SOUTH AMERICAN ELECTIONS
By PHILIP CARR ON Sunday last Argentina went to the polls to choose a new President and a new Parliament. Brazil had already done so at the beginning of December, with this difference, that the Sena- tors and Deputies, before taking possession of their separate build- ings, so long unoccupied, were first to sit as a' joint Assembly to frame a new constitution. Thus the two largest, most important and most populous countries in South America were holding their first elections for many years—since 1926 in Brazil and 1931 in Argen- tina, for the 1937 election there was a totalitarian farce.
In order that a European may begin to understand these events, he must put the size and the populations of these two countries to his own scale. Together, they are larger than Europe, Brazil alone being three times as big as Argentina ; but although the population of Brazil is more than half that of the whole of South America, it is less than that of the British Isles ; and it is so unevenly distributed that most of it is concentrated in the States of the south-eastern and relatively temperate part of the Atlantic seaboard, where the very modern and nearly two-million-population cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are to be found, leaving much of the " interior " and almost the whole of the equatorial and in some places still unex- plored Noah to carry less than one person to two square kilometres. Almost everywhere, the country districts and villages are in squalid and impoverished contrast with the towns. Much the same is true of the bare and almost Arctic South- of Argentina, whose more than two-million capital of Buenos Aires is on its North-East coast.
As to the electorate, although in Brazil every man and woman not only may but must vote, the fact that illiterates are disfran- chised (and they constitute between 70 per cent. and 8o per cent. of the population)'means that hardly more than a fifth of the people are qualified. In the Argentine women are not electors. Nor are the military, nor the inhabitants of certain Federal territories. This reduces the enfranchised to about a quarter of the whole nation.
Under such conditions, an election must mean a very different thing from what it is understood to be by most people in Western Europe ; but there are other circumstances which accentuate the difference. Hardly any of the words currently used in politics mean the same things out there as here. There the Governments call themselves republics ; but in one case—that of Brazil—the "President of the Republic" was for fifteen years, and almost until the recent elections, a dictator, Getulio Vargas, who usurped power by force and subsequently wielded it, with the support of the army, until his fall was precipitated by that support being withdrawn ; while both of the candidates in the Presidential election were high mili- tary officers, the successful one having been Minister of War under Vargas. In the other case, that of Argentina, republicanism has been represented by a military junta, which installed itself by a coup d'etat in 1943 and has since twice imposed a state of siege, and, on the second occasion, last September, followed up the decree by throwing into prison a number of leading citizens, including several prominent journalists. That state of siege is still in force today ; for it was only temporarily suspended on Saturday for forty- eight hours to comply with a clause in the constitution which lays it down that elections must not be held under such a ban. It is in force today, and will presumably continue to be in force until June ; for it is not until the beginning of that month that the present mili- tary Government will hand over its powers, whatever the result of last Sunday's election may turn out to be.
The meaning of the word "democracy" has already been pretty' severely, stretched in Europe; but in South America, not only are regimes which are nothing but dictatorial boldly described as demo- cratic, but the adjective is annexed as a party label by formations which have nothing. democratic about them. For example, General Dutra, who is now the President of Brazil, went to the polls as the leader of a so-called Social Democratic party, which could not claim to have anything in common with what we understand here by Social Democracy. Indeed, it made no such claim. The title was perhaps chosen on the spur of the moment because it looked well ; but it represented no party having any previous existence, and it stood for no programme. When I left Brazil in June it was quite impossible to discover what definite policy was advocated by either of the two principal candidates, although the election campaign was already in full swing. The issue was entirely personal. It was really fought around the personality of Gemlio Vargas, although he was not a candidate, and although his figure was nominally in the background. The opponents of Vargas and his dictatorship—who called themselves the National Democratic Union, and, in their sincere but very abstract Liberalism did have some right to the democratic title—chose a distinguished and public-spirited candi- date; but it was as opponents of Vargas that they obtained votes. And it was chiefly because he was the nominee of Vargas and was given the .assistance of the Vargas machine, to say nothing of the Vargas police, that General Dutra won through ; for his own per- sonality is colourless.
It is true that he may also have received some support in the interior of the country from the Roman Catholic Church ,and in the South from the Fascist-minded German colonists, since he was more outspokenly anti-Communist than his opponent. But the personality of Vargas dominated the issue ; and in this connection it is interesting to note that the former dictator, who deliberately cultivated the industrial workers when he was in power by issuing a series of decree-laws which make Brazil almost more advanced in social legislation than any country in the world, while at the same time he destroyed independent Trades Unions and made strikes illegal, has now, on his return to political life as.a Senator, accepted the leadership of the newly formed Labour party. Now what is this Labour party? We are told that it was formerly the Queremistas. And who were the Queremistas? They were those who, at a certain point in the election campaign, before Vargas had cooked his own goose by his final quarrel with the army, tried to stampede the country in his favour by launching the slogan " Queremos Genilio" (" We want Getulio"). It is significant that the distribution of parties in the new Lower Chamber is such that if the Labour party votes with the Democratic Union, the party of the President can be defeated, especially if the Communists do so also ; but that the same result cannot be achieved by the Democratic Union and the Communists alone.
Now, compare all this with the situation in Argentina. In the Spanish-speaking, as in the Portuguese, countries, everything turns on a personality, whom in the Spanish they call a "caudillo." Juan Peron is the very type of the caudillo, and, whether he has won or lost on Sunday—which I do not know as I write—he has been very much the central figure of the elections ; so much so that the single desire to defeat him has formed a bloc out of such apparently irre- concilable forces as the Radicals, the Socialists, the Communists (whose thunder he has stolen), the so-called Progressive Democrats (who are the agricultural landowners) and even the Conservatives, who joined it at the last moment.
Argentinos are different from Brazilians. Not only are they Spanish and not Portuguese ; but while they, like the Brazilians, have a considerable and fairly recent leaven of Italian immigration, they are more than ninety-five per cent. of European stock, and have virtually none of the considerable negro and native Indian strains, which help to make Brazilians so easy-going, so ready to cheer any- thing and be enthusiastic about anything—for a short time—but also so lazy and so ignorant. The Argentinos are more realist. They are harder. And so an Argentine caudillo must have a policy. He can be mysterious and silent about it, as Irigoyen, the caudillo of the last generation, was, and reveal it only by his deeds. Or he can talk about it all the time and promise almost anything, as Peron does. He can be, as PerOn is, the picturesque military officer, ladies' man and athlete, who is still only fifty, and introduced ski-troops into the Argentine army.
Peron is, of course, a demagogue ; but although he is often reck- less, he is also shrewd, as he has shown by his creation of a political police, at least as efficient as, and far more openly partisan and violent than, that of Vargas. His political career began when, rather more than ten years ago, he founded the G.O.U., an officers' association with military government as its aim. Under his leadership this group was largely instrumental in the coup d'etat which led to the formation of the present Farrell dictatorship some three years since ; but he contented himself with the Ministry of War, in which office he incontinently suppressed his own creation, the G.O.U., and then passed on to the Ministry of Labour, where he took more than a leaf out of the book of Getulio Vargas. He swept away the Trade Unions ; but he gave the new State-controlled organisations which he put in their place the administration of a whole series of revolu- tionary social welfare decrees, from sickness compensation to retire- ment pensions, as well as imposing shorter hours and higher wages, all of which the employers tried—but ineffectually—to resist. And it was as the candidate of a newly formed Labour Party that he stood at Sunday's election.
Peron is a demagogue in another way. He does not hesitate to fan the flames of the anti-foreign prejudice which can unfortunately be found in every country. He fanned them when he directed his Labour decrees particularly against those cattle ranches and chilled meat establishments, or frigorificos, which are owned by British and American firms. He fanned them when he denounced, as unwar- ranted foreign interference, the recent American exposure of the ways in which successive Argentine Governments showed sympathy for the Axis Powers during the war, and allowed Argentine territory to be used as a base for Nazi propaganda in South America.
Here the parallel between Brazil and Argentina exists no longer. It is true that, in the early part of the war, the military clique in Brazil was probably in sympathy with Germany—perhaps from professional admiration and perhaps from disappointment in General Gamelin, who had led an important military mission to the country some years earlier ; but, except for the small though homogeneous German colony in the south, the Brazilian people, or those educated classes who had any opinion in the matter, were definitely not pro- German. Their long-established cultural affinity with France and their affinity in political theory with England were too strong ; and they carried their Government into war on the Allied side. Argentina was quite another matter, and—which is far more important—still is. Nazi influence in certain classes in the country is almost as strong as ever it was, even though the Government made a last-moment declaration against Germany ; and that Nazi influence is on the side of Peron.
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