Between Institutional Survival and Intellectual Commitment: The Case of the Argentine Society of Writers during Perón’s Rule (1945–1955)

An analysis of Peronism constitutes an obligatory point of departure of any study of Argentina’s history since 1945. The advancement of the popular masses toward the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October 1945, clamoring for their new leader (the Colonel Juan Domingo Perón) inaugurated a new era for this nation. For some, especially for those who marched on that day, it represented the beginning of a period of hope. For others, those who looked with stupor at the crowds “invading” the city, this was the start of a decade of undemocratic practices and populist pseudo-fascist reforms. Perón’s rise to the presidency in 1946 would find the majority of the Argentine intelligentsia in the ranks of the opposition. The intellectuals were particularly worried by the emergence of this political movement which, in their eyes, was a combination of a local incarnation of European fascism and the ‘barbaric’ regime of the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas. In 1956, the writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada summarized the horror that this march signified for the “decent people.” He declared it the threat of a “San Bartolomé del Barrio Norte” (an affluent neighborhood in Buenos Aires) and characterized the Peronists as “those sinister demons of the plains which Sarmiento described in El Facundo.” In his description Perón was depicted as a local Franco, a Mussolini or a Hitler. Only those intellectuals who defended different versions of local nationalism joined the enterprise of the colonel-turned-popular-politician and put their hopes in him.