The Ghost of Peronism: Why Argentina Keeps Making the Same Mistakes Again and Again
Commentary
Around a century ago, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Indeed, in the early 1900s, the country was ranked among the ten richest in the world, ahead of France and Germany. In 1914, more than half of Buenos Aires’s population was actually foreign-born. Argentina was a magnet for numerous European immigrants who flocked to find work and a better quality of life.
And then Peronism came along. The charismatic leader Juan Domingo Perón shunned the Argentine founding fathers who favoured economic liberalism and a free society.
The day after he passed away, on July 1, 1974, the New York Times wrote that in Perón’s prime, “he squandered his talents and his support—stoking class war, provoking mob violence, jailing and silencing opponents, and running a flourishing economy into the ground with extravagance and statism.”…