Rio de Janeiro. I was glad I didn’t have to help them haul that statue up there. Colombia was up north next to Panama, and if we remembered that Ecuador was like the word equator, we could always find it next to Peru. Peru was blessed with tremendous mineral resources, as did other countries straddling the Andes. Most of the South American countries were good enough places with good people, but there was another country that astonished me.

Argentina was special, the gem of South America. In many ways it was similar to the US. It was the most prosperous country on that continent, and it was still among the top ten most prosperous countries in the world, although in the ‘60s when I discovered it, it was beginning to slip. I didn’t know this because textbooks often gave us information that was outdated, and sometimes badly outdated. Argentina had mountains and minerals and coal and oil and waterfalls and farmland and ranches and cowboys! It had had a frontier like we did, moving to the west. We often had Argentine beef in our grocery stores. It had beautiful cities with modern cars and boulevards and plenty of grace and elegance. There were railroads and shipping and exports and major trade. Emigrants liked to go there to work for a better life. Imagine, a country in Latin America that was actually well off! Except for everybody speaking Spanish, the pictures looked like pictures of New York or Chicago. I actually wanted to go there sometime, unlike other places in South or Central America. That’s where my fifth grade geography story ended. It was 1963. We weren’t told that for nearly 20 years there had been a festering problem in Argentina.

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Juan Peron was an army officer who had gone to Fascist Italy before the war and had admired what Mussolini had done there, bringing those ideas home with him. He began to participate in the increasingly turbulent field of Argentine politics, helping to overthrow the government in 1943, then becoming head of the Labor ministry. Other officers pushed him out of this politically powerful position in 1944. He was briefly confined, then emerged to address more than 300,000 people in public and more on the radio in October, 1945. With the help of the federal police to suppress opposition, he won election as president in 1946.

He ran promising economic independence from the US and Britain, greater government intervention in the economy, and “social justice.” He took strong anti-American and anti-British stances, advocated for the government to direct economic expansion and proceeded to nationalize transport and other key businesses. Peron targeted the rich and played on ideas of class envy. In the name of better wages and benefits for workers, he transformed the Argentine economy. He restricted constitutional liberties and altered the constitution so he could be re-elected president in 1951. Trade, manufacturing, and the standard of living began to fall.

Fully in control of the Argentine government, Peron proceeded to print money to finance his plans, focusing on public works. Spending skyrocketed. Inflation became worse and worse, robbing people of their savings and bringing stagnation, unemployment, and general despair. Argentina went into economic decline.

Peron was overthrown in a coup in 1955, fleeing to Spain where he lived for the next 19 years. He returned to Argentina in 1972, and again in 1973, then was elected president again in October of that year. His wife Isabel became his vice president. When Peron died in 1974, she became president, but was herself removed in a coup in 1976.

The Perons might be gone, but from the time of Peron’s exile in 1955 until 2023, a series of Peronist figures and movements came and went. All tried to continue the public spending, inflation, and state intervention Peron had used to transform the country into a hot mess. The country stagnated, deteriorated, and became a has-been just like many other countries in South America. No one could fix it any more. Argentina appeared to be used up, non-repairable, and permanently ruined. Crushing debt and other obligations had made Argentina a perennial economic basket case.

I had followed the goings on there off and on when something changed, as when the Kirchners came on the scene in the 2000s. First Nestor Kirchner became president in 2003, then his wife became president in 2007. Economic problems worsened as more state intervention in the economy and rising inflation and debt left the country in a shambles.

Without following the news from Argentina carefully, a new figure on the scene took me by surprise. Javier Milei had been a rock band vocalist and football goalie before studying economics. Trained as a Keynesian, he became interested in the ideas of the American economists Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, then economists of the free-market Austrian school, including Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. These economists had long argued that the solution to centralized economic control and destructive economic policies was economic freedom, encouraging people to abandon subsidies and government influence in the economy. The Austrian school economists celebrated economic freedom, stable currencies, and free market solutions to everyday problems.

He’s an unorthodox figure to say the least. In the mid 2010s, Milei began to appear on news and opinion programs in the Argentine media. He pulled no punches, making fun of the Kirchners and other Peronist figures. His fame grew as a result. When COVID arrived, he criticized the government’s handling of it and freely expressed his views on the use of the vaccines. He won a seat to the Chamber of Deputies only in 2021, then moved into position to run for president in 2023.

When no one won a majority of the vote in the first round, Milei ran hard for the presidency. The country was in ruins with nearly 40% of the people in poverty, devastating inflation over 100%, and ongoing debt insolvency. He won with 56% of the vote, giving Argentina the first non-Peronist and non-military government since 1946. He astonished the world.

The mere fact that an Austrian school economist had won the presidency of a nation mired in statist stagnation and ruin was a miracle in itself. The headlines now bring stories of one effort after another to cut the bloated government and reduce public spending. Milei intends to end the central bank, slash government bureaucracy, and prevent devastating inflation by making the US dollar the primary exchange currency. There are other breathtaking plans, too.

In the meantime, there is a curious contrast afoot. Venezuela, the US, and Canada, among others, continue pell-mell down the road of reckless debt growth, government intervention in their economies, inflation, and an embrace of socialist policies, just like those that brought such ruin to Argentina. Political parties have embraced these destructive ways in a deliberate effort to transform once-prosperous nations into socialist societies. They seem to be gaining momentum.

But there is a beacon of hope way off to our south. Argentina may take a different way, a better way to the future, looking to free markets and the power of individuals to show how to escape the despair and poverty of Peronism.

Can Milei turn this once-prosperous country around? It will be a monumental task, considering the hold the Perons and Peronism has had on the popular imagination for so long. Perhaps the shadow of Juan Peron can finally be eclipsed by the glow of freedom. We shall be watching hopefully.

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