Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina is a highly readable biography of Juan Domingo Perón by Robert Crassweller, a former International Telephone and Telegraph general counsel for Latin America. The author is not satisfied with offering just another, albeit highly entertaining, overview of Perón and Peronism. Crassweller has a more ambitious goal in mind, namely to explain the cultural and psychological factors that account for Perón’s immense power and the extraordinary longevity of the mass movement bearing his name.
The book poses a question that has always troubled historians and social scientists: how, given all its tremendous early promise, can Argentina’s decades of economic decline, social stalemate, and bitter political conflict be explained? This is Argentina’s first great enigma, while Perón himself is the second one: how did Perón achieve such great personal popularity and yet accomplish so little? Crassweller avers that the usual explanations “often seem incomplete because there is usually something in the background sensed but not fully brought forth, a hint of chambers beyond chambers. . . . [T]he missing element in the explanation often seems to be an understanding of the motivation and conduct of the individuals who form the priesthood of public life, and of those who follow them inarticulately” (p. 9). How successful is this “life and times” account in supplying this missing element?
Crassweller advances the thesis that both Perón’s “ascent into legendry” and his failures were founded on the extremely close psychological bond that united him with the Argentine masses. This unremarkable interpretation is well argued and amply documented (the notes and index are useful, as are the photographs) in a chronological narrative of Perón’s very remarkable career.
The book’s more problematical assertion is that, to a great extent, Perón’s achievements flowed from his personification of Argentina’s Hispanic and creole cultures and the indigenous ethos of the pampas and the gaucho. No doubt there is some truth to this line of reasoning. For those who are comfortable with monocausal culturalist notions of national character, this all may seem quite persuasive. But even aficionados of psychological and cultural explanations might be more confident of the correctness of this argument had the author compared Argentina with other societies with a similar ethos and political culture. Have these societies also had leaders such as Perón? If not, why not? Readers of a more sociological bent— especially those who strongly suspect that Argentina’s “enigmas” have something to do with the specificities of the country’s social structure and political economy— probably will remain skeptical of Crassweller’s interpretation, although, like me, they will certainly find much insight in his well-told tale.
