Peronist Consumer Politics and the Problem of Domesticating Markets in Argentina, 1943-1955
During a 1947 national radio broadcast, Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón explained to his listeners why the prices of goods at local shops and street markets were climbing higher. Perón noted that inflation was a worldwide problem in the postwar period, but he condemned in particular the “egotism, greediness, lack of human solidarity, and absence of patriotism” of certain Argentine business owners. “They are the ones,” the president exclaimed, “who stir up the river to reap gains as fishermen, who lay the foundations for black markets, who speculate and profit from the labor and blood of the immense majority of inhabitants.”1 Perón’s moralistic distinction between the virtuous, laboring pueblo and a cabal of greedy adversaries seems familiar enough. Scholars have emphasized the importance of this type of political discourse in populist movements, and leaders like Perón are famed for their impassioned attacks on vendepatrias, oligarchs, corrupt politicians, imperialists, and other enemies of “the people.” In this case, however, Perón focused not on elite landowners or foreign trusts, but rather on the quotidian world of commerce and consumption — a dimension of the history of populism that has received far less attention. Throughout Perón’s presidency (1946 – 55), the national government buttressed this rhetoric with an