Juan Domingo Perón

Juan Domingo Perón’s significance in the book lies in the contrast between his electoral legitimacy and the concentration of power under his rule. A former colonel who first rose to national prominence after the 1943 military coup, he built a coalition with trade unions and the labor movement, won the presidency in 1946, and moved quickly against a Supreme Court that had challenged his policies. The episode became a precedent: later governments, civilian and military alike, treated the Court as an institution whose membership could be remade to suit those in power.

From military prominence to electoral coalition

Perón first came to national prominence after the 1943 coup, which appointed him minister of labor. From that position he built ties with trade unions and the labor movement, organizing a political base that would prove crucial to his presidential bid. He was democratically elected president in 1946, but the book distinguishes the fact of an election from the wider distribution of political power: a government could win at the ballot box and still act with few institutional constraints.

The labor coalition also formed part of a broader political machine. In the 1940s, Perón cultivated organized labor as a source of support. When military repression weakened the labor movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the Perónist Party shifted toward buying votes from other constituencies. Its electoral success drew on patronage and corruption, including government contracts and jobs exchanged for political support. Elections persisted, but the book argues that this machinery did not produce pluralism or a level playing field.

The Court and the limits of constitutional restraint

Argentina’s Supreme Court had a formal constitutional role that might have constrained the executive. The 1853 constitution established the Court, and an 1887 decision allowed it to determine whether particular laws were constitutional. Yet these legal arrangements existed within a wider political and economic system that remained extractive, with little pluralism or empowerment of broad sections of society.

The conflict sharpened because the Court had ruled that Perón’s new national labor relations board was unconstitutional shortly before his election. During his 1946 campaign, he criticized the Court, echoing the broader challenge that presidents could make to judicial authority. After his victory, Perón’s supporters in the Chamber of Deputies proposed impeaching four of the five justices. Their charges included the Court’s acceptance of the legality of the military regimes of 1930 and 1943—a charge the book calls ironic because Perón had played a key role in the 1943 coup—as well as its decisions striking down legislation.

Nine months after impeachment proceedings began, the Chamber impeached three justices; the fourth had already resigned. The Senate approved the motion, and Perón appointed four new justices. The result was not merely a change in personnel. The book argues that weakening the Court freed Perón from a significant political constraint. The newly appointed judges, for example, upheld the conviction of Ricardo Balbín, leader of the main opposition party, the Radical Party, for disrespecting Perón. Perón could thus exercise power with far fewer checks, in a manner the book compares to Argentina’s military regimes.

A precedent carried across regimes

Perón’s successful court-packing became a model for subsequent presidents. The practice of handpicking Supreme Court justices became normal, removing an institution that might otherwise have constrained executive power. Perón’s government was itself removed in another coup in 1955, after which Argentina moved repeatedly between civilian and military rule. Both kinds of governments selected their own justices, extending the precedent beyond Perón’s presidency.

The pattern continued even after Argentina returned to democratic government. In 1990, following a transition from one elected government to another, Carlos Saúl Menem sought to reshape a Court appointed under the Radical Party president Raúl Alfonsín. The book’s comparison underscores the durability of the precedent Perón helped establish: changing the political regime did not by itself make the judiciary independent of the executive.

Party rule, patronage, and institutional inheritance

The Perónist Party’s dominance did not mean that Argentina lacked elections. Rather, the book describes an electoral system in which the party’s political machine could secure support through vote-buying, patronage, and corruption, while facing few constraints when the military did not intervene. If the Supreme Court challenged a policy, the government could treat the Court itself as the problem. Menem’s later willingness to rewrite the constitution to remove a term limit is presented as another instance of political power overriding institutional constraints.

The book situates this history within Argentina’s longer experience of growth and political conflict. Before 1914, the country experienced about fifty years of growth driven by agricultural exports such as beef, hides, and grain. That expansion did not bring innovation or creative destruction, and it was not sustained. Political instability and armed revolts led elites to try to broaden the political system; the effort helped mobilize forces they could not control, and the first military coup followed in 1930. Between then and 1983, Argentina repeatedly shifted between civilian and military rule. Under military governments, repression peaked in the 1970s, when at least nine thousand people—and probably many more—were illegally executed, while hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and tortured.

Within this history, Perón’s importance is both personal and institutional. His labor coalition helped him win office, but his attack on judicial independence left a durable precedent for executives to subordinate the Court. The book’s wider argument is that popular elections and redistributive political rhetoric do not alone dismantle extractive institutions. Longstanding failures to give people a voice, provide basic services such as roads and education, or protect them from local elites help explain why many voters support forceful leaders even when their governments bring corruption and waste. Perón and later Latin American strongmen are presented not simply as individual exceptions, but as products of political arrangements that favor concentrated power and make such leadership attractive.