‘Bruce Plan’ and Marshall Plan: The United States's Disguised Intervention against Peronism in Argentina, 1947–1950

Abstract

United States' s charge d'affaires at Buenos Aires, John Moors Cabot, remarked in 1946 of the Argentine presidential candidate Colonel Juan Domingo Peron: 'Whenever we look around for a really good stick with which to beat a certain gent, we never seem to be able to find one handy.'1 The statement illustrates how Good Neighbor pledges of non-intervention in the internal affairs of the Latin American states handcuffed the administration of Harry S. Truman as it sought to combat the Peronist movement in the late 1940s. Although Carlos Escude and C. A. MacDonald show how the United States and Britain used economic boycott and political manipulation to lever Peronist Argentina away from a statist economic programme,2 the Truman administration, which wished to draw all of the Latin American states in its train, saw that an open attack on or condemnation of Peron would backfire and tried to hide its leverage behind the facade of non-intervention. Peron won the Argentine election of February 1946 by advocating 'social justice' for working people and national development through 'populist' statism.3 At the heart of his economic programme was the Instituto