Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Just as the entire national fabric became more intricately interwo-
ven and society became urbanized and industrialized, the Argentines
could no longer sustain the old dynamism. Fifty years of export-led
development came to an end in the depression of world trade. The
dynamic agricultural sector stagnated. Politicians blamed the wealthy
oligarchs and the foreigners for the nation's problems and turned
to national industrialization as the panacea. After 1930, the state
bureaucracy grew in order to satisfy the demand of the middle class
for jobs worthy of its educational achievement. Workers eager for
participation in public affairs exchanged their political loyalties for
the security of unionized jobs in state industries. Hoping to satisfy
the workers as a method of controlling them, politicians obliged by
nationalizing the foreign interests. Thus did the age of populism rise
out of the rubble of liberalism.
The Infamous Decade
The substitution of populism for liberalism took time, for the bank-
ruptcy of liberalism did not manifest itself immediately. General
Uriburu turned out to be too rigid and right wing for the tastes of many
Argentines. He appointed members of his own hard-line faction as cabi-
net ministers and ignored the moderates among his fellow officers. The
Uriburu administration purged the bureaucracy of Radical officeholders
as a method of cutting public expenditures. His government banned
the Radicals from participating in politics and annulled provincial
elections in which his own handpicked gubernatorial candidates were
losing. Uriburu, as acting president, supported paramilitary nationalist
groups that spread antiforeign sentiments and attacked labor strikers
with clubs. Some of the same middle-class youth who had marched in
protest against Yrigoyen just 12 months before returned to the streets to
protest the repressive policies of the military government. Thereupon,
the moderate faction of the military persuaded Uriburu to hold elec-
tions in order to have General Agustín Justo elected.
In 1932, Justo won the presidency, after some voting irregularities,
with the support of the anti-Yrigoyen Radicals, the old PAN conser-
vatives, and the Socialists of the city of Buenos Aires. General Justo
remained in office for a full six-year presidential term but kept his
supporters in the provincial statehouses and the federal congress only
through wholesale electoral fraud. It seemed as if the politicians of the
1930s were returning to the days before the 1912 electoral reforms.
Not without reason, critics have called this the “infamous decade.”
