Duke University Press

Review
Author(s): Joseph R. Barager
Review by: Joseph R. Barager
Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Aug., 1980), pp. 524-526
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2513310
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524 HAHR I AUGUST

drama; for to submit to his blindness meant, as he well knew, ceding

power to a man, Ramon Castillo, hostile to all the values by which he
lived. All of which is to say that specialists and general readers alike
would welcome a first-rate biography of Ortiz centered upon the tortured
politics of his presidency.
What Felix Luna has given us instead is a superficial and meretricious
paste-up. Except for a handful of interviews, his sources are the published
memoirs of Ortiz' contemporaries. He counterfeits immediacy by tran-
scribing excerpts as though the witnesses were speaking directly to the
reader; and he hypes the prose further by appending more or less rele-
vant snippets from popular magazines of the time, in the fashion of John
dos Passos' camera eye. These sources permit some insight into the re-
lation between Justo and Ortiz and into the byzantine machinations by
which Ortiz was saddled with Castillo as his vice-president. We learn
about the progress of Ortiz' disease and also about his household econ-
omy, as both his doctors and his servants have unburdened themselves.
Despite Luna's repeated assurances that Ortiz was a passionate democrat,
however, we do not learn why he was a democrat, nor what democracy
meant to him in the Argentine context, nor how he reacted to all but a
few of the conflicts of the time (and those, predictably, scandals or per-
sonal confrontations), nor in fact what were the issues that divided him
from his fellows and were about to polarize the country at large. One
must hope that Luna's trivializing effort will only encourage others to do
a needed job properly.
Simon Fraser University RONALD C. NEWTON

Juan Domingo Peron: A History. By ROBERT J. ALEXANDER. Boulder,

1979. Westview Press. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii,
177. Cloth. $15.00.
Few, if any individuals outside of Argentina have followed the career
of Juan D. Per6n as closely as Robert J. Alexander. Thus he is well
prepared to undertake a detailed analysis of the accomplishments and
shortcomings of the Argentine dictator and his impact upon Argentina
and its neighbors. Juan Domingo Peron: A History is indeed a very wel-
come addition to the growing list of monographs by U.S. scholars on
Argentina.
Since Per6n was one of the Latin American area's most controversial
figures over the last four or five decades, there is a tendency in books

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BOOK REVIEWS I NATIONAL PERIOD 525
and articles about him either to attack him as the source of all Argentina's
problems or to present him as one of the greatest leaders of modern
times, if not for all recorded history. Alexander has tried hard to be
objective. He gives Per6n credit for such accomplishments as getting on
with industrialization, nationalizing the foreign-owned railroads, and pro-
viding labor with substantial economic, social, and political benefits. At
the same time he faults Per6n for his neglect of agriculture, wasteful
conduct of Argentine financial affairs, and his deleterious impact upon
the Argentine society by provoking political confrontations and relying
upon dictatorial methods barely masked by a facade of constitutional
rhetoric and make-believe. Alexander quite properly points out Per6n's
failure to provide for a viable Peronist successor. Indeed, Per6n soon
eliminated any Peronist who showed any evidence of not following pre-
cisely where Peron chose to lead.
There are some significant aspects of the Per6n story which are passed
over rather quickly-for example, the involvement of Juan Duarte, Pe-
ron's brother-in-law and private secretary, in the black-market meat scan-
dal which preceded Duarte's alleged suicide. The army general who at
Per6n's orders investigated the scandal and uncovered Duarte's major
role in it, was one of the ringleaders of the 1955 coup. Duarte tried to
escape to Europe but Peron's henchmen headed him off at the airport.
As portefios were wont to say at the time, "We know Juan Duarte com-
mitted suicide but what we don't know is-who shot him?"
There is no discussion of the abortive military coup of late 1951 in
which Alejandro Lanusse (president, 1971-1973) was involved. Lanusse
was imprisoned, for his participation, until Peron's overthrow in 1955.
Moreover, in 1951, organized labor took to the streets to create bar-
ricades and demonstrate support for Peron. In 1955 that kind of support
was lacking. One of the reasons was Peron's public and scandalous in-
volvement with teen-age girls. Alexander states that one of them was a
certain Nellie Rivas, who became Per6n's mistress. He does not mention
that she became Per6n's mistress at age thirteen. Even the most ardent
labor supporters of the regime were likely to be shocked at that. Fur-
thermore, the spectacle of the Commander-in-Chief of the Argentine
Armed Forces leading troupes of his teen-aged companions through the
streets of Buenos Aires on motor scooters-en route to fun and games at
the presidential residence-was hardly calculated to please the country's
military leaders.
Finally, in discussing the contract with a Standard Oil of California
subsidiary (to develop Argentine petroleum resources), the part which
alienated Argentines of all political opinions is omitted. It provided that,

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526 HAHR I AUGUST

in case of a dispute between the company and the Argentine government,

the final arbiter would be an international oil expert-not the Supreme
Court of the Argentine Republic!
There are a number of points in this volume on which specialists in
the field of Argentine affairswill differ with the author. One of the most
obvious ones is Alexander's use of material obtained from an interview
with Peron in Madrid on September 1, 1960. He states that Peron lied
to him on a number of points yet presents the interview without anno-
tation to guide the unwary reader through the labyrinth of lies, half-
truths, and distortions with which Peron tried to beguile him. In this
reviewer's opinion, there is a substantial mass of reliable evidence to
indicate that Peron was a consummate and perhaps pathological dissem-
bler and liar. One can understand Alexander's reluctance to annotate the
interview. Properly done, that would require going through it, not para-
graph by paragraph or sentence by sentence, but word by word. None-
theless, he should either have done just that or not included it in his
study of Juan Domingo Peron. Otherwise, as published, it could give an
unwary reader a seriously distorted picture of Peron and his times.
Canandaigua, New York JOSEPH R. BARAGER

Os Guerrilheiros do Imperador. By DEcio FREITAS. Rio de Janeiro,

1978. Ediv6es Graal. Bibliography. Pp. 170. Paper.
This slim volume, one of a series on Brazilian popular movements by
the same author, surveys the Cabanada of Pernambuco (1831-1835). It
is based on Portuguese-language published sources and on limited ar-
chival research in Rio and Recife.
In his introduction, Freitas affirms the necessity of developing a his-
toriography of the oppressed to counter the ideology of the dominant
classes. Objectivity is not a goal: "In a society founded on class division
and struggle, a disinterested, impartial, and non-partisan social science
cannot exist" (p. 11). Within his Marxian framework, Freitas analyzes
Pernambucan society and Brazilian politics. His interpretation is not new:
members of the provincial elite initiated the revolt as a political uprising,
but the impoverished, landless masses turned it into a social movement
that threatened the status quo. Yet the Cabanada never became more
than a jacquerie, for "the peasant masses are historically incapable of
revolutionary initiatives" (p. 166). Rather than confront the central di-
lemma of landownership, the peasants simplistically called for the return
of Pedro I to redress their grievances.

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