An Unbroken Loyalty in Turbulent Times: La Prensa and Liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1946

Abstract

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has revised one of the mostcontroversial periods in Argentine history: the sixteen years between the mi- litary coup of September 1930 and the presidential election of Juan Perón in 1946. These years have been traditionally interpreted as a transition period, a “prelude” to the emergence of Peronism, characterized by the decadence of the nineteenth-century liberal republic in a context of political and ideological crisis and economic and social transformation. While acknowledging some of those features, new studies emphasize the blurred political and ideological boundaries of the main political and social actors and locate them within the broader histo- rical framework of the interwar years. For example, they show that the Radical and Socialist parties and the conservative groups that gathered in the ruling Concordancia coalition were deeply divided and far from being ideologically homogeneous, and that varied positions on state economic intervention, free trade, and industrialization generated both sharp intra-party differences as wellas cross-party coincidences.