Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Political Transition
The first presidential elections following these reforms proved monu-
mental. Not only did the Radicals win the presidency and control
of the Congress in 1916, but the Socialist Party gained power in the
city of Buenos Aires, where voters would consistently elect Socialist
congressmen into the 1950s. Suddenly the battered remnants of the
PAN became an anemic party of opposition. The day belonged to the
Radicals, and jubilant party loyalists at the inaugural parade unhitched
the horses from the presidential carriage and pulled their leader,
Hipólito Yrigoyen, through the streets. The elections of 1916 marked
the first time that one national party transferred political power to
another through a peaceful process. Argentines had reason to believe
that the era of criollo politics and military coups were behind them.
The oligarchy in the provinces did not fare any better in the 1916 elec-
tions. Public life in Mendoza had been transformed during the period of
rapid economic growth, symbolized by the arrival of the railway at the
end of the 19th century. The local landowners, in order to protect their
sociopolitical hegemony, welcomed the railway and economic change
almost in self-defense. They did not wish to be overrun by powerful
national economic forces. But if they had intended to retain their social
and economic monopoly, they were mistaken. Modernization brought
in its wake new local social groups, especially an immigrant bourgeoi-
sie that increasingly captured a share of land and financial resources.
Immigrants developed the province's modern wine industry. While
Mendoza's oligarchy still controlled access to land, water, and finances,
it found itself weakened by older family divisions and by the need to
permit participation of new social groups. True, the old
mendocino
elite
had become wealthy, but in the end, the oligarchy lost the hegemony it
had hoped modernization would preserve. In 1916, three decades after
the arrival of the first railway, the local Conservative Party fell from
provincial power in Mendoza.
President Yrigoyen was the longtime leader of the national Radical
Party. He rose to power through the support of the farmers, the farm
tenants, the urban middle classes, and, unexpectedly, the working class.
Yrigoyen was a man of property and his inner circle of Radical leaders,
also, belonged to the landed oligarchy. The families of many Radicals
had been members in good standing of the Generation of Eighty, so the
economic policies of the Radical government did not depart significantly
from those of the conservatives. However, the other constituencies of
the Radical Party added new and potentially contradictory tendencies
(social reformism and nationalism) to Argentine politics.
