Political Order and Political Decay (45 page)

If one wants to look for deeper historical causes of the twentieth century reversal, there are two that stand out. The first is the concentration of land ownership, particularly in the agricultural regions radiating out from the port of Buenos Aires. Beginning in the 1820s, the Argentine state leased out huge tracts of land that were eventually purchased by a small number of families for very low prices. As late as the third decade of the twentieth century, a group of fifty families owned eleven million acres of property, or 13 percent of the land in Buenos Aires province. The six largest landowners at the time of World War I had incomes larger than the national budget of Argentina's main ministries. This consolidation took place in a temperate agricultural zone with moderate amounts of rainfall, conditions perfectly suitable for family farming.

Democracy does not automatically spring up under favorable climatic conditions. It is the result of deliberate political choices about the way that resources are distributed, which in turn are driven by ideas and ideology. In American history, there was always a strong tension between demands for the egalitarian distribution of federal lands in the West to individual families, and those of large land speculators and corporations that wanted to consolidate landholdings. These battles were fought in Congress, and to the extent that family farming prevailed, it was due to passage of measures like the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and the 1862 Homestead Act, which deliberately encouraged smallholding.
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Unlike the United States, early postindependence Argentine governments decided on very different policies that concentrated land ownership and created a landed oligarchy that then dominated the country's politics up through the 1930s. The United States made one choice and Argentina another; climate and geography had little to do with these outcomes.
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The second long-term historical factor is leadership style and Argentina's ambivalent embrace of institutions. One of the country's founding leaders was the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, a caudillo who was governor of Buenos Aires province from 1835 to 1852. Rosas was himself a wealthy landowner who built a political base by conquering Indian lands and giving them away to his followers as estancias, or large estates. In doing so he established the hegemony of his class over Argentine politics. He was also good at rallying supporters around opposition to a variety of enemies, such as neighbors Brazil and Paraguay, the European powers, and the opposition Unitarios who supported a strong, centralized government. Among other acts, he decreed that all official documents be prefaced with the slogan “Death to the Vile, Filthy, Savage Unitarios.” These were not simply words; in the course of his dictatorship, Rosas had thousands of opponents put to death, including 3,765 individuals who had their throats cut. A George Washington he was not.
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Rosas was not an institution builder. His dictatorship produced few laws, least of all a constitution on which a new national government could be based. In a precedent that would be followed by later Argentine leaders, he built a following based on loyalty to his person rather than to any coherent set of ideas or institutions. Argentina did not get a constitution until 1853, and it was not until 1880 that the final regional rebellions and Indian uprisings had been suppressed, and Buenos Aires made the national capital.
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Argentina thus was saddled with two bad historical legacies: a powerful landed oligarchy and a tradition of personalistic authoritarian leadership. The decades following this consolidation of national power demonstrated, nonetheless, that these historical legacies did not necessarily condemn the new republic to economic decline or political decay; it was just the opposite. Economic growth took off in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of the twentieth, the political system began to open up as well.

Samuel Huntington argues that for political order to be achieved during the process of modernization, institutions must accommodate increasing demands for political participation. This is in fact exactly what happened in Argentina between 1880 and 1930. The political system of the late nineteenth century, like that of Italy, Germany, and any number of other European countries, was based on a limited male franchise with strict property qualifications that allowed the system to be dominated by the landed elite. This oligarchic republic soon came under challenge. Economic growth and incipient industrialization, as well as the huge number of foreigners flooding into the country, created new social groups that sought representation in the political system. The first was the middle class—professionals like lawyers and doctors, civil servants, and other more educated people who made their livelihoods outside of the agrarian economy. This group formed a base of support for the Unión Civica Radical, or Radical Civic Union, in the 1890s. The Radicals were initially excluded from political participation by widespread fraud and vote manipulation on the part of the landed oligarchy, and in response staged several violent revolts to gain power. A more enlightened wing of the ruling conservative party came to power in 1911 under President Roque Sáenz Peña, which expanded suffrage to all adult males. This vastly expanded the voter rolls (though immigrants remained excluded) and resulted in the election in 1916 of Hipólito Yrigoyen, whose Radical Party remained in power for the next fourteen years.

The Radical Party was not, in fact, very radical; its leadership included members of the rural oligarchy, and it had no intention of trying to upend the existing social order or commodity-based export economy. Instead it behaved much like early democratic political parties in the United States, Greece, and Italy, building a large political base through the clientelistic distribution of public offices to supporters and creating a modern machine run by professional political functionaries. Using these techniques, the Radical Party became the first truly national party in Argentina. In addition, Yrigoyen himself perfected the personalistic political style of Rosas, building a cult of personality around himself rather than around the ideas represented by his party. The Radical Party thus engineered the transition from traditional oligarchic patronage to modern clientelism, much as the Italian Christian Democrats were to do after World War II.
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Up to this point, there was really no reason why Argentina could not have developed politically in the manner of the United States or Britain. Industrialization was leading to the mobilization of new social groups—first the middle classes and then a growing working class. The political system was adjusting to the demands for participation posed by these groups, in the shape of an expanded franchise and new political parties representing their interests. There was violence as each of these rising groups sought representation, but there was plenty of violence as well in the United States and Britain at comparable periods of their industrial development. The old landowning oligarchy could feel its influence slipping away, but no one in the new political constellation that emerged by the 1920s was fundamentally challenging its position. Indeed, one social fact that distinguished Argentina from Peru and Mexico was that it had no impoverished peasantry that could organize to demand radical land reform.

Whereas the Costa Rican elite made good political choices in 1948, the Argentine elite made some very bad ones, beginning with the military coup that took place in September 1930 that brought down Yrigoyen's radical party government. The coup was the result of collaboration between the old landowning oligarchy and the military. The 1929 stock market crash in New York and the beginning of the Great Depression had reduced demand for Argentina's exports and brought on an economic crisis. While the setback was not nearly as great as in other countries of the western hemisphere, it nonetheless triggered great fears among the old elite that their economic and social position was under threat.

The military, ironically, was the one part of the Argentine state that had undergone considerable modernization. The government had sought the advice of—who else?—the German military in seeking to professionalize its own armed services, and in the early decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a much more autonomous army that could control its own promotions and protect its interests from politicians. Many in the military were unhappy with Yrigoyen's interference in their chain of command. They had also by that time developed their own ideas about the need for a quasi-Fascist corporatist organization of a new Argentine state, along lines that Hitler was to implement in Germany during the 1930s. The military was thus prepared to join forces with the old oligarchy to close off the system to the new social actors.
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Argentina's landed oligarchy could easily have continued to enjoy their lifestyles and wealth even as they lost political power, just as the landowning aristocracy in England did. The coup could not prevent the larger process of social change from occurring as Argentina industrialized; this group would lose power in any event over the next generation. Had the global economic crisis occurred a decade later, things might have turned out differently. But the elite's commitment to democratic norms at this point was still fragile, and they judged their own self-interest poorly.

The period following the 1930 coup is known in Argentina as the “infamous decade,” in which a series of military men turned politicians tried to rule the country through electoral fraud, repression, and outright illegality. The conservative oligarchy did not achieve any of the goals the authors of the coup intended, and a decade of jockeying for power prepared the ground for a second military coup in 1943. This event in turn paved the way for the rise of Juan Perón, a military officer who used his position as labor minister in the military government to build a party and a power base for himself.
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It is not my intention to provide a detailed account of the subsequent history of Perón and Peronism, and the complex sequence of military coups and democratic restorations that occurred in the period from 1943 until 1983 when democracy was more stably restored in Argentina and the military exited from politics. What makes these struggles hard for outsiders to understand is that they do not fit neatly into the ideological categories used to describe twentieth-century European politics. Perón and his first wife, Eva, could be seen as left-wing figures insofar as they built a power base among the working class and labor movement, and followed redistributive social policies that were highly beneficial to the industrial proletariat. On the other hand, Perón was a military officer whose mobilizational techniques borrowed much from fascism, with its effort to organize the state in a corporatist fashion. He had little use for Marxism, emphasizing nation and Argentine patriotism instead. Rather than building a disciplined Leninist party with its ideologically motivated cadres, he built a populist mass party based on his ability to shower clientelistic favors on supporters. In addition, he and particularly his wife Evita followed in the tradition of Rosas and Yrigoyen in building a highly personalistic following in which loyalty was owed less to a party with a clear program than to a particular charismatic leader. This ideological incoherence continued long after Perón departed the scene: the Peronist party followed a conservative neoliberal policy under Carlos Menem in the 1990s, and then a leftist-populist program under Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in the 2000s.

Perón invented a populist tradition that continues to the present day, engaging in social policies that won him votes in the short run but that were economically disastrous and unsustainable over time. He tried to maintain full employment through customs tariffs and quantitative restrictions on imports, overvalued the peso to make imports cheaper, and taxed agricultural exports to pay for his generous social policies. These measures introduced a host of distortions into the economy, required an ever-more-complex set of exchange controls to administer, and in the end led to long-term declines in productivity and deficits that could be covered only through the printing of money. Under Perón, the Argentine working class became the hyperpoliticized political base of a single, controversial individual.
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But in another respect, the real damage was done by the first coup in 1930, which brought the military into politics and signaled that Argentine elites were not willing to play by liberal democratic rules of the game. The coup undermined the rule of law: the Argentine Supreme Court retroactively approved what should have been clearly denounced as an unconstitutional seizure of power, as a result of the new government's ability to pack the court with its own members. This practice of court packing—something the U.S. public rejected soundly when Franklin Roosevelt tried to do it in 1937—has been practiced by virtually every subsequent Argentine president, with terrible consequences for the rule of law.
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Argentina was born with a clean slate. Unlike Mexico and Peru, it did not inherit a society that was highly stratified by class or ethnicity. It did well in its early days precisely because it could adopt, like Britain's settler colonies, a set of liberal economic policies that encouraged entrepreneurship and growth. What Argentina's political elites did was to turn the country into a polarized, class-ridden society whose divisions made it incapable of achieving consensus around sensible pro-growth economic policies. These elites included the old oligarchy that feared losing power and social status, the military, which sought to protect its own autonomy at the country's expense, the leadership of a working class that soon had benefits to protect, and a broader political class that traded on personality rather than policy.

Costa Rica and Argentina have something in common: they both failed to follow the predictions of materialist theories of how early colonial institutions or natural resource endowments determine contemporary success, in either economic development or political institution building. This doesn't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong. It does mean that they are insufficient to fully explain the process of political development in many specific cases. This process is highly complex, involving multiple factors including leadership, international influences, and ideology in addition to climate and geography.