Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The railway nationalization has to be considered the high point of
the Perón regime because it satisfied nearly everyone in the populist
alliance—workers, nationalists, military officers, and the middle class.
RURAL WORKERS AND PERONISMO
F
or all its promises to integrate the working class into the nation,
Peronism did not extend into the countryside. It demonstrated its
limitations early in Perón's first presidency. During the growth phase
of the CGT, when organizing strikes met with a sympathetic response
from the state, the rural workers sought to include themselves among
loyal
peronistas
. They organized federations among their peers and
sought assistance from Perón's labor and agriculture ministries in their
efforts to gain dignity and a living wage. Instead, however, rural peons
confronted a brick wall.
Perón and his economic advisers had already decided to fund their
national industrialization program by taxing agricultural exports. They
also fixed food prices at artificially low levels so as to placate their
supporters in the cities. Such tax and pricing policies fell heavily on
the landed oligarchy that detested the Peróns, but it also cut into the
narrow profit margins of small farmers who produced foodstuffs and
grains. Indirectly, rural workers who harvested the products of the
estancias
and farms suffered job losses and reduced incomes at the very
moment they wished to join the Peronist movement.
A series of strikes on the part of agricultural peons threatened the har-
vests of 1947 and 1948 as well as the government transfer of income from
the countryside to the cities. “While the product of the rural workers is
distributed in foreign lands at prices that produce fabulous profits for the
State,” protested the leaders of the rural labor federation, “we peons can-
not earn a just compensation that permits us to live like human beings”
(102). Perón responded by accusing the striking peons of acting under the
instructions of the landed oligarchy. He labeled their actions unpatriotic.
Thereafter, labor organization remained the privilege of urban workers
and not the agricultural peons. When a devastating drought struck the
Pampas in 1951 and 1952, many rural poor had little choice but to aban-
don the countryside and move to the
villas miserias
of the city.
Source:
Quotation from Engles, Josephine. “Sectoral Clashes and
Forgotten Classes: Rural Workers and the Peronist State, 1946-1948.”
(master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2007).
