What the People Want : State Planningand Political Participation in PeronistArgentina, 1946–1955*

EDUARDO ELENA

Abstract. This study examines an episode in the social history of state planning byfocusing on the 1951 Peronist letter writing campaign. Peron’s request for popularsuggestions to the Second Five-Year Plan was met with enthusiasm from men andwomen across Argentina. As with other cases of state planning in the postwar world,the Peronist model of planned progress inspired many popular sector individualsand organisations, in part by offering them an intimate mode of political partici-pation within an increasingly restrictive order. This appeal cannot be attributed toPeronist mass politics alone ; rather, the regime’s ideal of macro-level nationalplanning also reinforced pre-existing practices of social activism in Argentine localcommunities.

Zulema, a woman from the city of Santiago del Estero, wrote to Juan

Domingo Peron in 1951. Her letter recounted that shortly after Peron

assumed the presidency in 1946, she had come across illustrated pamphlets

on the ‘works ’ (obras) that the Peronist government intended to accomplish.

She greeted these proposals with ‘ sceptical curiosity ’ and showed them to

her boss, a ‘ senor espanol ’, who replied, ‘As a project this is beautiful, senorita,

but it’s a utopia, do you know what a utopia is? Well, it’s this, that which one

dreams but doesn’t achieve. ’ After six years of Peronist rule, however,

Zulema had reached a different conclusion. In her letter she outlined a series

of suggestions for the Peronist government’s upcoming Second Five-Year

Plan, including her opinions on national economic policy, labour relations

and public works projects. ‘Today having learned my lesson’, she told Peron,

‘ I put before your consideration another utopia as that senor would say,

because I know that you have the power to make them real. ’1

Eduardo Elena is a lecturer at Princeton University.

* The author would like to acknowledge the JLAS editors and the two anonymous readersfor their helpful recommendations, as well as the assistance of the Archivo General staff inBuenos Aires. Additional thanks for suggestions and critiques go out to Kristin Roth-Ey,Todd Stevens, Meri Clark, Michael Spaeder, Jeremy Adelman and, especially, Ashli White.

1 Zulema described herself as an ‘ empleada ’, although it is not clear whether she was adomestic worker or another type of employee. Archivo General de la Nacion (AGN),Coleccion del Ministerio de Asuntos Tecnicos (MAT), Legajo 307, 13024. I have identified

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37, 81–108 f 2005 Cambridge University Press 81DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X04008569 Printed in the United Kingdom

This woman was by no means alone in sharing her thoughts with the

Peronist president. She was joined by tens of thousands of men and women

who contacted the Argentine government as part of an extraordinary letter-

writing campaign. On 3 December 1951 Peron informed the public that

he would entertain suggestions for the upcoming Second Five-Year Plan,

the social and economic policy roadmap for his second presidential term.

Under the slogan ‘PeronWants toKnowWhat thePuebloWants ’, the Peronist

regime called on the populace to mail in their requests and comments.

Zulema and her peers responded enthusiastically, sending approximately

42,000 pieces of correspondence (signed in many cases by multiple pet-

itioners) between late 1951 and mid-1952. The men and women who took

part in this campaign represented a wide cross-section of society : residents

of the Buenos Aires metropolis and small towns, farmhands and housewives,

unionised workers and white-collar employees, individuals as well as neigh-

bourhood, labour, and partisan organisations. Their letters offer invaluable

insights into the ways popular sector Argentines engaged with the Peronist

planning state and its utopian dreams.

This article examines the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign to shed new

light on the history of Peronism and, more generally, on the history of state

planning in the mid-twentieth century. There is, of course, no shortage of

scholarship on Peronism. Classic works have investigated the Peronist leader-

ship’s ability to forge alliances with key social sectors (above all, organised

labour). Through a combination of material benefits, mass politics, and a

powerful language of social justice, Peron’s movement inspired a majority

of Argentina’s popular sectors, and at the same time, it alienated a sizable

minority of the population.2 Many of these works have looked at Peronism

from the perspective of leaders and institutions (mainly government, media,

and labour unions). Historians have emphasised the production of Peronist

discourses and policies over their reception and adaptation by individuals,

in part because of the notorious difficulty of accessing sources on the 1946–

1955 period.

Without ignoring the asymmetries of power between state authorities and

popular sector Argentines, this article departs from the ‘ top-down’ meth-

odology of many studies. In particular, the essay investigates how the Peronist

state’s version of planned progress resonated with many working- and

middle-class Argentines, and in turn, how these actors came to identify

the authors of letters by their first name to protect their identity. In translating the lettersinto English, I have also standardised the unconventional spelling and grammar used bysome petitioners.

2 For a useful overview of the historiography on Peronism, see Mariano Plotkin, ‘TheChanging Perceptions of Peronism, ’ in James P. Brennan (ed.), Peronism and Argentina(Wilmington, 1998), pp. 29–54.

82 Eduardo Elena

personal goals with the state’s priorities. This approach employs a fascinating

set of documents : the letters sent by Argentines to Peron’s government.

Few scholars, even those who specialise on Peronism, have heard of the 1951

letter-writing campaign. It was by no means the most central political event

of the Peronist era, paling in comparison to the mass rallies of the 17th of

October or the Cabildo Abierto. Yet as this article illustrates, the ‘Peron Wants

to Know’ campaign did generate great enthusiasm and exemplified a popular

form of political participation. Equally importantly, this event – unlike the

famous rallies – left behind written sources that can help us get beyond

the wall of Peronist propaganda and censorship, revealing the still poorly

understood social history of the period.3

The article focuses on a rich subset of correspondence – those letters

concerning public works – to address a central question: why did Peronist

planning have popular appeal? One obvious explanation for the allure of

planning is that the letter-writers were aware of the Peronist state’s ac-

complishments.Newpublicworks projects, among themost tangible evidence

of the planning state in action, were constructed across Argentina and were

the subject of extensive print, radio, and film propaganda. The costs associ-

ated with participating in the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ event were minimal,

and the potential gain for petitioners was great. However, this crude line

of argument – individuals needed public works, so they asked for them –

assumes an all too easy link between the perception of material needs and the

desire to enlist the state to meet them. It was not a given fact that Argentines

would want to attract the attention of Peronist authorities ; after all, ap-

proximately one-third of the voting public expressed its dislike of Peron

during the 1951 presidential elections. By contrast, those who joined in the

‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign demonstrated a willingness for greater

state intervention, at least of a certain form, and they sought cooperation

with political rulers rather than active or passive resistance.

The significance of participation in state planning becomes evident when

considering not just what the petitioners asked for, but also how they con-

structed their demands. To be sure, the letter-writers’ self-representations

were shaped by the parameters of this epistolary event, and petitioners fell

into roles – the productive worker, the meek supplicant and the dutiful

3 The letters examined in this article are drawn from the Ministry of Technical Affairs col-lection at the Argentine Archivo General de la Nacion. This body of government docu-ments from Peron’s planning ministry was opened to the public only in the early 1990s.Historians of Latin America have made ample use of public correspondence, but popularletter-writing has rarely been made the main subject of analysis. For letter-writing in otherpopulist regimes, see W. John Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization inColombia (Gainsville, 2003). Joel Wolfe, ‘Father of the Poor or Mother of the Rich? GetulioVargas, Industrial Workers, and Constructions of Class, Gender, and Populism in SaoPaulo, 1930–1954, ’ Radical History Review, vol. 58 (Winter 1994), pp. 80–111.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 83

mother, among others – common to the genre of public letter-writing in this

period.4 Yet the letter-writers had much leeway in presenting their requests

for the new Plan Quinquenal. They chose to focus on certain aspects of

planning and mass politics that most appealed to them, while ignoring

others. The question here is not whether participation was truly heartfelt

or cynical – a tempting, but ultimately impossible issue to resolve given the

nature of the sources. Rather, this article investigates the more intriguing

problem of how letter-writers adopted strategies of self-representation that

both met the expectations of Peronist authorities and made sense within

their own lived experiences.

Finally, although the letter-writing campaign reflects the distinctiveness

of Peronism, the Argentine case has important implications for the wider

history of state planning. Planning formed a key component of what James

Scott has dubbed the ‘high modernist ’ ideology of the mid-twentieth

century : the application of science, technology, and reason by state officials

to reorder society comprehensively.5 Peronism’s goal of a autarchic ‘New

Argentina ’ – as a familiar slogan went, a ‘politically sovereign, socially just,

and economically independent nation’ – was pursued along similar lines

across the globe. Scholars have most often compared Peron to European

fascists like Franco or Mussolini, and indeed the Peronists also saw them-

selves as pursuing a nationalist third-way between the extremes of capitalism

and communism. But there were many other experiments with both state

planning and ‘ third-way’ politics. Peron can be placed alongside other

‘Third-World’ advocates of national planning such as Nehru, Sukarno,

Nkrumah, Kubitschek and Nasser to illuminate this important dimension of

twentieth-century history.6

Naturally, the scope and impact of statist modernity differed in each of

these cases, as did the means employed to implement planned progress. The

expansion of state planning was met with strong resistance from some

social quarters. Authoritarianism was an integral feature of experiments with

high-modernist planning, and studies such as Scott’s rightly draw attention

4 For an excellent analysis of the genres of public letter-writing, see Sheila Fitzpatrick,‘Supplicants and Citizens : Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, ’ Slavic Review,vol. 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 78–105.

5 James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition HaveFailed (New Haven, 1998), p. 4. Other key works on state planning include : Paul Rabinow,French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, 1989). Gyan Prakash,Another Reason : Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999). James Holston,The Modernist City : An Anthropological Critique of Brasılia (Chicago, 1989).

6 In addition to the comparisons with European fascism, Peronism is most often analysed asan example of Latin American populism. In this analysis, I avoid engaging at length withthis vast literature to explore new interpretive directions, but my approach to studyingplanning and participation could apply to other classic populists (such as Cardenas orVargas) and even leftists such as Castro.

84 Eduardo Elena

to the coercive dimension of planning states. But as a consequence, these

works focus on the elites who crafted designs and controlled the action

of state bureaucracies, overlooking how even highly centralised planning

enjoyed a measure of popular support and redefined the very meanings of

participation in public life, albeit in illiberal ways.7 The tendency of historians

to look mainly (even obsessively) for resistance when confronted with

mobilising authoritarianism and state-led modernisation distorts our view.

As the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign illustrates, the social history of

planning in Argentina is also one of raised expectations, fervent enthusiasm,

and frustrated demands.

This article focuses on how planning as an expression of political power

created certain opportunities and effects – or to use a musical metaphor, how

the ideal of a New Argentina broadcast by Peronist authorities struck a chord

with popular sector individuals and local organisations. We begin with a brief

examination of planning within the context of Peronist mass politics from

the rise of Peron in 1946 to the 1951 letter-writing campaign.8 The bulk of

the essay is devoted to a close reading of the letter-writers’ demands, stra-

tegies of self-representation, and modes of participation. The discussion

concludes with a look at the aftermath of this event, including the responses

of officials and letter-writers in the years before Peron’s overthrow in 1955.

Peronists and planners

What was state planning in the Peronist era? Answering this deceptively

simple question is complicated in that ‘planning ’ was many things at once

for the Peronist regime. At the most basic level, it represented a method

of organising central government through overarching plans that were

formulated and implemented by the political appointees and technical experts

in federal bureaucracies. Yet planning was also an integral part of Peronist

propaganda and its imagery of statist modernity. As with other twentieth-

century experiments in state planning, the lines separating policy from

propaganda and statecraft from mass politics were difficult to discern. Such

fluidity was especially pronounced in the Argentine case, as the Peronist

7 Stephen Kotkin’s work on Stalinism offers a fruitful model for considering this dynamic.Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain : Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 22–3.Within the field of Latin American history, scholars are reconsidering the intricacies ofpopular support for and participation within authoritarian regimes. See, for example,Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism : Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity inDominican History (Stanford, 2003).

8 The article limits itself to the national government, placing aside the larger issue of prov-incial and municipal governments’ planning efforts. In some cases, notably Buenos Airesprovince, the government mirrored national planning with its own three-year plans. Butmost planning activity and propaganda was concentrated at the national level.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 85

regime blurred the boundaries that traditionally separated the state, the party,

and the media in an effort to establish a new political order. Within this con-

text, the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letter-writing campaign was one of many

initiatives designed to mobilise popular support.

The first Five-Year Plan encapsulated the Peronist model of planned

progress. Designed by Peron’s resident policy expert, Jose Figuerola, the

Plan was presented to Congress in October 1946. Figuerola’s proposal rep-

resented the culmination of intense wartime discussions over Argentina’s

transition to a postwar order and a series of economic plans and emergency

packages drawn up since the early 1930s, such as the Plan Pinedo (1939). But

the Five-Year Plan proposed a far more comprehensive social and economic

reorganisation than its predecessors. It covered a wide range of issues :

agricultural and industrial policy, public health, social insurance, housing and

public works construction, international relations, and state finances, among

others.9 Despite its Soviet-sounding title, the Plan Quinquenal was less a de-

tailed technical blueprint than a vague overview of the government’s new

direction. The implementation of the Plan did not always live up to its am-

bitious promises of national reorganisation, and in practice the planning state

was far less organised than official pronouncements suggested.

The Peronist government’s version of planning nevertheless made its

impact felt on Argentine society.10 The newly created Secretariat of Technical

Affairs (which later became a Ministry) oversaw the Plan and orchestrated

the various branches of federal government. Moreover, estimates provided

by the regime reveal a steady growth in infrastructure and public resources.

Millions of Argentines were incorporated into retirement, health, and social

assistance programmes. New roads and bridges were constructed, and the

number of persons with running water and sewerage grew from 6.5 million

and 4 million respectively in 1942 to 10 million and 5.5 million in 1955.11 In

ways large and small, the lives of wage earners and their households were

affected by the forward march of the New Argentina.

9 Republica Argentina, Plan Quinquenal del Presidente Peron, 1947–1951 (Buenos Aires, n.d.).10 This element of disorganisation and improvisation was somewhat inevitable in light of the

enormous goals set forth by the Plan. Despite the regime’s corporatist pretensions, the lackof experience of the Peronist top brass – a collection of military officers, ex-union officials,and a handful of dissident industrialists – added to these problems. Over time, Peronistauthorities took measures to centralise policymaking. Gary W. Wynia, Argentina in thePostwar : Politics and Economic Policymaking in a Divided Society (Albuquerque, 1978), pp. 43–80.

11 For overviews of the Peron government’s accomplishments on these fronts, see JuanCarlos Torre and Eliza Pastoriza, ‘La democratizacion del bienestar, ’ in Juan Carlos Torre(ed.),Nueva historia argentina : los anos peronistas (1943–1955), vol. 8 (Buenos Aires, 2002), p. 292.Peter Ross, ‘ Justicia social : una evaluacion del los logros del peronismo clasico, ’ AnuarioIEHS, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 105–24.

86 Eduardo Elena

These projects were paired with extensive campaigns to raise public aware-

ness of the Plan Quinquenal. Pro-government newspapers such as Democracia

carried daily reports on the achievements of Peronist planning, and the

federal government distributed thousands of copies of the Plan for public

consumption. Peronist propaganda-makers at the federal Subsecretarıa de

Informaciones lavished attention on descriptions and visual representations

of public works under construction. Newsreels and pamphlets provided

similar images of a New Argentina in the making – of housing projects and

hospitals under construction, highways being paved, and bureaucrats hard at

work in new public buildings. Posters plastered on walls across the country

offered alluring depictions of how planned government and technology

were building the nation. One such poster used the metaphor of a cauldron

of molten metal being poured into an Argentina-shaped mold to illustrate

the impact of the Plan Quinquenal : industrial-age technology was forging

a new nation.12 Peronist propaganda balanced depictions of technological

efficiency with reminders of Peron’s personal authority. Propaganda-makers

presented the government not as a cold scientific apparatus, but as an

extension of Peron and Evita’s personal empathy for the pueblo. The signs

posted outside the thousands of public works projects drove this point

home: noting that individual projects were part of the Plan Quinquenal, the

posters proclaimed the official slogan, ‘Peron cumple ’ (Peron delivers).

To meet these objectives, the Peronist version of planning combined

authoritarian techniques with measures that spoke to the needs and desires

of working Argentines. Decision-making power was concentrated in Peron,

his inner circle of advisors, and the officials that staffed executive branch

agencies. There was little public deliberation in determining the priorities of

planning, and by 1951 the legislative and the judiciary branches had lost

any semblance of autonomy. Peronist authorities controlled a chain of news-

papers and radio stations that disseminated propaganda far and wide, while

shutting down most media outlets on the ideological right and left that dared

to criticise them. Political opponents were removed from their posts, thrown

in jail, harassed by the police, and forced into exile.13 Yet in conjunction

with this repression, the Peronist planning state extended new social and

public works programmes, wage increases, and workplace protections that

boosted the material quality of life for many working-class households.

As historian Daniel James has suggested, Peronism expanded the horizons

of the socially possible for countless Argentines – challenging established

12 AGN, Departamento de Fotografıa, Caja 1307, Sobre 62, 197326.13 Studies of Peronism and the media include Alberto Ciria, Polıtica y cultura popular : La

argentina peronista, 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires, 1983) and Pablo Sirven, Peron y los medios decomunicacion (1943–1955) (Buenos Aires, 1984).

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 87

hierarchies, affirming claims to social citizenship, and emphasising their

membership in a more inclusive national community.14

This process had a crucial political dimension as well. Stripped of its

narrow technical meanings, the Plan became a key metaphor in the Peronist

leadership’s attempts to consolidate rule. Peron proclaimed his ideal of an

‘Organised Community ’, in which the ‘masses ’ would be integrated within

a hierarchy of work, party, and social institutions with himself – the

‘Conductor ’ – at the apex.15 Peron’s government transformed the meanings of

partisan participation, converting older forms (such as elections and rallies)

into mass rituals that showcased the regime’s popularity and enabled millions

of supporters to express their Peronist sympathies.16 This process required

creating new mechanisms to mobilise followers, including state alliances with

organised labour, the creation of the Peronist Party, and the formation of

new partisan institutions (most notably, local party cells known as ‘unidades

basicas ’).

As the Peronist planning state expanded its sphere of influence, it added

new elements to this mass political repertoire. Public letter-writing was an

important example. Correspondence with government officials was a familiar

feature of the Argentine political tradition stretching back to the colonial

period. The dramatic expansion of literacy in the late-nineteenth century

made letter-writing an accessible means of interacting with political authority ;

individuals contacted state authorities in the hopes of securing government

employment and other favours, to denounce political enemies, or simply to

express opinions. With Peron’s rise to power, public letter-writing took on

a massive scale – thanks not only to high literacy rates, but also to Peron and

Evita’s populist style, above all their ideal of empathetic, direct communi-

cation with ‘ the people. ’17

The regime’s leaders took increasingly ambitious steps to harness the

political potential of letter-writing. From the earliest days of Peron’s presi-

dency, state agencies were flooded with correspondence of all types, and

14 James has argued convincingly that Peronism represented a ‘credible vision’ of socialchange for working-class Argentines. Applying this idea to the context of planning, newsocial programmes and legal measures helped to ground the lofty promises of state leaders.At the same time, the expansiveness of Peron’s planning discourse infused these myriadreforms with a unifying, utopian quality. Daniel James, Resistance and Integration : Peronism andthe Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 7–40.

15 Juan Domingo Peron, Conduccion Polıtica (Buenos Aires, 1952), pp. 240.16 Mariano Plotkin, Manana es San Peron : propaganda, rituales polıticos y educacion en el regimen

peronista (1946–1955) (Buenos Aires, 1993). Daniel James, ‘October 17th and 18th, 1945:Mass Protest, Peronism, and the Argentine Working Class, ’ Journal of Social History, vol. 21(Spring 1988), pp. 441–61. Juan Carlos Torre (ed.), El 17 de Octubre de 1945 (Buenos Aires,1995).

17 National literacy rates were near 90 per cent by the 1950s. Torre and Pastoriza, ‘Lademocratizacion del bienestar, ’ pp. 296–7.

88 Eduardo Elena

Eva Peron soon became the target for petitioners requesting personal

assistance. If official estimates are even somewhat reliable, the scale of

public letter-writing in Peronist Argentina was enormous; according to the

recollections of her assistants, Evita alone received ten to twelve thousand

letters each day.18 Even with the tendency toward exaggeration, it seems likely

that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Argentines penned letters to

Peronist authorities in the 1946–1955 period. Within this context, the ‘Peron

Wants to Know’ event represented the regime’s most concerted attempt

at organising letter-writing.19 Although writers were instructed to mail their

suggestions to the Direccion Nacional de Planificacion, the propaganda

campaign emphasised Peron’s personal involvement, implying that he would

be the final arbiter of all planning decisions.20 The problem of how these

letters would shape state planning was left conveniently vague, as was the

issue of who would actually read the letters.

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters thus highlight the challenges with

analyzing political participation in authoritarian contexts. Clearly, the terms

of participation were set by Peronist authorities. Petitioners displeased with

state responses to their demands had few ways to hold Peronist officials

accountable. But Peron’s call for planning suggestions was not necessarily

experienced as top-down mobilisation by the letter-writers themselves.

Participation was, after all, voluntary ; federal officials did their best to elim-

inate political alternatives and control the media, but individuals were not

coerced to write letters to Peron. Moreover, the method of communication

offered by letter-writing differed qualitatively from other types of Peronist

participation. Rather than casting their votes anonymously or cheering from

the crowd, petitioners could convey their thoughts and sentiments to the

Conductor and his agencies on personal, even intimate terms. In their letters

they could inform Peron about the conditions of everyday life in their local

18 Estela de los Santos, Las mujeres peronistas (Buenos Aires, 1983), p. 35 ; Nicholas Fraser andMarysa Navarro, Evita : The Real Life of Eva Peron (New York, 1996), p. 117.

19 The exact inspiration behind this campaign is unknown. Certainly, no government leader inArgentine history had asked for popular input in this fashion. Yet the world of mass culturesuggests a precedent. Argentines in the 1930s and 1940s participated in frequent write-incontests organised by radio stations and magazines, which generated thousands of piecesof correspondence and a flurry of media attention. There is some resemblance betweenthese events and the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign, and Peronist propaganda-makersat the Subsecretarıa de Informaciones, including its director Raul Apold, had backgroundsin private radio, film, and the press. Hugo Gambini, Historia del peronismo : el poder total(1943–1951), vol. 1 (Buenos Aires, 1999), pp. 403–21. For an account of radio in this period,see Carlos Ulanovsky, et al. Dıas de radio : historia de la radio argentina (Buenos Aires, 1995),pp. 121–76.

20 In his radio broadcast, Peron noted that additional ‘ technical commissions ’ were collectingthe input of provincial and municipal governments, private organisations and labourunions. La Nacion, 4 Dec. 1951, p. 1.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 89

communities and how these did – or did not – match up with the regime’s

promises. This method of political engagement strengthened the bonds of

partisan solidarity uniting leaders and followers in Peron’s Argentina, but

not without some degree of friction in reconciling the goals of mass political

management and the satisfaction of grassroots demands.

Building a new Argentina

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters describe the scenarios faced by popular

sector Argentines in their daily lives – urban neighbourhoods without sewers

or schools, rural villages without electricity, running water, or other public

services. These seemingly ordinary demands, all too familiar to observers of

Latin American societies, took on increased political significance in Peronist

Argentina. In the most abstract terms, the letter-writers focused on the

spatial consequences of Argentina’s uneven socio-economic development.

‘Urbanizacion ’ was a keyword invoked repeatedly by letter-writers, a term

that encapsulated a spectrum of desires for improvements in the material

conditions of life and social aspirations. Although petitioners concentrated

on the specific problems of their localities, their letters suggest an under-

standing of the importance of national planning to their quotidian lives, and

the letter-writers looked to Peronist planners for solutions to local dilemmas

of ‘urbanisation’.21

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ event occurred at a crucial conjuncture

in Peronist rule that shaped the demands posed by letter-writers. On 11

November 1951 Peron was re-elected to a second presidential term with

nearly 63 per cent of the total votes. This victory had been preceded by

months of electioneering that culminated in the largest mass rally of this

period, the famed Cabildo Abierto. Despite the president’s popularity at the

polls, all was not well. Growing economic problems cast dark clouds over

the nation’s future and, by extension, the viability of Peron’s regime. Argen-

tina’s economy, which had soared to annual growth rates of 8.5 per cent

21 The urbanisation demands raised by the letter-writers can be thought of as a form ofpolitical participation outside the more familiar electoral arena. Political scientists JohnBooth and Mitchell Seligson define political participation broadly as ‘behavior influencingor attempting to influence the distribution of public goods ’, and they provide the exampleof rural communities that petition governments for road improvements. According to theauthors, these interactions are particularly noteworthy in nations that have both wide-spread socio-economic inequality and that have experienced frequent shifts betweendemocratic and authoritarian rule. This definition stretches the conceptual limits of par-ticipation perhaps too far, but it does highlight the fact that letter-writing in PeronistArgentina had points in contact with social practices across the region. John A. Booth andMitchell Seligson (eds.), Political Participation in Latin America, vol. 1 (New York, 1978),pp. 6–7.

90 Eduardo Elena

during the 1946–1948 boom, languished between 1949 and 1951, threatening

the living standards of working-class Argentines. Behind the scenes Peron’s

economic advisors were busy drawing up a series of austerity measures to

tame inflation and control wage increases.22 No doubt the letter-writing

campaign tried to turn attention away from these economic anxieties and

to extend the election’s celebratory mood. In his 3 December 1951 speech,

Peron ignored the economic situation and praised instead the achievements

of the first Five-Year Plan, arguing that the government had surpassed its

goals by completing over 76,000 new projects. The next plan would ‘con-

solidate [the nation’s] greatness and secure the happiness that the pueblo now

possesses ’ by improving living conditions, especially outside major urban

centres.23

Peron’s call did indeed generate an outpouring of popular suggestions.

I estimate that a majority of the writers requested public works projects of

one variety or another. These included the construction of infrastructure

(such as roads and electrical power lines), government-run services (public

offices, schools and housing), and sanitation or health-related projects

(sewers and clinics). For the purposes of this article, the letters classified as

concerning ‘public works in general ’ and ‘sanitary works ’ are the most

pertinent. (‘Public works in general ’ is by far the single largest category, and

together these two subsets represent some 27 per cent of the total ‘Peron

Wants to Know’ letters in the archive.)24 Letters on these subjects arrived

from across Argentina in a pattern that broadly reflected the national distri-

bution of population. The city of Buenos Aires had fewer petitioners than

its share of population, while the suburbs of greater Buenos Aires had pro-

portionally more – a disparity explained perhaps by the better infrastructure

in the central districts of the city compared to outlying neighbourhoods

(see Table 1). Approximately 45 per cent of the letters were submitted by

individuals and 55 per cent by organisations. These included groups with

clear Peronist associations (unidades basicas, pro-regime labour unions and

government officials) as well as less overtly partisan civil actors (see Table 2).

The lines between these individual and group categories were vague, as

individuals often submitted one letter with signatures from scores of

22 Pablo Gerchunoff and Lucas Llach, El ciclo de la ilusion y el desencanto : un siglo de polıticaseconomicas argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 208–11.

23 La Nacion, 4 Dec. 1951, p. 1.24 These estimates are based on the categories used by the National Archive to classify the

correspondence. My sense is that the basic geographic distribution and identity of thepetitioners holds true with some variation for other issue categories (such as ‘vivienda ’ or‘ educacion ’). All the letters examined in this paper arrived to the Ministry of TechnicalAffairs between December 1951 and March 1952. Archivo General de la Nacion, FondoDocumental Secretarıa Tecnica 1 y 2 Presidencia del Teniente General Juan Domingo Peron (1936–1955)(Buenos Aires, 1995).

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 91

community members, and multiple organisations signed the same letter.

Likewise, determining the number of male and female petitioners is com-

plicated by the fact that some letters were signed by members of both sexes.

Table 1. Geographical Distribution of Letter-writers

City, Province, orTerritory

Percentage ofTotal Letters(N=490)

Percentage ofNationalPopulation

Greater BuenosAires (GBA)

21.6 11.3

Buenos AiresProvince(excluding GBA)

17.1 15.5

Cordoba 11.0 9.4Santa Fe 8.4 10.7Buenos Aires city 8.2 18.8Santiago del Estero 4.7 3Tucuman 3.7 3.7Mendoza 3.5 3.7Entre Rios 2.9 5.0El Chaco 2.5 2.7Other Locales 16.2 16.3

Note : These calculations are based on a random cluster sample of boxes identified by theAGN as pertaining to ‘obras publicas ’ and ‘obras sanitarias ’. National population figures aretaken from: Presidencia de la Nacion, Cuarto Censo General de la Nacion, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires,1947). Greater Buenos Aires is defined as the 25 partidos in Buenos Aires province surroundingthe city of Buenos Aires, see Margarita Gutman and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Buenos Aires :Historia urbana de la area metropolitana (Madrid, 1992), p. 270.

Table 2. Identity of Letter-writers

PetitionerPercentage of LettersIn Sample (N=490)

Man 39.3Woman 5.9Sociedad de Fomento 17.4Labour Union 13.9Civil Organisation 10.4Unidad Basica orPeronist Organisation

8.0

Local Government 4.3Other/Unknown 0.4

Note : The author of each letter was identified as the main signer of the document ; in manycases an individual petitioner also attached the signatures of neighbours and organisations.‘Sociedad de Fomento ’ includes petitioners who identified themselves as neighbourhood com-missions. ‘Civil Organisations ’ are mutual aid societies, sports and social clubs, newspapers,libraries, churches, cooperatives, and other collective actors. ‘Unidades Basicas ’ include bothfemale and male branches. ‘Peronist Organisation ’ refers to official party institutions as wellas unofficial associations of Peronist supporters.

92 Eduardo Elena

The ‘public works ’ petitioners drew attention, above all, to deficiencies of

communal resources. They privileged problems of collective consumption

over personal ones (such as the requests for employment, medical assistance,

and individual favors) discussed in letters to Evita.25 These letters were some-

times quite specific (requesting the paving of one block on a dirt road, for

instance) ; or they were less exact, enumerating several public works projects

that would benefit an entire town or neighbourhood. In some cases, pet-

itioners argued in favour of a specific collective good in terms of their

individual household needs. A paved road, for example, would allow family

members to attend school or seek employment further afield. Other letter-

writers adopted the mantle of community promoters and highlighted how

public works would uplift their barrio or town. Local governments and

private utility companies were blamed for not providing adequate services.

For the majority of letter-writers, the implicit assumption was that the

Peronist central state could and should counteract government and private

sector inaction.

This emphasis on improvement though public works runs throughout

the letters sent by the single largest group of letter-writers : the residents of

Buenos Aires’s suburbs. Suburbanites described the negative consequences

of the rapid growth of metropolitan Buenos Aires, spurred by the concen-

tration of factory and government jobs that attracted city dwellers and

provincial migrants.26 Marıa P., a woman from a working-class barrio in

Lomas de Zamora, recounted the daily ordeals of her neighbourhood, where

frequent flooding turned dirt streets into muddy pools so deep that residents

were trapped at home during rainstorms. When weather permitted, Marıa

and her family members walked thirty blocks to reach the closest bus stop.27

In general, suburban letter-writers called on Peron’s government for better

roads, transportation, and utilities that would, as one petitioner put it, ‘per-

fect the faraway barrios of the metropolis ’.28

But these problems were not just a Greater Buenos Aires phenomenon.

Residents in provincial cities (such as Rosario) and their suburbs experienced

similar challenges of patchy urbanisation and public services. Letters poured

in from provincial towns and rural communities that faced comparable, if not

worse, infrastructure woes. In poorer provinces located far from the centres

25 For a classic analysis of the links between collective consumption and grassroots politicalaction, see Manuel Castells, City, Class, and Power (New York, 1978). For the politics ofcollective consumption in Argentina, see James Baer, ‘Buenos Aires : Housing Reform andthe Decline of the Liberal State in Argentina, ’ in Ronn Pineo and James Baer (eds.), Cities ofHope : People, Projects, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930 (Boulder, 1998).

26 By the mid-1940s nearly 30 per cent of all Argentines lived in the city and its environs.Margarita Gutman and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Buenos Aires : historia urbana de la areametropolitana (Madrid, 1992). 27 AGN-MAT, Legajo 214, 8921.

28 AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 6401.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 93

of Peronist prosperity, petitioners faced additional challenges, including the

dearth of stable, year-round employment and access to basic social pro-

grammes. Ernesto, a resident of the small town of Chamical, La Rioja made

demands that ran the gamut of the Five-Year Plan: public housing, paved

roads, new school and local government buildings, a health centre, and the

construction of a dike.29 These sorts of rural petitioners imagined the

Peronist planning state as a force that could transform their dusty villages

into modern communities complete with thriving factories and government

services for all.30

It is important to note that the petitioners were concerned mainly with

local public works, either singly or in conjunction with other infrastructure

improvements, rather than a national programme of massive projects. In

part, this focus on a series of public works was in keeping with the Peronist

government’s own approach. The Peronist central state did not focus its

resources on a single flagship project as in other cases of high-modernist

planning, such as the Aswan Dam or Brasılia.31 This tendency was the result

of various factors : the initial disorganisation of Peronist governments (in-

cluding at the provincial and municipal levels), mounting financial limitations

by the late 1940s, the use of public works as a means to distribute patronage

locally, and the sheer diversity of socio-economic issues addressed under the

Peronist banner of planning.

Whether they lived in rural, suburban, or urban settings, the ‘Peron Wants

to Know’ petitioners made the connection between specific local problems

and national solutions. In practice, this often meant elevating living con-

ditions across the country to the levels attained in Argentine cities – above all,

Buenos Aires’s better districts. The radio and other mass media played a

crucial role in disseminating information about the ‘ social conquests ’ of urban,

industrial workers and in shortening distances between the central govern-

ment in Buenos Aires and populations in the Interior. Writers repeatedly

29 AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8082.30 In their enthusiasm for planning, popular sector letter-writers shared points in common

with more elite provincial groups. As James Brennan has shown, certain factions of in-dustrialists and businessmen from the Interior – especially those from less developedprovinces outside the Littoral region – also saw the Peronist state as an ally in decen-tralising industrialisation and commercial activity. James P. Brennan, ‘ Industrialists andBolicheros : Business and the Peronist Populist Alliance, 1943–1973, ’ in Peronism andArgentina, pp. 79–124.

31 There are two notable exceptions : the reconstruction of San Juan city after the 1944earthquake (which became bogged down with internal disputes) and a cluster of projects inthe Buenos Aires suburb of Ezeiza (including an airport, highway, and housing projects).Mark Alan Healey, ‘The Ruins of the New Argentina : Peronism, Architecture, and theRemaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake, ’ unpubl. PhD diss., Duke University,2000 ; Anahı Ballent, ‘Arquitectura y ciudad como esteticas de la polıtica, ’ Anuario IEHS,vol. 8 (1993), pp. 175–98.

94 Eduardo Elena

noted in their letters that they were responding to the call for popular input

made over the airwaves – what one small-town sports club called Peron’s

‘patriotic radio exhortation’.32 Although petitioners did not wish to recreate

Buenos Aires in toto, the big city’s amenities, services, and material comforts

remained the standard. When given the opportunity to shape planning

priorities, petitioners imagined their future largely in steel and concrete.

The allure of Peronism and progress

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters open a window into the everyday

problems that preoccupied Argentina’s popular sectors. But letter-writers did

not simply enumerate their requests ; they provided their own explanations

of why Peronist planning was a necessary and welcome form of state inter-

vention. Clearly, this commentary was shaped by the genre of public letter-

writing and the petitioners’ ideas of what officials would want to hear. To

acknowledge this strategic dimension of letter-writing does not, however,

detract from the testimonial value of these documents, and above all, their

perspective on how Argentines reflected on their lives under Peronist rule.

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters offer two main insights into why state

planning resonated with Argentina’s popular sectors. First, the letters reveal

the inroads made by the regime in creating new political loyalties and op-

portunities for partisan participation under the banner of planned progress.

Yet partisanship alone does not explain the popular enthusiasm for the

‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign. State planning elicited a strong, positive

response from civil organisations because it intersected with traditional

community and neighbourhood activism. The 1951 campaign illustrates how

planning’s appeal derived from the novel impact of Peronist mass politics

and, simultaneously, how it found points in common with pre-existing local

practices.

For many of those who took part in the letter-writing campaign, putting

pen to paper was more than the prosaic act of sending a request to a distant

bureaucrat. It represented direct communication with Peron himself. Critics

of Peronist rule may have looked upon this exchange between the ‘pueblo ’

and Peron as farcical demagoguery. But many letter-writers expressed a

mixture of joy and awe that the government was willing to entertain their

suggestions. In the words of a petitioner from greater Buenos Aires, ‘before

it was only in dreams that one could imagine that a simple resident of a

lost place could ask something of the National Government ’.33 A corre-

spondent from Santa Fe city sent a handwritten letter to the president asking

for running water for her barrio. Spurred by the combination of municipal

32 AGN-MAT, Legajo 360, 9046. 33 AGN-MAT, Legajo 112, 7958.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 95

government inaction and Peron’s radio address, she proclaimed with

religious fervour, ‘ it’s a sacrifice that we have kept quiet because we have

no one to complain to here_ it’s like preaching in the desert. Thank God

we have you and that you gave us the order to present our complaints. ’34

It was common for writers to address their letters to ‘Your Excellency ’ or

‘Mi General ’. Even those letters addressed to the Ministry of Technical Affairs

sometimes closed with expressions of good will towards the nation’s leading

couple, or as one male petitioner stated, the ‘Great General Conductor, Peron ’

and the ‘Alma Mater of the humble born, Eva Peron ’.35

Such language shows that some of the popular enthusiasm for state

planning is attributable to its close association with the personae of Juan and

Eva. This illusion of personal contact with the Conductor was exactly what the

‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign sought to achieve. In general, the letters

reveal the regime’s success in broadcasting its ideal of political power.

This merging of personalist politics and state planning may seem contra-

dictory – indeed, the co-existence of the impassioned Peronist cult of leader-

ship and the paradigm of rational, bureaucratic planning may strike one as

baffling. But that blend was common to other historical experiences of state

planning, including interwar Europe and Third World nationalism. In the

Argentine case at least, the fact that a vigorous, smiling leader was in charge

of the complex machinery of government reassured some petitioners, tap-

ping as well into longstanding political traditions of patron-client relations.

Letter-writers might not be able or care to understand the technical details

of planning, but they could confide in the personal authority of Juan and Eva

to remedy their needs in a just manner. In some cases, supplication verged

on passivity, as petitioners looked to the miraculous intervention of Peron to

transform their rural towns or suburban barrios.

Not all petitioners, however, waited for salvation from the Conductor. The

‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters also show clearly that ordinary Argentines

sought their own solutions to local problems and capitalised on the oppor-

tunities offered by Peronist state planning. Given the extensive propaganda

depicting the Argentine population as generously cared for by the central

state, it is initially surprising to find letter-writers commenting on their

own struggles for community improvement. Yet the ‘Peron Wants to Know’

letters contain countless demands made by individuals and organisations

with activist experience at the grassroots. Petitioners included sports and

social clubs, mutual aid societies, religious groups, and sociedades de fomento.

These latter associations were common in working- and middle-class

neighbourhoods and served as focal points for activism: building libraries

and social centres, resolving local disputes, functioning as local boosters,

34 AGN-MAT, Legajo 179, 10986. 35 AGN-MAT, Legajo 49, 5896.

96 Eduardo Elena

and lobbying government officials for new roads, sewers, and other

infrastructure – or in some cases, collecting funds to complete these

projects themselves. Like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, men and

women of the popular sectors elaborated institutions for community devel-

opment that became an integral feature of Argentine civil society.

Many advocates of fomentismo saw the Peronist planning state as an ally

in furthering their goals of local uplift. Take for example a letter sent by the

Sociedad de Fomento ‘Villa Spinola ’ of Valentın Alsina in the northern suburbs

of greater Buenos Aires.36 Similar to other petitioners, the Villa Spinola

organisation described the daily challenges faced by residents : one-third of

the neighbourhood was without running water, and unpaved roads flooded

during rains. Because of the deep mud, residents were even forced to use

carts to transport corpses out of the barrio – a ‘situation that is profoundly

hurtful and incredible in the twentieth century. ’ The sociedad outlined the

efforts they had taken to improve matters, including creating a sports field

and building a makeshift schoolhouse and small library with funds from

member dues (‘as an example of culture within the Villa ’). Their letter

recounted that the sociedad had contacted government agencies repeatedly

since the 1920s for assistance, but to no avail. Thanks to the ‘Nuevo Plan

Quinquenal ’, however, the situation had radically changed, and the letter

proclaimed gratefully, ‘Today your excellency offers us this magnificent

opportunity, we cannot but become happy and proud of this magnificent

example of pure democracy that you have offered us. ’37 This conception of

Peronism as a new era was integral to the regime’s propaganda about plan-

ning, but the letters suggest how popular organisations adapted this trope

to their own understandings of respectability and community activism. The

Villa Spinola sociedad argued that, as a result of their sacrifices and their status

as workers in Peron’s ‘democratic ’ Argentina, they merited having their

proposal form part of the next Five-Year Plan. ‘We believe ’, the sociedad

concluded, ‘ that the realisation of the projects that we present before you

should reach their fruition as a prize to our anonymous, self-denying fighters

[luchadores]. ’38 From this perspective, Peronist planning appeared as a con-

tinuation on a national scale of the self-help efforts undertaken by the resi-

dents of popular barrios.

There were, in fact, significant parallels in how state officials and civil

organisations approached problems of the built environment and public re-

sources. For some letter-writers, the organisation of the Peronist government

36 AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8664. It is important to note that the term ‘villa ’ in this time perioddid not necessarily refer to a shanty-town or villa miseria, but rather a neighbourhood ofrecent settlement. In some cases petitioners made reference to buying plots of landthrough real estate agents, suggesting that villa residents were not primarily squatters.

37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 97

around planning was key : as one group from Rosario argued, ‘ it is very

noteworthy that the realisation of these works will obey a plan, that is de-

liberately thought out and that considers the needs of the entire Argentine

pueblo, especially the most poor. ’39 National-level planning may have ap-

pealed to petitioners because they employed similar tools, such as plans and

maps in their local efforts. Fomento organisations (including the Villa Spinola

sociedad) frequently attached to their letters detailed diagrams and sketches

of their blocks, neighbourhoods, and towns. Although these maps were often

hand-drawn and rudimentary, others were architectural and engineering

blueprints, which indicated the precise placement of proposed sewers and

roads. Some letter-writers included additional materials, such as photographs

and reports.40 Throughout the 1946–1955 period, citizens submitted their

own comprehensive plans to the Ministry of Technical Affairs – sometimes

highly technical or legal proposals that dealt with agriculture, housing, or

some other facet of state planning.41 ‘Planning ’, in this more expansive

sense, can be viewed as a widespread practice among popular sector

Argentines, one that was not necessarily confined to a coterie of experts in

central bureaucracies.

In addition to extolling the virtues of planning, local activists used a

familiar language of ‘progress ’ to describe their actions. Writers occasionally

appended the adjective ‘progresista ’ to describe their towns and neighbour-

hoods, as in the case of a union from the ‘progressive ’ town of Pascanas,

Cordoba.42 In these cases, progress was defined in terms of improvements

to the built environment and local organising. One self-described ‘neigh-

bourhood commission’ from Villa Argerich in Lanus, underscored the

advantages of ‘urbanising the densely populated worker barrios ’. Not only

would Peron’s government display its superiority over past political regimes,

but road construction would further these communities’ ‘adelanto edilicio ’

(literally, advancement of building).43 Peronist planners and these popular

actors shared a similar faith in the power of national organisation to create a

more modern nation. While both groups relied upon the same vocabulary

and metaphors of nation-building, the letters suggest that fomentista groups

and their peers also defined progress in the specific terms and geography of

their localities.44

39 AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 11622. 40 AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 10134.41 Beatriz Sarlo has examined the fascination of mass reading audiences with popular science

and technological subjects in interwar Argentina. These cultural influences also may explainthe interest of some petitioners with the technical aspects of planning under Peron. BeatrizSarlo, La imaginacion tecnica : suenos modernos de la cultura argentina (Buenos Aires, 1992).

42 AGN-MAT, Legajo 36, 8081. 43 AGN-MAT, Legajo 214, 17201.44 It is noteworthy that this overlapping of local strategies for improvement and the Peronist

version of national planning was not a conscious design of Peron’s regime. In terms of publicworks, Peron rarely acknowledged the efforts of neighbourhood and civil organisations.

98 Eduardo Elena

It bears stressing that involvement in community activism was not

restricted to sociedades de fomento or other civil organisations without a clear

partisan identity. For many petitioners, letter-writing was but one aspect of

their devotion to the Peronist movement. The justicalista regime made great

inroads in reorganising society since Peron election in 1946, and hundreds

of unidades basicas, pro-regime labour unions, and self-described Peronist

sympathiser groups took part in the letter-writing campaign, many of them

in places far from major population centres.45 From the vantage point of

the regime’s leadership, these mediating institutions provided a mechanism

to mobilise followers, attract new converts, and reinforce existing Peronist

loyalties. From the perspective of their members, unidades basicas offered a

channel to communicate local claims to the state, and unions helped to

direct local planning suggestions to federal agencies. Within the limits of

Peronist rule, these institutions opened up the possibility of participation in

civic life to a larger segment of the population, including working and

middle-class women who became protagonists in local politics and social

assistance through female unidades basicas. In the process, older traditions of

fomentismo were reconfigured within the new institutions of Peronist mass

politics.

In their letters, members of partisan organisations presented themselves

as proud collaborators with the Peronist movement. Like many other pet-

itioners, the Centro de Accion Social y Cultural Juan Domingo Peron in

the province of Entre Rios captured this sentiment in military terms in the

closing line of their request for potable water, an industrial school, and public

works : ‘we have the satisfaction of expressing once more our unbreakable

status as soldiers of your great cause, as is the Peronist cause, of which Your

Excellency is the majestic conductor, illuminating all of us with your un-

extinguishable torch of patriotic and humanist fervour ’.46 Some of these

letter-writers also identified directly with the regime’s futuristic vision of

progress, in which Peronist planners would deploy state bureaucracies and

bulldozers to create a better society. A letter from a union in Colon, Santa

Fe – requesting a clinic, roads, and public housing for their town – evoked

the poetics of modernisation featured in Peronist propaganda: ‘We feel that

There was no concerted national effort to include sociedades de fomento within the officialframework of the Peronist movement. In this regard, the contrast with labour unions isimportant.

45 According to official Peronist estimates, approximately half of the economically activepopulation was unionised by the early 1950s, up from just 20 per cent a decade before.Unidades Basicas were divided into male and female branches, under the commandrespectively of the Partido Peronista and the Partido Peronista Femenino. Louise Doyon,‘El creciminento sindical bajo el Peronismo, ’ in Juan Carlos Torre (ed.), La formacion delsindicalismo peronista (Buenos Aires, 1988), pp. 174–5. 46 AGN-MAT Legajo 12, 8637.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 99

the realisation of these projects will be another segment [ jalon] added to the

luminous road of the New Argentina’s progress, whose direction is guided by

its creator and forger, General Juan D. Peron. ’47

In carrying out their partisan duty, letter-writers drew attention to the

entitlement that they felt as Peronists. They often painted poignant scenes

that expressed their newfound sense of empowerment in Peron’s Argentina,

in some cases contrasting their faith in the Peronist cause with the apathy

of others to the everyday problems faced by working Argentines. Marıa

del C., a resident of a working-class suburb in greater Buenos Aires, com-

plained in her handwritten letter about the neglect that her ‘ sad and desolate

villa ’ had endured for decades. Even now, she lamented, some did not

think that ‘authentic workers ’ deserved more than muddy roads and poor

public services. In a phrase that echoed the regime’s discourse of social

justice and working-class pride, Maria proclaimed ‘ somos dignos de calles

asfaltadas ’.48 But feelings of entitlement could sometimes take on a critical

edge, as the promises made in the Five-Year Plans and their propaganda

outstripped the central government’s ability to meet them. The Peronist

Party office of Caseres, Santiago del Estero stated matter-of-factly that

‘ for years this humble town has been forgotten ’. Now that ‘ the Federal

Capital and other Provinces have received some benefits of the first Plan

Quinquenal ’, the petitioners felt that it was their turn to enjoy the benefits

of the New Argentina. These expressions reveal the success of the regime’s

ideal of social progress in shaping the political worldview of popular sector

Argentines, as well as the expectations raised by central planning.

This impact was not limited to partisan diehards alone. The ‘Peron Wants

to Know’ letters show that the lines separating partisan and non-partisan

groups were not always easy to discern in local communities. Sociedades de

fomento praised the virtues of Peron in their letters, and Peronist party groups

pressed for improvements to collective consumption. In some localities,

new Peronist groups may have competed with other civil actors. But there

is ample evidence of cooperation between partisan and non-partisan organ-

isations on fomento projects. The Ministry of Technical Affairs collection

contains scores of petitions, typically from small towns, signed by several

civil associations. A letter from La Puerta, Cordoba – soliciting a day care

facility, a vocational school for women, and running water, among other

demands – included multi-coloured seals from the community’s authorities :

unidades basicas, the Partido Peronista Feminino, public school officials, the police

department, and a justice of the peace.49 In other areas, traditional opponents

47 AGN-MAT, Legajo 347, 8972.48 Literally, ‘we are dignified enough to have paved roads ’. AGN-MAT, Legajo 307, 6607.49 AGN-MAT, Legajo 320, 1497.

100 Eduardo Elena

came together to petition the state : local government agencies joined with

fomento societies, and business owners with labour unions.50

These revelations challenge many of our existing assumptions about

the relationship between civil society and Peronism. Historians Leandro

Gutierrez and Luis Alberto Romero were among the first scholars to point

out the significance of neighbourhood associational life. According to these

authors, sociedades de fomento, social clubs, barrio libraries, and political associ-

ations of Buenos Aires city constituted democratic civil society in the 1920s

and 1930s.51 Romero argues that in the Peronist era these practices of citi-

zenship gave way to a more rigidly controlling and ultimately ‘de-politicising ’

mode of participation. In his words, ‘ the old embryos of participation in

social cells were at root incompatible with this populist and authoritarian

regime that avoided their development in its own womb. ’52 This conclusion

applies without question to some of the civil organisations examined by

Romero (such as Socialist Party groups). But the 1951 correspondence

demonstrates that many older forms of civil society, such as sociedades de

fomento, adapted to the challenges presented by Peronist rule. In postwar

Argentina, activist practices that were participatory and empowering at

the local level dovetailed, paradoxically, with the centralised structures of

planning.53

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters illustrate how certain types of civil

society can co-exist and even work at common purposes with mobilising

variants of authoritarian rule.54 It is clear that the Peronist regime reshaped

civil society, restricting the spaces available for some actors (such as those of

political opponents), redefining the role of established institutions (such as

labour unions), and creating new organisations (such as partisan groups).

What has received less attention by historians is how individual and collec-

tive actors in civil society expanded to meet the opportunities offered by state

50 AGN-MAT, Legajo 254, 8154.51 Leandro H. Gutierrez and Luis Alberto Romero, Sectores populares, cultura y polıtica : Buenos

Aires en la entreguerra (Buenos Aires, 1995), p. 159.52 Luis Alberto Romero, ‘Participacion polıtica y democracia, 1880–1984, ’ in Sectores Populares,

p. 131.53 Even in the pre-Peronist period, sociedades de fomento in Buenos Aires city adjusted to un-

democratic political environments. Adrian Gorelik has argued that while these organis-ations offered their members opportunities for democratic experimentation from within,they also formed alliances with city administrations committed to boss politics and ex-clusionary strategies of urban development. Adrian Gorelik, La grilla y el parque : espaciopublico y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 439–49. See alsoLuciano de Privitellio, Vecinos y ciudadanos : polıtica y sociedad en la Buenos Aires de entreguerras(Buenos Aires, 2003), pp. 105–48.

54 For examples of this phenomenon in European history, see Frank Trentmann (ed.), TheParadoxes of Civil Society : New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York andOxford, 2000), pp. 3–46. Sheri Berman, ‘Civil Society and the Collapse of the WeimarRepublic, ’ World Politics, vol. 49 (April 1997), pp. 401–29.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 101

planning – in the process, shaping, however obliquely, the implementation

of state planners’ designs. With few ways of directly influencing policy-

making, ordinary men and women struggled to attract the central state’s

attention and resources, justifying their demands as patriotic citizens and

fervent participants in a partisan movement. The 1951–1952 letters offer

a window onto this political dynamic from the vantage of popular sector

Argentines. They reveal that the Peronist regime drew strength from its

newly established mediating institutions, but also more unexpectedly from

pre-existing organisations in civil society, whose members saw in national

planning a means to realise their longstanding aspirations for greater respect-

ability, material well-being, and local progress.

Asking and receiving?

The purported goal of this letter-writing event, as declared in the President’s

December 1951 radio address, was to make the Second Five-Year Plan

reflect popular desires. Within weeks of mailing their letters, individuals

received notes from the government confirming the arrival of their sugges-

tions. What, then, became of the letter-writers’ requests and suggestions?

How did officials respond to the flood of correspondence, and what, if

any, impact did the letters have on the state? The dearth of sources on the

internal workings of Peron’s government makes it impossible to formulate

comprehensive answers to these questions. The fragmentary historical record

points, however, to the frustration of the demands made by letter-writers,

partly because of the economic constraints of the post-1952 period. More

generally, the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ campaign underscores the ultimate

limits of the regime’s ideal of popular participation within national planning.

Rebuffed petitioners had few means of venting their displeasure ; for those

with persistence, the path to material improvements lay in working through

partisan channels, lobbying officials, and continuing local fomentismo efforts.

At the end of the letter-writing campaign, propaganda-makers praised the

cooperation of letter-writers and the value of their contributions. Although

media coverage given to this event was by no means extensive (suggesting

perhaps that officials sought to defuse the petitioners’ anticipation of con-

crete results), references to the letters appeared in the Peronist media be-

tween December 1951 and the announcement of the second Plan Quinquenal

in December 1952. An article published in Mundo Peronista in July 1952

detailed what became of the ‘pueblo’s ’ letters.55 Titled ‘Here is Your Project ! ’

the article offered the first-hand account of Jose Lopez, a (fictitious?) individ-

ual who decided to visit the Direccion Nacional de Planificacion to inquire

55 Mundo Peronista, 1 July 1952, pp. 8–11.

102 Eduardo Elena

about his letter. Lopez described how he was taken through rooms and

rooms of files until he was presented with his own proposal ; this govern-

ment agency functioned with machine-like efficiency, staffed by diligent

bureaucrats who laboured from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for the good of the ‘pueblo ’.

At the end of this impressive tour inside the nerve-centre of Peronist plan-

ning, Lopez could not help but exclaim, as the magazine hoped its readers

would, ‘Es grande Peron ! ’

As one might expect, there was a notable difference between this propa-

gandistic public face and the response to correspondence within government

circles. Brief internal memos appended to the letters by bureaucrats provide

some insight into the problems officials faced in meeting popular demands.

The Ministry of Technical Affairs acted as a clearing-house, forwarding the

correspondence to the appropriate national, provincial, or municipal agency.

Some of the surviving ‘Peron Wants to Know’ letters have replies from

these agencies attached to them. But it took anywhere from one to three

years for these assessments to return to the MAT – well after the second Plan

Quinquenal was adopted – indicating either the difficulties of processing the

high volume of letters or that this correspondence was not a priority for

officials.

Despite their brevity and formulaic style, these internal memoranda illus-

trate the variety of state responses to the letter-writers’ requests. Memos

sent to the MAT from the Ministry of Public Works issued terse judgments :

a particular request fell under the jurisdiction of provincial not national

authorities, was already under consideration by the Ministry, or formed part

of a project already underway. In the best case scenario, a letter-writer’s

request was met with the somewhat vague reply that the Ministry would

add the proposal to its list of future projects, which would be built when

the agency received the proper funds. Yet bureaucrats also rejected many

demands, often for sound reasons. A request for a one-million-peso loan

from a sports club was deemed ‘excessive ’, while a female petitioner’s

personal plea for educational assistance was determined not to be ‘an

initiative that should be considered for inclusion in the second Plan

Quinquenal. ’56

Budgetary limitations were frequently cited as a reason for refusing

requests, an internal acknowledgement that the economic downturn was

curbing the Peronist planners’ ambition. A memo from the ‘Technical

Secretary ’ of La Rioja argued that Ernesto from Chamical’s request for

multiple ‘urbanizacion ’ projects (discussed earlier in this essay) did indeed fall

under provincial authority, but the La Rioja government lacked funds

to implement the second Five-Year Plan and depended on national

56 AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8676. Legajo 205, 10144.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 103

contributions.57 The contrast between the letter-writers’ enthusiasm and the

state’s limitations was striking. In a letter requesting telephone service, parks,

and other public works, the Partido Peronista in the town of Estacion Clark

proclaimed triumphantly : ‘ In Peron’s New Argentina the pueblo is joyful

and the country progresses in giant leaps, and thus, we see new public works

appear on a daily basis. ’ Confronted with this demand, the Ministry of Com-

munications concluded that although it had intended to extend phone ser-

vice to this town, it was now unable due to ‘financial needs ’.58

Given these practical hindrances, government officials found themselves

in the tricky position of deciding what do about public demands for state-led

progress. Peron had warned his radio audience in December 1951 that not

all planning suggestions could be put into action; planners would listen and

consider the requests of the ‘pueblo ’, but ultimately make the final decisions

about what the nation needed. Actions taken by Peronist authorities between

1952 and 1955 in response to other challenges helped to diffuse tensions.

In January 1952, Peron announced a sweeping austerity package and called

upon supporters to endure personal sacrifices in the short-term. The death

of Evita in July of that year was accompanied with further entreaties from

Peron for partisan solidarity. The regime’s leadership sought to dispel

anxieties with an elaborate presentation the second Five-Year Plan in

December 1952. Like its predecessor, the new plan was a dazzling display

of the planning state. The second Five-Year Plan showcased the regime’s

new economic priorities, especially with its emphasis on boosting agricultural

production and developing natural resources, but also included the types of

public works projects requested by letter-writers.59 Within the constraints

imposed by the austerity measures, national and provincial governments

funded these projects across the country – continuing to build the New

Argentina, if at a more measured pace.

It is difficult to determine how the letter-writers reacted to this com-

bination of mass politics, policy, and propaganda in the 1952–1955 period.

Despite the partisan loyalty that Argentine men and women expressed in

their letters, they would surely have had their faith in Peronism tested. In

fact, many petitioners were well accustomed to frustration and expressed

their dissatisfaction in their letters. ‘ It’s already been four years ’, protested

one petitioner in 1951, ‘ that all us neighbours have collected signatures to

see if we can get electricity and some paths, not having obtained anything

to date. ’ A correspondent from greater Buenos Aires claimed that municipal

officials in her suburb ignored her earlier correspondence; she reached the

conclusion that ‘ in order for those people to take action the order has to

57 AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8082. 58 AGN-MAT, Legajo 161, 11409.59 Subsecretaria de Informaciones, Segundo Plan Quinquenal, (Buenos Aires, 1952).

104 Eduardo Elena

come at least from General Peron. ’60 This irritation with the Peronist

bureaucracy may explain in part why so many petitioners sought to com-

municate directly with Peron about their problems. In these cases, the fusing

of populist politics and technical planning seemed to break apart : for the

petitioners, personal appeals to the nation’s most influential political patron

seemed to offer a path around the bureaucratic barriers of the planning state.

Notwithstanding the obstacles they faced, some groups pursued their

lobbying efforts with remarkable resolve. A letter from a sociedad de fomento in

Greater Buenos Aires recounted its long struggle to get a public plaza built

for its community. Members claimed to have sent 27 petitions to various

levels of government between 1928 and 1950, but that ‘all this was a useless,

begging pilgrimage ’. In 1949, they met with Domingo Mercante, the well-

connected governor of Buenos Aires province, who referred their case

favourably to Evita Peron. The sociedad’s project was considered by the

federal Ministry of Transportation, which eventually rejected their request.61

Rather than give up, this organisation participated in Peron’s call for

planning suggestions, hoping to enlist his personal assistance in overcoming

these obstacles. Perhaps not all petitioners were so tenacious, but this

example points to the determination with which some advocates of grass-

roots fomento pursued their causes. It also suggests that for popular sector

Argentines the era of Peronist planning represented but one episode (albeit

one of high significance) in a much longer struggle for community and

personal improvement, which continued without much outside recognition

throughout Argentina’s turbulent political cycles.

The ‘Peron Wants to Know What the Pueblo Wants ’ campaign was an

innovation in the regime’s mass political repertoire – an experiment that was

never repeated. With Peron’s overthrow by a military coup in September

1955, his government lost the opportunity to develop a Third Five-Year

Plan, and as a result, there was no occasion to request popular planning

suggestions. For the remainder of the 1952–1955 period, the regime’s leaders

continued to encourage individuals to write in with demands for personal

assistance. The ability of the central government to satisfy larger requests,

such as those for more comprehensive community development, was cur-

tailed by new economic policies to rein in state spending. Letters on planning

were more likely to gather dust in a bureaucrat’s filing cabinet than to be-

come a guide for government action.

Yet the actors that took part in the letter-writing campaign did not, by

and large, break openly with the Peronist movement. As the ‘Peron Wants

60 AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 6401 and 11623. The second petitioners’ requests were eventuallyadded to the province of Buenos Aires’s planning registry, according to an internal memofrom November 1953. 61 AGN-MAT, Legajo 62, 9886.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 105

to Know’ letters suggest, there was more at stake in these political inter-

actions than a clientelisic bargain, in which the state rewarded supporters

with public works in exchange for votes.62 Despite the limited form of

participation offered by Peronist planning, men and women from across

Argentina saw themselves as working in concert with those at the highest

level of the state. If the 1951 letters are any indication of further trends,

individuals at the local level continued to take up the banner of planning –

even as the government found it difficult to fulfill its promises. The bonds of

partisan solidarity and the ideal of national progress retained at least some

of their original force. Within the political constraints of the regime, Peronist

sympathisers pressured officials to fulfill the unmet promise of the New

Argentina.

Conclusion

The ‘Peron Wants to Know’ correspondence supplies new insights into two

political keywords of the mid-twentieth century : planning and participation.

In Peron’s Argentina, ‘planning ’ as a mode of governance was linked to

ideas about progress shared by state officials and popular sector supporters.

The 1951–1952 correspondence shows that the grand technical vision of

national progress expressed in the Plan Quinquenal overlapped at least par-

tially with the dog-eared blueprints of concerned neighbours. The letter-

writers saw the planning state more as a saviour or an ally in providing

material improvements than an unwanted intruder to be resisted. By putting

pen to paper, letter-writers also took part in a type of mass political partici-

pation that offered, in theory at least, a means of communication with the

supreme Peronist authority. Peronist participation built upon classic liberal

forms (such as elections), while creating additional venues for interaction

between state authorities and the public. Similarly, letter-writing represented

an older political and mass cultural practice that was recast within the new

mold of mass politics.

This collection of public correspondence offers a rare snapshot of popular

attitudes towards Peronism, questioning some familiar assumptions about

this Argentine variety of populism. Scholars have drawn attention to how

populist leaders employed a ‘popular ’ style in communicating with their

followers ; these leaders peppered their speeches with slang terms or a put

forth a public image that contrasted with the rigidity of traditional politicians.

Even those populists who were more staid, such as Vargas or Cardenas, used

a discursive style in which they placed themselves squarely on the side of

62 For a case study of Peronism and clientelism in present-day Argentina, see Javier Auyero,Poor People’s Politics : Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Durham, NC, 2000).

106 Eduardo Elena

the pueblo.63 The 1951–1952 letters illustrate that these popular transgressions

were only part of the story. Petitioners were also inspired by the ‘science ’ of

planning and its ideal of modernisation, in which the central state would

literally build a New Argentina through public works and other interventions.

(Whether planning was truly ‘scientific ’ is another question altogether.)

Peronist planning contained a series of internal contradictions : between

state despotism and the vibrant spark of fomentismo, and between the ration-

ality of the Plan and the empathy of the Conductor. The salient issue here,

which has been overlooked, is the alchemy between these seemingly

opposing elements into an unsteady, if potent amalgam. Peron’s ‘ style ’ was a

combination of the popular and the technocratic, which drew strength from

the ‘substance ’ of the planning state in action and the propagandistic vision

of the New Argentina.

Naturally, the ‘Peron Wants to Know’ correspondence does not provide

a complete view of planning and Peronism. Missing from the letters are the

reactions of critics and opponents of the regime’s partisan brand of statist

intervention. Although this essay has emphasised the common ground

reached by planners and petitioners, resistance has its place in the history

of Peronist planning, especially in the contest among business, labour, and

the state over national economic planning. Likewise, the letters offer glimpses

into the complex worlds of local politics and civil society ; one is left to

imagine the patron-client relationships that formed around unidades basicas,

the struggles between socidades de fomento and other organisations, or the dis-

putes among neighbours over where public works would be built.

Yet the conclusions drawn from this correspondence provide a more

complete view of state planning as a twentieth-century political phenom-

enon. There is room alongside the standard accounts of centralised, auth-

oritarian technocracy for a social history of planning, one that takes into

account how ‘ordinary ’ men and women came to terms with the utopian

dreams of third-way nationalists. Of course, there are examples of political

regimes that practiced exclusionary planning, with few opportunities for

the popular classes to participate politically even on a symbolic level. In

Argentina, the project of ‘national reorganisation’ launched by the military

dictatorship of the ‘Proceso ’ (1976–1983) reworked the discourse of planning

to terrorise workers, leftists, and the population as a whole. But other types

of state planning in Latin America, especially those associated with populist

regimes, spoke to the aspirations of popular households and other sup-

porters – even as state leaders faced structural economic crises (exacerbated

63 On populism and style, see Alan Knight, ‘Populism and Neo-populism in Latin America,especially Mexico, ’ Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 223–48; ErnestoLaclau, Populism and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977) ; Michael L. Conniff (ed.),Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa, 1999) ; James, Resistance and Integration, pp. 7–40.

State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 107

in most cases by their own poor management) that impeded the realisation of

their ambitious plans. The Peronist state may have lacked the ability of other

planning regimes to implement fully its designs, but its vision of ‘progress ’

had a deep political and social impact equal to, if not greater than, the actual

number of public works built.

From a contemporary perspective, where the virtues of unregulated

economic markets and small government are defended far and wide, plan-

ning may seem like an odd curiosity. Certainly, many aspects of this period

(such as the Peronist ideal of an ‘Organised Community ’) are best left buried

in the past. Yet the utopias imagined by national planners such as Peron

and working people such as Zulema have not disappeared entirely. The

connection between progress and public works remains strong in Argentine

communities that still struggle with muddy streets and other problems of

collective consumption, while partisan and neighbourhood associations

still link needy communities to officials who control access to resources.

Although the planning state has faded with the rise of neo-liberalism, the

‘ luminous road’ of progress invoked in 1951 retains, for some Argentines at

least, glimmers of its old lustre.

108 Eduardo Elena