Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón

Abstract

Rita Martes, an Argentine single mother and furniture store worker, wrote a letter to the Eva Perón Foundation describing her dire living conditions and asking for a bicycle for her son. To her surprise, Rita found that Eva Perón not only answered her letter and had the bicycle delivered to her son but also arranged for the installation of a prefab house for her. Eva's disposition to respond to similar requests is a well-known fact, but actual epistolary evidence is hard to come by as the Eva Perón Foundation archives are missing, apparently destroyed by the military that ousted Juan Perón in 1955. What rescued Rita's letter from oblivion was the fact that Eva's office forwarded the case to a separate dependency for its fulfillment. Sifting through the scattered records hosted in the Archivo General de la Nación, Donna Guy was able to recover hundreds of similar letters, reconstructing a significant portion of the correspondence to and from Juan and Eva Perón. Guy selected several excerpts from petitions, including many from isolated rural towns, to analyze how the process of state formation intersected with the interests of poor citizens—the kind of individuals whose voices rarely appear as part of the public record—and to thus enrich our understanding of how the Peróns established enduring emotional bonds with their followers.This book constitutes a logical sequel to Guy's Women Build the Welfare State, in which she shows how, in pre-Peronist Argentina, a system of semiprivate charities, mostly run by middle- and upper-class women, operated as an intermediary between the state, which ultimately provided the funds, and the growing ranks of the Argentine poor. In this new book, Guy shows that the transition from the semiprivate system to a fully fledged welfare state was staggered and mediated by the personal intervention of Juan and Eva Perón. A case in point is the establishment, in 1946, of a pension and subsidies program aimed at the elderly, the infirm, and single mothers. The program's scope was revolutionary but lacked the necessary funding and infrastructure to deliver the assistance. Furthermore, bureaucratic glitches and confusing paperwork delayed the application of the program. Beleaguered applicants found that writing directly to Juan and Eva could effectively untangle the web of red tape that was stalling their cases. Similarly, petitioners who wrote to the Peróns regarding a wide range of personal ailments, especially lack of health care and education opportunities for their children, found that the government or the Eva Perón Foundation would provide at least temporary relief. Guy studies the petitioners' writing and finds the expected melodramatic and sometimes sycophantic tones that accompanied the rise of Peronism. But she also finds a certain air of familiarity that many letter writers used when addressing the Peróns and a clear confidence that, for a change, someone would take care of them. Though the analysis is pointed, the excerpts talk for themselves, showcasing the paucity of resources ravaging the poor in supposedly prosperous mid-twentieth-century Argentina.But not all the correspondence was about grievances. Guy incorporates in her study an entirely different kind of letter in which the writers suggested ideas to accelerate the economic and social transformations that Argentina was experiencing. The letters were in response to Juan Perón's request for citizen input while drafting the first and second “five-year plans.” Enthusiastic citizens heeded the call, flooding the government mailboxes with propositions that ranged from the visionary (a blueprint for a submarine airplane) and the bizarre (a UFO detection system for merchant ships) to the sensible (the transference of struggling community-sustained rural schools to the public system). The exercise was not entirely futile, as some practicable suggestions found their way to the appropriate office for implementation. Yet many letter writers took advantage of the opening to denounce the incompetency and corruption of local authorities, including Peronist ones. In those cases, the national Peronist government appeared to favor local officials over common citizens, thus showing the limits of the charismatic bond to undo the inner workings of the state.For Guy, the enduring popularity of Juan and Eva Perón among working-class Argentines cannot be explained without considering the practice that common citizens developed of writing to the president and the first lady, a practice sustained by a considerable amount of positive feedback. Well written and engaging as well as analytical, this book does not seek to offer a groundbreaking revision of the already complex scholarly understanding of Peronism. But it does offer a good teaching tool and a reminder of the redistributive nature of populism in a time when this term has increasingly become synonymous with hollow promises and electoral manipulation.