Interview with Kerry Bolton on Peron and Peronism

The lastest offering from Robert Stark is an interview with Kerry Bolton on Peron and Peronism. There has been a long debate about whether Peron was on the Right or on the Left. Some say he was a fascist. However, that is probably not the case. What rightwinger would eulogize the death of Che Guevara as a hero and a comrade? That makes no sense. Peron instituted many populist reforms in Argentina, turning it into something resembling a social democracy. However, he had authoritarian tendencies. His wife Eva Peron shared power with him. Eva rose to the elite by sleeping her way to the top, which I suppose is one way that is always available for any ambitious woman to move up ladders of government or business. Eva very much abused her power, was very authoritarian, and she even had people killed. Peron’s followers were called the “shirtless ones,” working class or proletarian heroes. The Peronist was simply “the man of the street,” the “ordinary man.” Later Peronism split into right and left wings, the right wing being more or less fascist and the left wing being more socialist or Communist. These splits hated each other so much that they used to shoot it out with each other pretty regularly and campaign rallies often turned into massacres large and small. Sections of the Peronist Left later took up arms as the urban guerrillas known as The Montoneros.

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0 thoughts on “Interview with Kerry Bolton on Peron and Peronism”

  1. Actually it was Peron’s second wife, Isabel, who succeeded Juan as president. This was during Peron’s second period of rule in Argentina. His first, which was the one memorialized in the musical “Evita”, and which prominently featured Eva Peron, was from the late ’40s to around 1954. Eva died around 1952, and Juan was ousted from power in 1954. Then in 1973, Juan returned to power in an election, and died in power one year later. His wife, Isabel, who was vice-president, then ruled ineffectively until she was ousted by a military coup in 1976.

  2. I’ve stumbled upon this post. As an argentine let me explain something: Peronismo is the ideology of power. The actions of any peronist have one single objective: to obtain power and maintain it.
    Perón played conservative with the conservatives and reformist with the reformists. In this country there are capitalists, socialists, christian democrats, green ecologists, and femminists who call themselves “peronists”. Because Perón had no ideology, he had several different sets of ideals and he changed them according to the audience he was facing at a particular time.

  3. The is a major error in this post: Tupamaros was a Uruguayan guerrilla (the current president, Mujica, was one of their members), in Argentina the name of the Peronist left-wing guerrilla was Montoneros.

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