This is the first in a series of short country studies of various Latin American nations. In what appears to be an editorial attempt to keep these books manageable and marketable, the authors have apparently been programmed to be selective. It has worked out well in this case.
Peter Snow makes several wise decisions at the outset of his Argentine study. He focuses only on what he considers the main political forces of contemporary Argentina, namely the political parties, army, church, labor, and students. Then the Onganía military government (1966-1970) is treated in terms of its impact on these political forces. He has chosen then not to attempt to cover superficially everything from the flora and fauna of Tierra del Fuego to the organization of the provincial judiciary system—the deadly pattern of the past. Instead the author has written something more like an informative monograph on Argentine politics that is remarkably clear and coherent.
Second, Snow makes very good use of available survey data, public opinion polls, and such primary sources as Bobert Scott on parties’ legitimating functions, José Luis de Imaz on the civilian propensities to provoke military interventions, and James Payne’s idea of labor’s threatening use of “political bargaining” to attain governmental concessions. There is also an interesting presentation of survey material on Argentine student politicization from two articles by David Nasatir. This intermixture of concepts and Argentine analysis allows for a certain amount of testing of general assumptions about Latin America.
The major shortcoming of the book is the neglect of contemporary theory and comparative political analysis. There is no use made of theories of modernization, political development, elites, conflict, or role behavior by writers who have had a major impact in the political science field, though not necessarily laboring in the Latin American vineyard.
The other reservations are a matter of interpretation. The “lack of truly national parties” (p. 38) in Argentina is not quite so phenomenal when one considers the U.S. and its mature but factionalized, localized coalition system of one hundred and two functioning party entities (in 50 states plus the congressional parties) replete with local caudillos such as big city mayors, governors, and county leaders. The resilience of Argentine political parties has been reaffirmed once again by the continued role played by those parties the author had written off under Onganía’s interventionist edicts—even relatively minor parties such as the Argentine Socialists (PSA), Progressive Democrats (PDP), and Frondizi’s Movement of Integration and Development (MID).
Snow also accepts the Argentine military contention that the Frondizi and Illia administrations were responsibe for the failure to solve the Peronista problem. Another contention would certainly be that Frondizi’s inabilities to integrate the Peronistas from 1958-1962 were largely the fault of restrictions and controls put upon him by the armed forces. The bankruptcy of the military policy toward Peronism between 1966-1972 is again manifested by the return to civilian political options via electoral alternatives.
Lastly, it is surprising that the author in the appropriate chapters does not deal with what are very decisive Argentine developments: the role of the Third World Priests in civil and religious disobedience and students in the terrorist organizations. Also not discussed is the most important student-worker rebellion in Argentine history—the “Cordobazo” of May 1969 which saw organized and skilled Renault auto workers and students of the National University of Córdoba combine to strike, manifest, and then bring the city to a standstill before they were violently repressed with scores of deaths. This marked the beginning of the end for Onganía’s personal “ten years of military rule.”
