End of the Tracks

Perón darkens the door, the world is put to war, and a new form of fascism looms large on the Pampas...

(Juan Perón and his wife, Eva, in Buenos Aires on inauguration day (June 9, 1952) of his second term as president of Argentina. Source: Britannica)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Times of plenty, times of few... an age of optimism, an age of despair... this nation, down at the End of the World, has seen it all. And one gets the feeling we’re only just beginning, all over again...

We’ve been tracking the highs and lows of Argentina by examining its storied railways. When we last left you, the country was almost at the end of the tracks. (You can catch up with Part I here.) Today, we pick up the action...

A Great Pall

A decade after the end of the “War to End All Wars,” Argentina’s glittering fortunes took a turn for the worse. Like much of the developed world, the export-oriented nation was hard hit by the Wall Street Crash – the nation’s GDP collapsed by one fourth between 1929 and 1932 – and the Great Depression that ensued. 

European markets in particular, once major recipients of Argentine goods and now decimated by war, enacted protectionist policies on the continent in an attempt to resurrect their own economies from within. Global trade slowed, sputtered, then all but collapsed. Argentina’s vast train network, which had once hauled her abundant natural riches from the farthest reaches of her vast territory to the capital, where it was shipped around the world, grew eerily quiet. A great pall hung over the End of the World...

Though her economy hobbled along, Argentina was meanwhile wracked by political turmoil, including a series of brazen coups d'état in the 1930s and ‘40s, the last of which set the stage for the rise of military strongman, Juan Domingo Perón, whose shadow would darken the doorway of his country for decades to come. 

Having risen through the military ranks as an army careerist, the charismatic young Perón found himself on the wrong side of an earlier coup, that of José Félix Uriburu, who deposed President Hipólito Yrigoyen in 1930. For having gone to the trouble of backing the wrong man (General Agustín Justo), Perón was banished to the northwestern reaches of the country, near the remote border with Bolivia. There he taught at the local academy where he studied military history, a subject that would come in handy later on in his life. 

Mussolini of the South

Following a short stint as military attaché in Chile and the death of his first wife in 1938, the Argentine War Ministry dispatched Perón to the Italian Alps in 1939. It was from this vantage point, and subsequent military posts in Berlin and Rome, that Perón began infusing his military studies with political ambitions. He was particularly interested in “social democracy,” which he saw as a more gradualist means to bring about the socialist worker’s paradise than, say, outright revolutionary communism.  

As one idiotic idea led naturally to another, Perón soon found himself an ardent admirer of the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, who famously stated his doctrine as “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Perón credited the fusion of Italian facism and German national socialism for creating a command economy that, to his mind, “harmonized the interests of the workers.” In a dispatch from Italy, he wrote:

“Italian fascism brought the popular organizations into effective participation in national life, from which the people had always been excluded. Until Mussolini's rise to power, the nation was on one side and the worker on the other, and the latter had no part in it. I discovered the resurgence of the corporations and studied them in depth.” 

~ Juan Domingo Perón describing his admiration for Mussolini’s Italy

It wasn’t long after Perón’s return from Europe, when he found himself embroiled in yet another coup d’état in 1943, this one led by General Arturo Rawson against the conservative Ramón Castillo. Unlike the Uriburu-Yrigoyen affair, this time Perón found he had backed the right horse. After a few years serving as head of the country’s Department of Labor, where he was able to onside powerful unions and sell his brand of socialism to the Workers of the End of the World, the time came for Perón to make his own run at the top job.  

After winning the popular vote, Juan Domingo Perón became Argentina’s president on June 4, 1946 and soon set about introducing his eponymous brand of left-wing populism to the world. Perónism, as it is broadly understood, was founded on three core principles:

Economic Independence – trade protectionism, sometimes known as import substitution industrialization (ISI),

Political Sovereignty – total amalgamation of power toward the State (recall Mussolini’s “All within the state...” decree),

Social Justice – massive, top down redistribution of resources with the aim of “fixing” economic and social inequalities.

Propaganda Perón

Once in the Casa Rosada, Perón wasted no time consolidating power, beginning by silencing dissidents among the country’s intelligentsia, nationalizing the media broadcasting system and monopolizing the supply of newspaper printers to quell opposition voices. 

Along with the central bank, telephone network, ports, docks and other industries he considered of strategic importance, Perón also nationalized the railways in March, 1948. This included the compulsory state purchase of 7 British-owned and three French-owned railways. At mass rallies Perón would often refer to the nationalization of the railways as a victory against foreign (presumably British and French) imperialism. 

(A propaganda poster reads: Perón complies. Now it’s ours!) 

As the prize of its declared struggle against neo-imperialism, the Perónists hung on to their toy trains like any toddler might, even as both the net tonnage of freight and the quality of the passenger service declined markedly over the ensuing decades. The global advent of the motor car, along with raging political upheaval and consequent state mismanagement at home, combined to further hollow out Argentina’s once mighty rail network. Under the military junta, during the 1970’s and ‘80s, hundreds of stations were closed around the country, while thousands of kilometers of track were either torn up or left to fall into disrepair. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of railway jobs were lost, most of them forever. 

A few attempts were made at modernizing the industry, including a period of re-privatization in the 1990s, but by then Argentina’s roaring trains, once the pride and commercial lifeblood of the nation, had all but run out of track. 

Today, the enthusiastic day tripper can visit dozens of sleepy railway towns within an hour or two drive from the capital. They are quaint pueblitos, often with pretty public squares, local savings & loans in classically-styled buildings, a couple of general stores, a post office, a carnicería and, of course, a long-abandoned railway station, the tracks overgrown with grass and flowers and time. 

Meanwhile, in somewhat related news earlier this month, Javier Milei’s libertarian government announced the closure of the Trenes Argentinos Capital Humano, firing its 1,388 government workers. The state-run company was described at the press conference as “a railway company which did not run any trains.” 

Signs of the times, alas. 

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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