What do you think about he Argentinian blue book?

In 1945, at the very end of the argenArgent dark decade ( that was a period of political chaos and coups) Peron arose as a figure to run in the newly convocated 1946 election. Since he was the favorifav, on a last ditch attempt to prevent him from winning the pro USA politicians released a document called "the blue book", that denounced Peron as a pro axis politician and a naI sympathetic. The document was laughed off at the time and pro us imperialistix propaganda and Peron won anyway, but checking his biography it seems that Peron being part of the cabinet of the dictator Pedro Ramirez was the main reason why Argentina was the last country of the continent to join the allies (and under extreme pressure from the usa). Só what can be said about the blue book?

ImI tagging the main expert of Argentina to take part in the discussion, @juanml82
 
I'm hardly an expert, but here goes:

In the early years of the 20th Century, president Roca modernized and professionalized the armed forces, enacting conscription and hiring German advisers for the army. As it often happens when armed forces from different countries act as mentors and pupils, the Argentine Army ended up rather Germanophile during the first half of the 20th century, and cooperation agreements were signed. During this period there was also a significant influx of immigrants and public education, also created by the same Roca back in the 1880s, got to the task of educating the children of those immigrants and assimilate them into the Argentine nation. And, in the foreign affairs front, Argentina was firmly into the British sphere of influence, being an almost colony of the British Empire, where most of the exports from the agrarian export model went. This also led Argentine leadership to misjudge existing and (more importantly) future American influence in the Americas. For instance, during this period the USA had invaded the Dominican Republic. In 1919, the Argentine cruiser 9 de Julio, on tour through the Caribbean, went to Dominican Republic and hailed the Dominican Republic flag while in port, instead of the American flag, which lead IIRC to a relaxation of the American rules over the occupied population.

So, by the 1930s we have an economy depending on exports to the UK, which is now preferring to import from its dominions, which lead to the Roca-Runciman's pact (This Roca being the first Roca's son) which was positively described by Roca Jr. as "With this pact, Argentina is economically a part of the British Empire". Since this first generation of Argentines, most of them children of migrants, and the army officers were living through a raise of nationalism (the kind of thing public education is meant to create) I think it's easy to understand how this wasn't seen in a good light. Public opinion was demanding a country which set its own destiny and policies, and not a country subservient of global powers. So, what we have in society is a pro-British business elite, with contacts within the officer corps (because many officers came from that elite), a germanophile segment of the Army officers, a growing nationalistic sentiment among the general population, and your usual 1930 antisemitic part of society who happened to exist all over the world in that period.

As World War 2 raged, it seems the UK preferred a neutral Argentina as it would be easier to let Argentine ships to reach the UK under a flag of neutrality than having to set up convoys all the way to the South Atlantic. The USA leadership wanted all of Latin America to dance at its tune. The nationalists in Argentina wanted Argentina to dance at its own tune and leave the UK and the USA minding their own businesses. There was another screw up after the battle of the River Plate, in which the Graff Spee sunk in front of the Uruguayan coast. The pro-British president of the time, Roberto Ortiz, wanted to declare some sort of pro-Allied neutrality and secretly consulted with both the UK and the USA. Both countries were against such a declaration and nothing came out of it... until the New York Times published the diplomatic contacts months later - that incensed the nationalists in Argentina: why was the president of Argentina consulting foreign policy with foreign powers? (nevermind that it was the reasonable thing to do)

After Pearl Harbor, Roosvelt wanted all of Latin America to declare war on the Axis. In Argentina's case, that seemed to be against the interests of the UK and angered the nationalists - Argentina, they believed, was too much of a regional power to dance at the American tune. Eventually, the 1943 coup was staged both to prevent conservative pseudofeudal lord Robustiano Patron Costas to become president through electoral fraud and to prevent a declaration of war against the Axis. The coup succeed and Argentina remained neutral. Apparently, as the painting was drawn on the wall for the Axis and American pressure increased, Peron was one of the officers to support a declaration of war against the Axis, which ended up happening in 1945. While this avoided the full extent of American diplomatic wrath, the damage was already done and Argentine diplomacy was greatly miscalculating the kind of power the USA would wield after the war, mistakenly believing a "third position" was possible in South America during the Cold War.

As for Peron himself, he was a nationalist and a pragmatist. He had gone to Italy to study mountain warfare in the 1930s and did like what Mussolini was doing. But he wasn't a copycat. His intention was to avoid Mussolini's mistakes. I find calling Peron a fascist instead of a peronist insulting - it's like saying "Hey, that brown people south of the Rio Grande can't possibly create their own political movements. All they can aim is to copy and paste the stuff their betters in Europe create". It's xenophobia.

And as for Peron being nazi, the evidence strongly contradicts this. Peron opened doors to Jews in the public sphere and maintained good relationships with Israel - Argentina, under Peron, was the first country to recognize it as an independent State. Peron was a corporativist. The way he saw society, he was trying (and in many occasions managed) to control it so it wouldn't fall into communism, and he strongly pushed for the "race melting pot" ideal, which included jews, as well as all other ethnicities and religions. Yeah, some Nazi war criminals escaped to Argentina, as they escaped everywhere. But they did so under fake ids and lacked all kind of public support from the governments. The only nazis who Peron openly welcomed were scientists and engineers, like Kurt Tank, just like the Americans and Soviets did (or do we just forget who was NASA's first director and what he did during WW2?)
 
Peron wasn't a Nazi or a facist because that would imply he had some kind of ideology. Peron only did what was good for Peron and nothing else.

Like the post above mine said, Argentina didn't declare war on the Axis because it wasn't convenient for the country nor its british masters.
 
I posted in 2017 on the Blue Book and other possible reasons for Peron's victory at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/juan-peron-loses-1946-election.413381/ (my apologies for any links that may no longer work)

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The Argentine presidential election of 1946 was both more free and more closely contested than is often realized. (The 1951 election in which Peron defeated Ricardo Balbin cannot compare with it in this respect; see my post at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/3thpn1zhIHQ/ca1n8sA2gCsJ for details.) It was indeed the first free presidential election Argentina had had since 1928; the elections of the 1930's were notoriously rigged by the so-called Concordancia with its "patriotic fraud." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancia_(Argentina) Yes, in 1946 there was violence during the campaign--mobs of Peronistas breaking up opposition rallies and sometimes killing people, etc. Nevertheless:

(1) The opposition candidate, Jose Tamborini of the "Democratic Union" (a coalition of the Radical, Socialist and Communist parties--and with the informal backing of the Conservatives, who did not run a candidate of their own) did have full access to the media, both print and radio. Indeed, he had the support of virtually all the big newspapers.

(2) Tamborini also had ample financial support from big business to offset Peron's labor support (though it is true that some businesses eventually hedged their bets and provided Peron with money as well).

(3) It seems to be universally agreed that whatever irregularities happened during the campaign, the actual balloting was free and secret, and the counting of the ballots was accurate.

(4) The results of the election--a majority supporting Peron and a strong minority opposing him--do seem to be in accord with observers' views of the actual state of Argentine public opinion at the time. Peron won 52.8 percent of the vote to 42.9 percent for Tamborini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_general_election,_1946 (In the electoral college, the vote was 299-66 according to Wikipedia; other sources give 304-72. https://books.google.com/books?id=z6J0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PT115 The Argentine electoral college, which has since been abolished, shared with its US counterpart a tendency to exaggerate the percentage of votes given to the winning candidate.)

So in essence, the question is, Was there anything that could have changed the minds of about 5 percent of the Argentine electorate? I doubt that a single POD could do the trick, but here are a few things I can think of:

(1) The US unintentionally helped Peron by the openness with which it opposed him--thereby allowing him to pose as the candidate of Argentine nationalism. A popular Peronist slogan was "Peron or Braden". To be sure, Spruille Braden, the outspokenly anti-Peronist US ambassador had departed months earlier, but he had departed to become Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. On February 12, 1946--two weeks before the elections--the US State Department issued its famous "Blue Book" on Argentina, attacking Peron's support for the Axis during World War II, and the "Nazi-Fascist" aspects of the "new Argentina."

The "Blue Book" was intended for two audiences--Latin American governments and the Argentine electorate. Both were urged to regard Peron as the hemisphere's leading villain. But the Blue Book failed with both. The Chilean government said that Braden had not proved his case. The Cuban government said that restoration of inter-American solidarity should take precedence over continuing to fight a war that had ended in 1945, and the Brazilian government took a similar position. As for the Argentine electorate, it is generally agreed that the Blue Book helped Peron by causing resentment of what was regarded as US interference in Argentine internal affairs. Peron accused Braden of being the "inspiration, creator, organizer and virtual chief" of the Democratic Union (UD), that "unholy oligarchy-communist alliance."

So the opposition might have done better if someone more sensitive to Argentine nationalist feelings than Braden had been Ambassador and then Assistant Secretary of State. Interestingly, the US charge d'affairs in Buenos Aires urged the State Department *not* to release the Blue Book before the elections, fearing exactly the backlash that took place.

(Indeed, at least one source thinks the Blue Book in itself was decisive: ""A shift of only 140,500 votes away from Peron would have given Tamborini the popular majority. More to the point, a shift of only 37,350 votes in five electoral districts would have given him a majority in the electoral college. The narrowness of Peron's eledctoral victory makes it more than likely that the Blue Book served to swing the balance in his favor." https://books.google.com/books?id=oIWpDxJH1PkC&pg=PA45)

(2) Maybe Tamborini was not the right candidate--he was certainly dull. (Even the names of the Democratic Union's ticket--Tamborini and his running mate Enrique Mosca--were a target of ridicule--"the tambourine and the fly"...) OTOH, I'm not sure who else was available. Former President Alvear, who in his last years had finally united the "personalist" and "anti-personalist"--i.e., pro-Yrigoyen and anti-Yrigoyen--wings of the Radical party had died in 1942. It's probably too early for the two men who were to dominate Radical politics for the next generation--Ricardo Balbin and Arturo Frondizi (Frondizi was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1946). Maybe someone from the left wing of the Radicals would have a better chance of cutting into Peron's working-class support. One such leftist was Amadeo Sabattini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Sabattini whom Peron had actually offered the vice-presidential nomination on his own ticket. But whie Sabattini turned Peron down, he was also critical of the "centrist" leadership of the Radicals and opposed to the whole idea of the Democratic Union. So I doubt there was any realistic chance of his becoming its candidate.

(3) Maybe it was a mistake to have the Communists in the UD--it might have been better had they officially remained neutral while informally supporting the UD. Some conservatives didn't want to vote for a coalition including Communists--but then, some conservatives found it hard to vote for a Radical (like Tamborini) in any event.

(4) There was a three-day lockout by businesses in response to a "bonus bill" that was passed to help Peron win the labor vote. This may have been a mistake. The lockout was successful in bringing business to a close, but it convinced the *descamisados* (literally, "shirtless ones") even more strongly that Peron was on their side, and that his opponents were tools of the hated oligarchy. (In fact the UD's position on socio-economic issues was a "progressive" one not terribly different from the Peronists'. But as long as the UD had the support of the employers, the workers had a hard time believing the UD would act in labor's interests.)

Of course, even if Peron were beaten that would not mean the end of Peronism, as its persistence after Peron was ousted in 1955 shows. Still, that was a military coup, whereas an electoral defeat in 1946 would be a blow at Peron's mystique of spokesmen for the people. Much would of course depend on what kind of government the UD would provide, and given that it was a rather incongruous alliance, I am not sure it could govern effectively. And even if Peron himself were somehow totally discredited--and it would take more than one electoral defeat to do that--the populist and nationalist impulses which motivated his followers would not go away.
 
So the opposition might have done better if someone more sensitive to Argentine nationalist feelings than Braden had been Ambassador and then Assistant Secretary of State. Interestingly, the US charge d'affairs in Buenos Aires urged the State Department *not* to release the Blue Book before the elections, fearing exactly the backlash that took place.
I think that alone would have seriously changed the status of the diplomatic relationship between the USA and Argentina - such an ambassador might have suggested ways to influence Argentina to declare war on the Axis after Pearl Harbor and explained his superiors that no, Argentine reticence wasn't due nazi sympathies.
 
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