P o s t– W o r l d W a r I I P o p­u ­l i s m

shantytown. Her diary became a best-­seller in Brazil and was eventu­

ally translated into thirteen languages. It became her ticket out of the
shantytown. But millions of others stayed, eating putrid food, dying
from preventable diseases, miserable and desperate.
Many in Latin America began to believe that truly revolutionary
change was needed. Meanwhile, Latin American nationalists began to
see their war­time “good neighbor” as, once again, their old imperialist
adversary. Nationalism was at the heart of their anti-­US attitude. Fre­
quently, nationalism joined in a powerful combination with another
ideology, Marxism. But not all Latin American nationalists became
Marxists in the postwar period, by any means. Nationalist leaders
who made a vigorous outreach to the common people without being
Marxists ­were often called populists.

Post–World War II Pop­u­l ism

1 Pop­u­lism was basically a leadership style, one that focused on mass
politics and winning elections. The postwar period saw significant
strides in Latin American democracy as voting was opened to women,
the voting age was lowered to eigh­teen, and literacy requirements
­were struck down. Many countries made voting a legal obligation.
In Brazil, a majority voted to make Getúlio Vargas president again
in 1951—­ despite his clearly demonstrated dictatorial inclinations—­
because his government had raised the hope of material betterment for
so many. In the postwar period, the nationalists who had come to power
all over Latin America depended, as few governments before them,
on the freely expressed suffrage of large numbers—­basically a co­ali­tion
of middle-­class people and industrial workers.
Pleasing this co­ali­tion was harder than pleasing a handful of
landowners ­here, a handful of landowners there, and trusting elec­
toral management to do the rest, as neo­co­lo­nial rulers had done. To
win elections in the postwar period, the nationalists adopted popu­
list po­liti­cal tactics, such as flying candidates around the country for
huge rallies and making ample use of radio. The populists bashed the
old rural oligarchies and their imperialistic accomplices outside the

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country. Populist appeals ­were calculated to attract working-­class vot­

ers with a vision of radical improvement of living conditions, without
scaring away middle-­class voters with images of class warfare. Na­
tionalism helped give a sense of unified purpose to the new co­ali­tion.
2 Populist politics kept power away from the old coalition—­the
combination of oligarchic and foreign economic interests—­that had
governed most of the region before 1930. The economic power of land­
owners and international financiers had been eclipsed when the great
export boom went bust, but they ­were poised to make a comeback when
the import–export system revived. The old co­ali­tion still exercised deci­
sive influence over voting in the countryside. So Latin American nation­
alists had to win—­and win big—­in the industrializing cities.
Meanwhile, Latin American industrialization began to slow
alarmingly after World War II. With imported consumer goods back
on the shelves, the window of opportunity closed for ISI. US consumer
goods ­were again available to satisfy pent-­up demand. To compete, Latin
American manufacturers needed capital goods: new machinery for their
factories. Trade surpluses in the war years had provided buying power
to acquire industrial machinery from Eu­rope and the United States. But
Eu­rope was rebuilding its own factories destroyed by the war, and that
rebuilding created a shortage of capital goods on the world market.
3 US economists, backed by unanimous US business and dip­
lomatic pressure, recommended a return to pre-1929-­style import–
export trade. Latin American countries, explained the US economists,
should do what they did best: concentrate on their “comparative
advantage” as low-­wage producers of raw materials and foodstuffs.
That would help the world’s industrial countries, in turn, do what they
did best: produce all the gadgets (for instance, cars and electronics)
and cultural goods (such as movies and clothing styles) that defined
modernity. According to liberal economic theory, the result would
be an improved standard of living for everyone. According to Latin
American nationalists, on the other hand, the result would be a return
to neo­co­lo­nial­ism. For them, industrialization had become the bot­
tom line of national development, the only thing that could level the
economic playing field between Latin America and the already indus­
trialized countries.

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This “developmentalist” interpretation found an influential

voice in the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), set
up by the United Nations. The guiding light of ECLA was an Argen­
tine, Raúl Prebisch, who became the most influential Latin Ameri­
can economist ever. His economic analysis focused on Latin America’s
“peripheral” position (exporting raw materials) within a global econ­
omy increasingly dominated by an already industrialized “center”
(the United States and Eu­rope). For most Latin American economists,
Prebisch’s center-­periphery, or de­pen­den­cy, model replaced the liberal
theory of comparative advantage as a guide to action. The problem,
they believed, was not how to find comparative advantages on the pe­
riphery, but how to escape from it and join the industrialized center.
4 During the postwar years, then, Latin American nationalists
faced a set of stiff challenges: urgent social needs, a counterattack from
their old po­liti­cal adversaries, a weakening economic base, and the hos­
tility of the United States. Populist politics was, in large mea­sure, a
response to these challenges. Events in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico
illustrate variants on the populist theme.
Argentina, the richest, most industrialized, urban, and literate
country in Latin America during this time, also had the most dynamic
nationalist movement: Peronism. The Argentine military had con­
trolled the country during the 1930s, acting sometimes as national­
ists of a right-­wing sort, but more often as guardians of the old social
hierarchy. Juan Perón, for whom the Peronist movement is named,
was a nationalist army officer who, as secretary of labor, won a strong
following among Argentine workers. Fearing Perón’s influence, the
government removed him, but on October 17, 1945, an im­mense dem­
onstration of workers converged on downtown Buenos Aires to demand
his return. Ever after, Peronists solemnly commemorated October 17 as
Peronist Loyalty Day, and their enemies annually groaned about it as
Saint Perón’s Day. Perón gave the frightened Argentine elite a lot to
groan about after his election by a wide margin in 1946.
5 Perón’s presidency of Argentina (1946–­55) witnessed the rapid
­unionization of the country’s industrial workforce. For de­cades, the
industrial working class would remain the mainstay of the Peronist
movement. Perón and his wife, Eva Duarte—­Evita to the millions who

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adored her—­raged, in good nationalist fashion, at the traditional land­

owning oligarchy, a class unloved by urban people in general. Evita
played a large role in mobilizing the Peronist movement. Her dramatic
gestures in favor of Argentina’s poor helped the movement broaden its
populist constituency beyond or­ga­nized labor.
A glamorous actress of radio soap operas when she met Perón,
Evita had been poor and socially ostracized as a girl. She, too, had come to
Buenos Aires from “the sticks,” at the same time as had so many Peronist
workers. She felt she understood them. She certainly spoke their lan­
guage. Even her lavish wardrobe, with a Eurochic far from Frida Kahlo’s
peasant garb, suited the Argentine workers’ taste. Evita’s flashy style in­
vited them to savor her triumph: “I’m one of you. And I ­haven’t forgotten
you. My glory is yours, too.” Her greatest pride, she declared, lay in de­
serving “the love of the humble and the hatred of oligarchs.” She created
a Social Aid Foundation where she liked to hand out charity personally.
6 Evita helped win the vote for Argentine women in 1947 and advo­
cated equal pay for equal work. But her slavish adoration of Perón reeked

JUAN AND EVA PERÓN addressing the multitude in downtown Buenos Aires on
October 17, Peronist Loyalty Day. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.

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of patriarchal tradition, and she believed that a woman’s highest aspira­

tion should be marriage and motherhood: “We ­were born to be homemak­
ers, not to go around in the street.” Evita never used the word leader to
describe herself. “He is the leader,” she said of her husband. “I am only
the shadow of his superior presence.” In her impassioned speeches, more
powerful than Perón’s, Evita presented herself as a mediator, a “bridge
of love between Perón and the people.” Evita died suddenly of cancer in
1952, amid wrenching demonstrations of public grief. The picture on
page 263 shows Evita’s last public appearance, shortly before her death.
Nationalism guided Peronist economics, and the United States
protested vociferously. The Peronist government tried to end foreign
own­ership of, well, almost everything in Argentina. In addition to pub­
lic utilities, it bought or expropriated the country’s important meat­
packing plants, banks and insurance companies, and, most famously,
the extensive British-­owned railway system. At the same time, it
expanded social ser­vices and the bureaucracy to administer them.
The centerpiece of the Peronist program was a five-­year drive for
industrialization-­or-­bust, subsidized at the cost of the agricultural
export ­sector. What happened, however, was more bust than indus­
trialization. A severe economic downturn and an unpop­u­lar tiff with
the Vatican undermined the movement’s middle-­class support.
7 The military exiled Perón in 1955. But Peronism, by improving
workers’ lives, restoring their dignity, and, above all, giving them hope,
had won a permanent place in many Argentine hearts. Perón could ac­
tivate Peronist loyalties even from exile. In 1957, for example, a quarter
of the electorate voided its ballots in response to his remote control. The
Peronists could not quite govern, but nobody e­ lse could rule without
them. A rocky road lay ahead for Argentina.
Brazilian history ran more or less parallel, except that Brazil’s
populist co­ali­tion was not as strong. Brazil’s urban working and middle
classes, in a country more rural and more dependent on export agricul­
ture, remained proportionately much weaker than Argentina’s. Still,
the Vargas years had created momentum—­and the Vargas years w ­ ere
not over. When the Brazilian military ushered Vargas out of office in
1945, the nationalist leader had already prepared a populist come­
back by founding not one, but two po­liti­cal parties. Vargas returned

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to the presidency in 1950 as the victorious candidate of one of these,

the Brazilian Workers’ Party. But he accomplished little. In 1954,
he committed presidential suicide, quite literally. His suicide note
ranted against dark “forces and interests” that “sucked the blood of
the Brazilian people” and frustrated his nationalist goals. The dramatic
death of Vargas produced an awesome outpouring of public grief, simi­
lar to the Argentine reaction at Evita’s death two years previously.
Brazil’s populist co­ali­
tion bumped ahead under other presi­
dents. But development fever upstaged the commitment to the im­
poverished millions like Carolina Maria de Jesús. The new capital
at Brasília, conceived as an ultramodern design of massive, widely
spaced apartment blocks, was constructed with vast outlays of gov­
ernment resources at the expense of surging inflation. Its location
in the sparsely populated interior of the country optimistically sig­
naled a new frontier. Its design was decided by an international com­
petition and reflected the futuristic urban planning of Le Corbusier.
Brasília’s strikingly original public buildings, such as the partly subter­
ranean cathedral, made their creator, Oscar Niemeyer, the best-­known
Latin American architect of the century. This “space-­age” urban mirage
took shape in the late 1950s, during the poignant years of hardship
described in Carolina de Jesús’s diary. Inaugurated in 1960, Brasília is
the perfect symbol of the post-­Vargas moment in Brazil.
The perfect symbol of the moment in Mexico, on the other hand,
was the PRI: the Institutional Revolutionary Party, with an accent on
Institutional rather than Revolutionary. The military had now been de­
finitively subordinated to the PRI, and Mexico had a one-­party system of
admirable stability—­but questionable democracy—­in which each outgo­
ing president handpicked the next PRI candidate. And the PRI candi­
date never lost. The only thing “revolutionary” about the PRI now was
a nationalist devotion to the Mexican Revolution’s heroes and slogans.
But the Mexican Revolution, if defined as a fight for social justice and a
vindication of the downtrodden masses, was dead in the postwar period.
Mexican industrial growth continued, however. Landowner
power had been definitively shattered, and the PRI held the po­liti­
cal loyalty of the many who had benefited from land reform. Because
the government marketed food grown on the restored common lands

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called ejidos, it could hold food prices down and thereby, in effect, sub­
sidize urban living standards. Although the Mexican Revolution had
been largely a rural uprising, its ultimate winners ­were urban people.
Industrialization continued. The Mexican currency held rock-­steady,
in contrast to roaring inflation elsewhere. As in Brazil, the economic
pie grew overall, but the redistribution of wealth stopped. The major­
ity of Mexicans would not see great improvement in their welfare dur­
ing the PRI’s half-­century rule.

Onset of the Cold War

The 1950s ­were a time of frustration for most Latin Americans. The
United States, now definitively replacing Eu­rope as the ultimate model
of Progress, displayed a brilliant postwar prosperity, with living stand­
ards previously unimaginable. Glossy magazines and movies showed
Latin Americans what they ­were missing. The good life, proclaimed
US media, meant having a refrigerator, even a car. But, for most Latin
Americans, to have a refrigerator was a stretch—­and a car, absurdly
out of reach. Having modeled “the good life” to this attentive and yearn­
ing audience, the United States offered little help in getting there.
Now a superpower, preeminent in the world, completely un­
challenged in the hemi­sphere, the United States no longer seemed
a good neighbor. Latin American disenchantment with the United
States began in 1947, with the announcement of the US Marshall
Plan. The Marshall Plan spent vast sums rebuilding Eu­rope to jump-­
start postwar prosperity and limit the appeal of communism. Among
the major recipients of Marshall Plan aid w ­ ere the US enemies of
World War II. Former Latin American allies of the United States, also
struggling for prosperity, thought they rated similar help; but Latin
America got only about 2 percent of US foreign aid between 1946 and
1959. Latin American diplomats raised the issue at hemispheric meet­
ings, but US priorities lay elsewhere. Western Eu­rope, with the Soviet
armies nearby and vigorous communist parties in several countries,
was judged the danger zone, followed by Asia. Latin American issues
hardly concerned US policymakers.

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