Representations of Peronism as totalitarianism in the view of the Socialist Party during a Cold War period in Argentina (1950-1955)

Abstract

This article analyzes forms of cultural production that opposed Peronism in Argentina between 1950 and 1955 in the context of the Cold War. It focuses on representations created by Argentina’s Socialist Party. This party created a series of discourses opposed to Peronism using local and transnational categories that were framed by the country’s own view of the Cold War. The Socialist Party used these discourses to stigmatize Perón’s Argentina as a species of totalitarian state. This article sought to go beyond the traditional perspectives of Cold War historiography, whose focus is on diplomatic and military history and the bulk of whose analysis is devoted to dissecting the United States’ attempts to establish hegemony over Latin America or to describing the phenomenon of justicialismo’s “third position.” This article, on the other hand, sought to use cultural analysis to explore Latin America’s own agency in its adoption of language pertaining to the early Cold War period. Socialists crafted a stylized, and sometimes exaggerated, discourse in which imagery belonging to fascism and, to a lesser extent, Stalinism after the rise of the Iron Curtain, was combined with the local figure of nineteenth century governor Juan Manuel de Rosas.