Rubén M. Perina, currently an officer of the OAS, has written a narrative with running analysis of the administrations of Generals Onganía, Levingston, and Lanusse, the period from President Illia’s overthrow in 1966 to Perón’s retorno in 1973. The book is a translation (not entirely felicitous) of the author’s doctoral dissertation in international relations at the University of Pennsylvania: it maintains high standards of documentation and even-handed analysis. A conceptual frame surrounds the body of the work: ostensibly research was undertaken to measure “performance” and “efficiency” of military government. It does not come close to doing so, chiefly because the author does not systematically isolate criteria from elsewhere against which the soldiers’ performance could be set (in strict logic, such a project is probably undoable). But this perfunctory use of a conceptual frame is perhaps more a nod to current academic fashion than a serious flaw. The book is to be prized for what it does well.
Following an extended sketch of the historical background, the author hits his stride with a chapter on “The Illia Government and the Collapse of Democracy (1963-1966).” Perina makes use of Samuel Huntington’s image of a “praetorian society,” one in which “social forces act starkly [“desembozadamente”] without political institutions (political parties or parliaments) to mediate, moderate, and refine the socioeconomic conflict” (p. 67). Of the parties themselves he says: “one might suppose that ... all the political parties benefit from the existence of a competitive constitutional multiparty system, and that they would therefore exert themselves to maintain it. But the Argentine parties appeared determined invariably to undermine the only system on which parties normally depend for their continuing political activities” (p. 76). Carefully, perceptively, he maps the dead end into which Argentine political society had been staggering since 1955 (or, if you will, 1930). The immediate cause of paralysis was, of course, the system’s inability either to coopt or to eliminate the Peronist remnant. But something new was also inserted into the political parallelogram: the military accepted a grandiose notion of itself as saviour of the nation, restorer of traditional values, and generator of economic progress. Indeed, with Onganía’s accession to power, “desarrollo económico” became the incantatory watchword of the bravely proclaimed “Argentine Revolution.”
Both quietly fizzled out over the next seven years (next four, actually: Perina makes clear that the Levingston and Lanusse regimes were desperate ad hockery). The “revolution” turned out to be a form of “exclusionist corporatism” from which popular sectors had little to expect. Economic “plans” proliferated; promised social and political plans did not. Onganía’s political fortunes—indeed, his legitimacy—followed Argentina’s economic fortunes faithfully. The rapid escalation of discontent to the cordobazo of May 1969 he ascribes almost entirely to economic factors. To the extent he is correct, this makes for very depressing reading. I suspect, however, that Perina shares the Argentine technocrat’s faith that if only the right economic combinación can be found, bife twice a day will be restored, and peace and justice will follow automatically. It will surely take more than that.
Measurement or no measurement, military rule was a failure. Perina’s valuable book also makes clear that the system failed.
