Ni Yanquis Ni Marxistas, Peronistas

This paper examines the actions of the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón’s worker attachés to the United States and to the Soviet Union in the years immediately after World War II, and the domestic role of their reports in fashioning the Peronist identity in the Argentine labor movement.

The Argentine worker attachés is a crucial and overlooked initiative of labor diplomacy. Right after taking office in 1946, Perón gathered one hundred rank-and-file union members, called them “missionaries of a social apostolate,” gave them diplomatic title and sent them abroad. The attachés, who were direct rivals to U.S. efforts at labor diplomacy, represented the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country.

The paper focuses on the domestic impact of their activity abroad in fashioning Peronist identity. I argue that the engagement of workers in foreign affairs was a central incorporation in the process of identity formation of the labor movement, as the concern about what was happening abroad prompted fundamental reflections about the relation between the nation and workers.

Specifically, I study their reports from the United States and the Soviet Union during 1947 and 1948. There, they contrast the setbacks of the American labor movement and the daily deprivations under Stalin with workers’ prosperity in Argentina. While the comparison reinforced the perception of the arrival of Peronism as a rupture in national history that saved Argentine workers from the tragedy they witnessed abroad, it also gave new nutrients to old aims of national exceptionalism that considered Argentina as superior to other nations. This combination of continuity and rupture, in turn, built the foundations of the Peronist concept of “Third Position” as an understanding of government as regulating the excesses of capital and labor, and a foreign policy alternative to the two superpowers.