What The People Want Under Peronism (Eduardo Elena)

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.
37, 81–108 f 2005 Cambridge University Press 81

DOI : 10.1017/S0022216X04008569 Printed in the United Kingdom
What the People Want : State Planning

and Political Participation in Peronist
Argentina, 1946–1955*
EDUARDO ELENA
Abstract. This study examines an episode in the social history of state planning by
focusing on the 1951 Peronist letter writing campaign. Perón’s request for popular
suggestions to the Second Five-Year Plan was met with enthusiasm from men and
women across Argentina. As with other cases of state planning in the postwar world,
the Peronist model of planned progress inspired many popular sector individuals
and organisations, in part by offering them an intimate mode of political partici-
pation within an increasingly restrictive order. This appeal cannot be attributed to
Peronist mass politics alone ; rather, the regime’s ideal of macro-level national
planning also reinforced pre-existing practices of social activism in Argentine local
communities.
Zulema, a woman from the city of Santiago del Estero, wrote to Juan
Domingo Perón in 1951. Her letter recounted that shortly after Perón
assumed the presidency in 1946, she had come across illustrated pamphlets
on the ‘ works’ (obras) that the Peronist government intended to accomplish.
She greeted these proposals with ‘ sceptical curiosity ’ and showed them to
her boss, a ‘ señor español ’, who replied, ‘ As a project this is beautiful, señorita,
but it’s a utopia, do you know what a utopia is ? Well, it’s this, that which one
dreams but doesn’t achieve. ’ After six years of Peronist rule, however,
Zulema had reached a different conclusion. In her letter she outlined a series
of suggestions for the Peronist government’s upcoming Second Five-Year
Plan, including her opinions on national economic policy, labour relations
and public works projects. ‘Today having learned my lesson ’, she told Perón,
‘ I put before your consideration another utopia as that señor would say,
because I know that you have the power to make them real.’1
Eduardo Elena is a lecturer at Princeton University.

* The author would like to acknowledge the JLAS editors and the two anonymous readers
for their helpful recommendations, as well as the assistance of the Archivo General staff in
Buenos Aires. Additional thanks for suggestions and critiques go out to Kristin Roth-Ey,
Todd Stevens, Meri Clark, Michael Spaeder, Jeremy Adelman and, especially, Ashli White.
1
Zulema described herself as an ‘ empleada’, although it is not clear whether she was a
domestic worker or another type of employee. Archivo General de la Nacion (AGN),
Colección del Ministerio de Asuntos Técnicos (MAT), Legajo 307, 13024. I have identified
82 Eduardo Elena
This woman was by no means alone in sharing her thoughts with the
Peronist president. She was joined by tens of thousands of men and women
who contacted the Argentine government as part of an extraordinary letter-
writing campaign. On 3 December 1951 Perón informed the public that
he would entertain suggestions for the upcoming Second Five-Year Plan,
the social and economic policy roadmap for his second presidential term.
Under the slogan ‘ Perón Wants to Know What the Pueblo Wants’, the Peronist
regime called on the populace to mail in their requests and comments.
Zulema and her peers responded enthusiastically, sending approximately
42,000 pieces of correspondence (signed in many cases by multiple pet-
itioners) between late 1951 and mid-1952. The men and women who took
part in this campaign represented a wide cross-section of society: residents
of the Buenos Aires metropolis and small towns, farmhands and housewives,
unionised workers and white-collar employees, individuals as well as neigh-
bourhood, labour, and partisan organisations. Their letters offer invaluable
insights into the ways popular sector Argentines engaged with the Peronist
planning state and its utopian dreams.
This article examines the ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ campaign to shed new
light on the history of Peronism and, more generally, on the history of state
planning in the mid-twentieth century. There is, of course, no shortage of
scholarship on Peronism. Classic works have investigated the Peronist leader-
ship’s ability to forge alliances with key social sectors (above all, organised
labour). Through a combination of material benefits, mass politics, and a
powerful language of social justice, Perón’s movement inspired a majority
of Argentina’s popular sectors, and at the same time, it alienated a sizable
minority of the population.2 Many of these works have looked at Peronism
from the perspective of leaders and institutions (mainly government, media,
and labour unions). Historians have emphasised the production of Peronist
discourses and policies over their reception and adaptation by individuals,
in part because of the notorious difficulty of accessing sources on the 1946–
1955 period.
Without ignoring the asymmetries of power between state authorities and
popular sector Argentines, this article departs from the ‘top-down’ meth-
odology of many studies. In particular, the essay investigates how the Peronist
state’s version of planned progress resonated with many working- and
middle-class Argentines, and in turn, how these actors came to identify
the authors of letters by their first name to protect their identity. In translating the letters
into English, I have also standardised the unconventional spelling and grammar used by
some petitioners.
2
For a useful overview of the historiography on Peronism, see Mariano Plotkin, ‘The
Changing Perceptions of Peronism, ’ in James P. Brennan (ed.), Peronism and Argentina
(Wilmington, 1998), pp. 29–54.
State Planning and Political Participation in Peronist Argentina, 1946–1955 83
personal goals with the state’s priorities. This approach employs a fascinating
set of documents : the letters sent by Argentines to Perón’s government.
Few scholars, even those who specialise on Peronism, have heard of the 1951
letter-writing campaign. It was by no means the most central political event
of the Peronist era, paling in comparison to the mass rallies of the 17th of
October or the Cabildo Abierto. Yet as this article illustrates, the ‘ Perón Wants
to Know’ campaign did generate great enthusiasm and exemplified a popular
form of political participation. Equally importantly, this event – unlike the
famous rallies – left behind written sources that can help us get beyond
the wall of Peronist propaganda and censorship, revealing the still poorly
understood social history of the period.3
The article focuses on a rich subset of correspondence – those letters
concerning public works – to address a central question : why did Peronist
planning have popular appeal? One obvious explanation for the allure of
planning is that the letter-writers were aware of the Peronist state’s ac-
complishments. New public works projects, among the most tangible evidence
of the planning state in action, were constructed across Argentina and were
the subject of extensive print, radio, and film propaganda. The costs associ-
ated with participating in the ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ event were minimal,
and the potential gain for petitioners was great. However, this crude line
of argument – individuals needed public works, so they asked for them –
assumes an all too easy link between the perception of material needs and the
desire to enlist the state to meet them. It was not a given fact that Argentines
would want to attract the attention of Peronist authorities ; after all, ap-
proximately one-third of the voting public expressed its dislike of Perón
during the 1951 presidential elections. By contrast, those who joined in the
‘ Perón Wants to Know’ campaign demonstrated a willingness for greater
state intervention, at least of a certain form, and they sought cooperation
with political rulers rather than active or passive resistance.
The significance of participation in state planning becomes evident when
considering not just what the petitioners asked for, but also how they con-
structed their demands. To be sure, the letter-writers’ self-representations
were shaped by the parameters of this epistolary event, and petitioners fell
into roles – the productive worker, the meek supplicant and the dutiful
3
The letters examined in this article are drawn from the Ministry of Technical Affairs col-
lection at the Argentine Archivo General de la Nación. This body of government docu-
ments from Perón’s planning ministry was opened to the public only in the early 1990s.
Historians of Latin America have made ample use of public correspondence, but popular
letter-writing has rarely been made the main subject of analysis. For letter-writing in other
populist regimes, see W. John Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in
Colombia (Gainsville, 2003). Joel Wolfe, ‘ Father of the Poor or Mother of the Rich ? Getulio
Vargas, Industrial Workers, and Constructions of Class, Gender, and Populism in São
Paulo, 1930–1954, ’ Radical History Review, vol. 58 (Winter 1994), pp. 80–111.
84 Eduardo Elena
mother, among others – common to the genre of public letter-writing in this
period.4 Yet the letter-writers had much leeway in presenting their requests
for the new Plan Quinquenal. They chose to focus on certain aspects of
planning and mass politics that most appealed to them, while ignoring
others. The question here is not whether participation was truly heartfelt
or cynical – a tempting, but ultimately impossible issue to resolve given the
nature of the sources. Rather, this article investigates the more intriguing
problem of how letter-writers adopted strategies of self-representation that
both met the expectations of Peronist authorities and made sense within
their own lived experiences.
Finally, although the letter-writing campaign reflects the distinctiveness
of Peronism, the Argentine case has important implications for the wider
history of state planning. Planning formed a key component of what James
Scott has dubbed the ‘high modernist’ ideology of the mid-twentieth
century : the application of science, technology, and reason by state officials
to reorder society comprehensively.5 Peronism’s goal of a autarchic ‘ New
Argentina ’ – as a familiar slogan went, a ‘politically sovereign, socially just,
and economically independent nation’ – was pursued along similar lines
across the globe. Scholars have most often compared Perón to European
fascists like Franco or Mussolini, and indeed the Peronists also saw them-
selves as pursuing a nationalist third-way between the extremes of capitalism
and communism. But there were many other experiments with both state
planning and ‘third-way’ politics. Perón can be placed alongside other
‘ Third-World’ advocates of national planning such as Nehru, Sukarno,
Nkrumah, Kubitschek and Nasser to illuminate this important dimension of
twentieth-century history.6
Naturally, the scope and impact of statist modernity differed in each of
these cases, as did the means employed to implement planned progress. The
expansion of state planning was met with strong resistance from some
social quarters. Authoritarianism was an integral feature of experiments with
high-modernist planning, and studies such as Scott’s rightly draw attention
4
For an excellent analysis of the genres of public letter-writing, see Sheila Fitzpatrick,
‘ Supplicants and Citizens : Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, ’ Slavic Review,
vol. 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 78–105.
5
James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven, 1998), p. 4. Other key works on state planning include : Paul Rabinow,
French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, 1989). Gyan Prakash,
Another Reason : Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999). James Holston,
The Modernist City : An Anthropological Critique of Brası́lia (Chicago, 1989).
6
In addition to the comparisons with European fascism, Peronism is most often analysed as
an example of Latin American populism. In this analysis, I avoid engaging at length with
this vast literature to explore new interpretive directions, but my approach to studying
planning and participation could apply to other classic populists (such as Cárdenas or
Vargas) and even leftists such as Castro.
to the coercive dimension of planning states. But as a consequence, these
works focus on the elites who crafted designs and controlled the action
of state bureaucracies, overlooking how even highly centralised planning
enjoyed a measure of popular support and redefined the very meanings of
participation in public life, albeit in illiberal ways.7 The tendency of historians
to look mainly (even obsessively) for resistance when confronted with
mobilising authoritarianism and state-led modernisation distorts our view.
As the ‘Perón Wants to Know’ campaign illustrates, the social history of
planning in Argentina is also one of raised expectations, fervent enthusiasm,
and frustrated demands.
This article focuses on how planning as an expression of political power
created certain opportunities and effects – or to use a musical metaphor, how
the ideal of a New Argentina broadcast by Peronist authorities struck a chord
with popular sector individuals and local organisations. We begin with a brief
examination of planning within the context of Peronist mass politics from
the rise of Perón in 1946 to the 1951 letter-writing campaign.8 The bulk of
the essay is devoted to a close reading of the letter-writers’ demands, stra-
tegies of self-representation, and modes of participation. The discussion
concludes with a look at the aftermath of this event, including the responses
of officials and letter-writers in the years before Perón’s overthrow in 1955.
Peronists and planners

What was state planning in the Peronist era? Answering this deceptively
simple question is complicated in that ‘planning’ was many things at once
for the Peronist regime. At the most basic level, it represented a method
of organising central government through overarching plans that were
formulated and implemented by the political appointees and technical experts
in federal bureaucracies. Yet planning was also an integral part of Peronist
propaganda and its imagery of statist modernity. As with other twentieth-
century experiments in state planning, the lines separating policy from
propaganda and statecraft from mass politics were difficult to discern. Such
fluidity was especially pronounced in the Argentine case, as the Peronist
7
Stephen Kotkin’s work on Stalinism offers a fruitful model for considering this dynamic.
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain : Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 22–3.
Within the field of Latin American history, scholars are reconsidering the intricacies of
popular support for and participation within authoritarian regimes. See, for example,
Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism : Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in
Dominican History (Stanford, 2003).
8
The article limits itself to the national government, placing aside the larger issue of prov-
incial and municipal governments’ planning efforts. In some cases, notably Buenos Aires
province, the government mirrored national planning with its own three-year plans. But
most planning activity and propaganda was concentrated at the national level.
86 Eduardo Elena
regime blurred the boundaries that traditionally separated the state, the party,
and the media in an effort to establish a new political order. Within this con-
text, the ‘Perón Wants to Know’ letter-writing campaign was one of many
initiatives designed to mobilise popular support.
The first Five-Year Plan encapsulated the Peronist model of planned
progress. Designed by Perón’s resident policy expert, José Figuerola, the
Plan was presented to Congress in October 1946. Figuerola’s proposal rep-
resented the culmination of intense wartime discussions over Argentina’s
transition to a postwar order and a series of economic plans and emergency
packages drawn up since the early 1930s, such as the Plan Pinedo (1939). But
the Five-Year Plan proposed a far more comprehensive social and economic
reorganisation than its predecessors. It covered a wide range of issues :
agricultural and industrial policy, public health, social insurance, housing and
public works construction, international relations, and state finances, among
others.9 Despite its Soviet-sounding title, the Plan Quinquenal was less a de-
tailed technical blueprint than a vague overview of the government’s new
direction. The implementation of the Plan did not always live up to its am-
bitious promises of national reorganisation, and in practice the planning state
was far less organised than official pronouncements suggested.
The Peronist government’s version of planning nevertheless made its
impact felt on Argentine society.10 The newly created Secretariat of Technical
Affairs (which later became a Ministry) oversaw the Plan and orchestrated
the various branches of federal government. Moreover, estimates provided
by the regime reveal a steady growth in infrastructure and public resources.
Millions of Argentines were incorporated into retirement, health, and social
assistance programmes. New roads and bridges were constructed, and the
number of persons with running water and sewerage grew from 6.5 million
and 4 million respectively in 1942 to 10 million and 5.5 million in 1955.11 In
ways large and small, the lives of wage earners and their households were
affected by the forward march of the New Argentina.
9
República Argentina, Plan Quinquenal del Presidente Perón, 1947–1951 (Buenos Aires, n.d.).
10
This element of disorganisation and improvisation was somewhat inevitable in light of the
enormous goals set forth by the Plan. Despite the regime’s corporatist pretensions, the lack
of experience of the Peronist top brass – a collection of military officers, ex-union officials,
and a handful of dissident industrialists – added to these problems. Over time, Peronist
authorities took measures to centralise policymaking. Gary W. Wynia, Argentina in the
Postwar : Politics and Economic Policymaking in a Divided Society (Albuquerque, 1978), pp. 43–80.
11
For overviews of the Perón government’s accomplishments on these fronts, see Juan
Carlos Torre and Eliza Pastoriza, ‘ La democratización del bienestar, ’ in Juan Carlos Torre
(ed.), Nueva historia argentina : los años peronistas (1943–1955), vol. 8 (Buenos Aires, 2002), p. 292.
Peter Ross, ‘ Justicia social: una evaluación del los logros del peronismo clásico, ’ Anuario
IEHS, vol. 8 (1993), pp. 105–24.
These projects were paired with extensive campaigns to raise public aware-
ness of the Plan Quinquenal. Pro-government newspapers such as Democracia
carried daily reports on the achievements of Peronist planning, and the
federal government distributed thousands of copies of the Plan for public
consumption. Peronist propaganda-makers at the federal Subsecretarı́a de
Informaciones lavished attention on descriptions and visual representations
of public works under construction. Newsreels and pamphlets provided
similar images of a New Argentina in the making – of housing projects and
hospitals under construction, highways being paved, and bureaucrats hard at
work in new public buildings. Posters plastered on walls across the country
offered alluring depictions of how planned government and technology
were building the nation. One such poster used the metaphor of a cauldron
of molten metal being poured into an Argentina-shaped mold to illustrate
the impact of the Plan Quinquenal : industrial-age technology was forging
a new nation.12 Peronist propaganda balanced depictions of technological
efficiency with reminders of Perón’s personal authority. Propaganda-makers
presented the government not as a cold scientific apparatus, but as an
extension of Perón and Evita’s personal empathy for the pueblo. The signs
posted outside the thousands of public works projects drove this point
home : noting that individual projects were part of the Plan Quinquenal, the
posters proclaimed the official slogan, ‘Perón cumple’ (Perón delivers).
To meet these objectives, the Peronist version of planning combined
authoritarian techniques with measures that spoke to the needs and desires
of working Argentines. Decision-making power was concentrated in Perón,
his inner circle of advisors, and the officials that staffed executive branch
agencies. There was little public deliberation in determining the priorities of
planning, and by 1951 the legislative and the judiciary branches had lost
any semblance of autonomy. Peronist authorities controlled a chain of news-
papers and radio stations that disseminated propaganda far and wide, while
shutting down most media outlets on the ideological right and left that dared
to criticise them. Political opponents were removed from their posts, thrown
in jail, harassed by the police, and forced into exile.13 Yet in conjunction
with this repression, the Peronist planning state extended new social and
public works programmes, wage increases, and workplace protections that
boosted the material quality of life for many working-class households.
As historian Daniel James has suggested, Peronism expanded the horizons
of the socially possible for countless Argentines – challenging established
12
AGN, Departamento de Fotografı́a, Caja 1307, Sobre 62, 197326.
13
Studies of Peronism and the media include Alberto Ciria, Polı́tica y cultura popular: La
argentina peronista, 1946–1955 (Buenos Aires, 1983) and Pablo Sirven, Perón y los medios de
comunicación (1943–1955) (Buenos Aires, 1984).
88 Eduardo Elena
hierarchies, affirming claims to social citizenship, and emphasising their
membership in a more inclusive national community.14
This process had a crucial political dimension as well. Stripped of its
narrow technical meanings, the Plan became a key metaphor in the Peronist
leadership’s attempts to consolidate rule. Perón proclaimed his ideal of an
‘ Organised Community’, in which the ‘masses’ would be integrated within
a hierarchy of work, party, and social institutions with himself – the
‘ Conductor’ – at the apex.15 Perón’s government transformed the meanings of
partisan participation, converting older forms (such as elections and rallies)
into mass rituals that showcased the regime’s popularity and enabled millions
of supporters to express their Peronist sympathies.16 This process required
creating new mechanisms to mobilise followers, including state alliances with
organised labour, the creation of the Peronist Party, and the formation of
new partisan institutions (most notably, local party cells known as ‘ unidades
básicas ’).
As the Peronist planning state expanded its sphere of influence, it added
new elements to this mass political repertoire. Public letter-writing was an
important example. Correspondence with government officials was a familiar
feature of the Argentine political tradition stretching back to the colonial
period. The dramatic expansion of literacy in the late-nineteenth century
made letter-writing an accessible means of interacting with political authority;
individuals contacted state authorities in the hopes of securing government
employment and other favours, to denounce political enemies, or simply to
express opinions. With Perón’s rise to power, public letter-writing took on
a massive scale – thanks not only to high literacy rates, but also to Perón and
Evita’s populist style, above all their ideal of empathetic, direct communi-
cation with ‘the people.’17
The regime’s leaders took increasingly ambitious steps to harness the
political potential of letter-writing. From the earliest days of Perón’s presi-
dency, state agencies were flooded with correspondence of all types, and
14
James has argued convincingly that Peronism represented a ‘ credible vision’ of social
change for working-class Argentines. Applying this idea to the context of planning, new
social programmes and legal measures helped to ground the lofty promises of state leaders.
At the same time, the expansiveness of Perón’s planning discourse infused these myriad
reforms with a unifying, utopian quality. Daniel James, Resistance and Integration : Peronism and
the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 7–40.
15
Juan Domingo Perón, Conducción Polı́tica (Buenos Aires, 1952), pp. 240.
16
Mariano Plotkin, Mañana es San Péron: propaganda, rituales polı́ticos y educación en el régimen
peronista (1946–1955) (Buenos Aires, 1993). Daniel James, ‘ October 17th and 18th, 1945:
Mass Protest, Peronism, and the Argentine Working Class, ’ Journal of Social History, vol. 21
(Spring 1988), pp. 441–61. Juan Carlos Torre (ed.), El 17 de Octubre de 1945 (Buenos Aires,
1995).
17
National literacy rates were near 90 per cent by the 1950s. Torre and Pastoriza, ‘La
democratización del bienestar, ’ pp. 296–7.
Eva Perón soon became the target for petitioners requesting personal
assistance. If official estimates are even somewhat reliable, the scale of
public letter-writing in Peronist Argentina was enormous; according to the
recollections of her assistants, Evita alone received ten to twelve thousand
letters each day.18 Even with the tendency toward exaggeration, it seems likely
that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Argentines penned letters to
Peronist authorities in the 1946–1955 period. Within this context, the ‘Perón
Wants to Know’ event represented the regime’s most concerted attempt
at organising letter-writing.19 Although writers were instructed to mail their
suggestions to the Dirección Nacional de Planificación, the propaganda
campaign emphasised Perón’s personal involvement, implying that he would
be the final arbiter of all planning decisions.20 The problem of how these
letters would shape state planning was left conveniently vague, as was the
issue of who would actually read the letters.
The ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ letters thus highlight the challenges with
analyzing political participation in authoritarian contexts. Clearly, the terms
of participation were set by Peronist authorities. Petitioners displeased with
state responses to their demands had few ways to hold Peronist officials
accountable. But Perón’s call for planning suggestions was not necessarily
experienced as top-down mobilisation by the letter-writers themselves.
Participation was, after all, voluntary; federal officials did their best to elim-
inate political alternatives and control the media, but individuals were not
coerced to write letters to Perón. Moreover, the method of communication
offered by letter-writing differed qualitatively from other types of Peronist
participation. Rather than casting their votes anonymously or cheering from
the crowd, petitioners could convey their thoughts and sentiments to the
Conductor and his agencies on personal, even intimate terms. In their letters
they could inform Perón about the conditions of everyday life in their local
18
Estela de los Santos, Las mujeres peronistas (Buenos Aires, 1983), p. 35 ; Nicholas Fraser and
Marysa Navarro, Evita : The Real Life of Eva Perón (New York, 1996), p. 117.
19
The exact inspiration behind this campaign is unknown. Certainly, no government leader in
Argentine history had asked for popular input in this fashion. Yet the world of mass culture
suggests a precedent. Argentines in the 1930s and 1940s participated in frequent write-in
contests organised by radio stations and magazines, which generated thousands of pieces
of correspondence and a flurry of media attention. There is some resemblance between
these events and the ‘Perón Wants to Know’ campaign, and Peronist propaganda-makers
at the Subsecretarı́a de Informaciones, including its director Raúl Apold, had backgrounds
in private radio, film, and the press. Hugo Gambini, Historia del peronismo : el poder total
(1943–1951), vol. 1 (Buenos Aires, 1999), pp. 403–21. For an account of radio in this period,
see Carlos Ulanovsky, et al. Dı́as de radio: historia de la radio argentina (Buenos Aires, 1995),
pp. 121–76.
20
In his radio broadcast, Perón noted that additional ‘technical commissions ’ were collecting
the input of provincial and municipal governments, private organisations and labour
unions. La Nación, 4 Dec. 1951, p. 1.
90 Eduardo Elena
communities and how these did – or did not – match up with the regime’s
promises. This method of political engagement strengthened the bonds of
partisan solidarity uniting leaders and followers in Perón’s Argentina, but
not without some degree of friction in reconciling the goals of mass political
management and the satisfaction of grassroots demands.
Building a new Argentina

The ‘Perón Wants to Know’ letters describe the scenarios faced by popular
sector Argentines in their daily lives – urban neighbourhoods without sewers
or schools, rural villages without electricity, running water, or other public
services. These seemingly ordinary demands, all too familiar to observers of
Latin American societies, took on increased political significance in Peronist
Argentina. In the most abstract terms, the letter-writers focused on the
spatial consequences of Argentina’s uneven socio-economic development.
‘ Urbanización ’ was a keyword invoked repeatedly by letter-writers, a term
that encapsulated a spectrum of desires for improvements in the material
conditions of life and social aspirations. Although petitioners concentrated
on the specific problems of their localities, their letters suggest an under-
standing of the importance of national planning to their quotidian lives, and
the letter-writers looked to Peronist planners for solutions to local dilemmas
of ‘ urbanisation’.21
The ‘Perón Wants to Know’ event occurred at a crucial conjuncture
in Peronist rule that shaped the demands posed by letter-writers. On 11
November 1951 Perón was re-elected to a second presidential term with
nearly 63 per cent of the total votes. This victory had been preceded by
months of electioneering that culminated in the largest mass rally of this
period, the famed Cabildo Abierto. Despite the president’s popularity at the
polls, all was not well. Growing economic problems cast dark clouds over
the nation’s future and, by extension, the viability of Perón’s regime. Argen-
tina’s economy, which had soared to annual growth rates of 8.5 per cent
21
The urbanisation demands raised by the letter-writers can be thought of as a form of
political participation outside the more familiar electoral arena. Political scientists John
Booth and Mitchell Seligson define political participation broadly as ‘behavior influencing
or attempting to influence the distribution of public goods’, and they provide the example
of rural communities that petition governments for road improvements. According to the
authors, these interactions are particularly noteworthy in nations that have both wide-
spread socio-economic inequality and that have experienced frequent shifts between
democratic and authoritarian rule. This definition stretches the conceptual limits of par-
ticipation perhaps too far, but it does highlight the fact that letter-writing in Peronist
Argentina had points in contact with social practices across the region. John A. Booth and
Mitchell Seligson (eds.), Political Participation in Latin America, vol. 1 (New York, 1978),
pp. 6–7.
during the 1946–1948 boom, languished between 1949 and 1951, threatening
the living standards of working-class Argentines. Behind the scenes Perón’s
economic advisors were busy drawing up a series of austerity measures to
tame inflation and control wage increases.22 No doubt the letter-writing
campaign tried to turn attention away from these economic anxieties and
to extend the election’s celebratory mood. In his 3 December 1951 speech,
Perón ignored the economic situation and praised instead the achievements
of the first Five-Year Plan, arguing that the government had surpassed its
goals by completing over 76,000 new projects. The next plan would ‘ con-
solidate [the nation’s] greatness and secure the happiness that the pueblo now
possesses’ by improving living conditions, especially outside major urban
centres.23
Perón’s call did indeed generate an outpouring of popular suggestions.
I estimate that a majority of the writers requested public works projects of
one variety or another. These included the construction of infrastructure
(such as roads and electrical power lines), government-run services (public
offices, schools and housing), and sanitation or health-related projects
(sewers and clinics). For the purposes of this article, the letters classified as
concerning ‘ public works in general ’ and ‘ sanitary works ’ are the most
pertinent. (‘ Public works in general’ is by far the single largest category, and
together these two subsets represent some 27 per cent of the total ‘Perón
Wants to Know’ letters in the archive.)24 Letters on these subjects arrived
from across Argentina in a pattern that broadly reflected the national distri-
bution of population. The city of Buenos Aires had fewer petitioners than
its share of population, while the suburbs of greater Buenos Aires had pro-
portionally more – a disparity explained perhaps by the better infrastructure
in the central districts of the city compared to outlying neighbourhoods
(see Table 1). Approximately 45 per cent of the letters were submitted by
individuals and 55 per cent by organisations. These included groups with
clear Peronist associations (unidades básicas, pro-regime labour unions and
government officials) as well as less overtly partisan civil actors (see Table 2).
The lines between these individual and group categories were vague, as
individuals often submitted one letter with signatures from scores of
22
Pablo Gerchunoff and Lucas Llach, El ciclo de la ilusión y el desencanto : un siglo de polı́ticas
económicas argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 208–11.
23
La Nación, 4 Dec. 1951, p. 1.
24
These estimates are based on the categories used by the National Archive to classify the
correspondence. My sense is that the basic geographic distribution and identity of the
petitioners holds true with some variation for other issue categories (such as ‘vivienda ’ or
‘educación ’). All the letters examined in this paper arrived to the Ministry of Technical
Affairs between December 1951 and March 1952. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo
Documental Secretarı́a Técnica 1 y 2 Presidencia del Teniente General Juan Domingo Perón (1936–1955)
(Buenos Aires, 1995).
92 Eduardo Elena
Table 1. Geographical Distribution of Letter-writers
Percentage of Percentage of
City, Province, or Total Letters National
Territory (N=490) Population
Greater Buenos 21.6 11.3
Aires (GBA)
Buenos Aires 17.1 15.5
Province
(excluding GBA)
Córdoba 11.0 9.4
Santa Fe 8.4 10.7
Buenos Aires city 8.2 18.8
Santiago del Estero 4.7 3
Tucumán 3.7 3.7
Mendoza 3.5 3.7
Entre Rios 2.9 5.0
El Chaco 2.5 2.7
Other Locales 16.2 16.3
Note : These calculations are based on a random cluster sample of boxes identified by the
AGN as pertaining to ‘obras públicas ’ and ‘ obras sanitarias ’. National population figures are
taken from : Presidencia de la Nación, Cuarto Censo General de la Nación, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires,
1947). Greater Buenos Aires is defined as the 25 partidos in Buenos Aires province surrounding
the city of Buenos Aires, see Margarita Gutman and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Buenos Aires:
Historia urbana de la área metropolitana (Madrid, 1992), p. 270.
Table 2. Identity of Letter-writers

Percentage of Letters
Petitioner In Sample (N=490)
Man 39.3
Woman 5.9
Sociedad de Fomento 17.4
Labour Union 13.9
Civil Organisation 10.4
Unidad Básica or 8.0
Peronist Organisation
Local Government 4.3
Other/Unknown 0.4
Note: The author of each letter was identified as the main signer of the document ; in many
cases an individual petitioner also attached the signatures of neighbours and organisations.
‘Sociedad de Fomento ’ includes petitioners who identified themselves as neighbourhood com-
missions. ‘Civil Organisations ’ are mutual aid societies, sports and social clubs, newspapers,
libraries, churches, cooperatives, and other collective actors. ‘ Unidades Básicas’ include both
female and male branches. ‘Peronist Organisation ’ refers to official party institutions as well
as unofficial associations of Peronist supporters.
community members, and multiple organisations signed the same letter.

Likewise, determining the number of male and female petitioners is com-
plicated by the fact that some letters were signed by members of both sexes.
The ‘ public works ’ petitioners drew attention, above all, to deficiencies of
communal resources. They privileged problems of collective consumption
over personal ones (such as the requests for employment, medical assistance,
and individual favors) discussed in letters to Evita.25 These letters were some-
times quite specific (requesting the paving of one block on a dirt road, for
instance) ; or they were less exact, enumerating several public works projects
that would benefit an entire town or neighbourhood. In some cases, pet-
itioners argued in favour of a specific collective good in terms of their
individual household needs. A paved road, for example, would allow family
members to attend school or seek employment further afield. Other letter-
writers adopted the mantle of community promoters and highlighted how
public works would uplift their barrio or town. Local governments and
private utility companies were blamed for not providing adequate services.
For the majority of letter-writers, the implicit assumption was that the
Peronist central state could and should counteract government and private
sector inaction.
This emphasis on improvement though public works runs throughout
the letters sent by the single largest group of letter-writers : the residents of
Buenos Aires’s suburbs. Suburbanites described the negative consequences
of the rapid growth of metropolitan Buenos Aires, spurred by the concen-
tration of factory and government jobs that attracted city dwellers and
provincial migrants.26 Marı́a P., a woman from a working-class barrio in
Lomas de Zamora, recounted the daily ordeals of her neighbourhood, where
frequent flooding turned dirt streets into muddy pools so deep that residents
were trapped at home during rainstorms. When weather permitted, Marı́a
and her family members walked thirty blocks to reach the closest bus stop.27
In general, suburban letter-writers called on Perón’s government for better
roads, transportation, and utilities that would, as one petitioner put it, ‘ per-
fect the faraway barrios of the metropolis ’.28
But these problems were not just a Greater Buenos Aires phenomenon.
Residents in provincial cities (such as Rosario) and their suburbs experienced
similar challenges of patchy urbanisation and public services. Letters poured
in from provincial towns and rural communities that faced comparable, if not
worse, infrastructure woes. In poorer provinces located far from the centres
25
For a classic analysis of the links between collective consumption and grassroots political
action, see Manuel Castells, City, Class, and Power (New York, 1978). For the politics of
collective consumption in Argentina, see James Baer, ‘Buenos Aires: Housing Reform and
the Decline of the Liberal State in Argentina, ’ in Ronn Pineo and James Baer (eds.), Cities of
Hope : People, Projects, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930 (Boulder, 1998).
26
By the mid-1940s nearly 30 per cent of all Argentines lived in the city and its environs.
Margarita Gutman and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Buenos Aires: historia urbana de la área
27
metropolitana (Madrid, 1992). AGN-MAT, Legajo 214, 8921.
28
AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 6401.
94 Eduardo Elena
of Peronist prosperity, petitioners faced additional challenges, including the
dearth of stable, year-round employment and access to basic social pro-
grammes. Ernesto, a resident of the small town of Chamical, La Rioja made
demands that ran the gamut of the Five-Year Plan: public housing, paved
roads, new school and local government buildings, a health centre, and the
construction of a dike.29 These sorts of rural petitioners imagined the
Peronist planning state as a force that could transform their dusty villages
into modern communities complete with thriving factories and government
services for all.30
It is important to note that the petitioners were concerned mainly with
local public works, either singly or in conjunction with other infrastructure
improvements, rather than a national programme of massive projects. In
part, this focus on a series of public works was in keeping with the Peronist
government’s own approach. The Peronist central state did not focus its
resources on a single flagship project as in other cases of high-modernist
planning, such as the Aswan Dam or Brası́lia.31 This tendency was the result
of various factors: the initial disorganisation of Peronist governments (in-
cluding at the provincial and municipal levels), mounting financial limitations
by the late 1940s, the use of public works as a means to distribute patronage
locally, and the sheer diversity of socio-economic issues addressed under the
Peronist banner of planning.
Whether they lived in rural, suburban, or urban settings, the ‘ Perón Wants
to Know’ petitioners made the connection between specific local problems
and national solutions. In practice, this often meant elevating living con-
ditions across the country to the levels attained in Argentine cities – above all,
Buenos Aires’s better districts. The radio and other mass media played a
crucial role in disseminating information about the ‘ social conquests ’ of urban,
industrial workers and in shortening distances between the central govern-
ment in Buenos Aires and populations in the Interior. Writers repeatedly
29
30
In their enthusiasm for planning, popular sector letter-writers shared points in common
with more elite provincial groups. As James Brennan has shown, certain factions of in-
dustrialists and businessmen from the Interior – especially those from less developed
provinces outside the Littoral region – also saw the Peronist state as an ally in decen-
tralising industrialisation and commercial activity. James P. Brennan, ‘Industrialists and
Bolicheros : Business and the Peronist Populist Alliance, 1943–1973, ’ in Peronism and
Argentina, pp. 79–124.
31
There are two notable exceptions : the reconstruction of San Juan city after the 1944
earthquake (which became bogged down with internal disputes) and a cluster of projects in
the Buenos Aires suburb of Ezeiza (including an airport, highway, and housing projects).
Mark Alan Healey, ‘The Ruins of the New Argentina : Peronism, Architecture, and the
Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake, ’ unpubl. PhD diss., Duke University,
2000 ; Anahı́ Ballent, ‘Arquitectura y ciudad como estéticas de la polı́tica, ’ Anuario IEHS,
vol. 8 (1993), pp. 175–98.
noted in their letters that they were responding to the call for popular input
made over the airwaves – what one small-town sports club called Perón’s
‘ patriotic radio exhortation’.32 Although petitioners did not wish to recreate
Buenos Aires in toto, the big city’s amenities, services, and material comforts
remained the standard. When given the opportunity to shape planning
priorities, petitioners imagined their future largely in steel and concrete.
The allure of Peronism and progress

The ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ letters open a window into the everyday
problems that preoccupied Argentina’s popular sectors. But letter-writers did
not simply enumerate their requests ; they provided their own explanations
of why Peronist planning was a necessary and welcome form of state inter-
vention. Clearly, this commentary was shaped by the genre of public letter-
writing and the petitioners’ ideas of what officials would want to hear. To
acknowledge this strategic dimension of letter-writing does not, however,
detract from the testimonial value of these documents, and above all, their
perspective on how Argentines reflected on their lives under Peronist rule.
The ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ letters offer two main insights into why state
planning resonated with Argentina’s popular sectors. First, the letters reveal
the inroads made by the regime in creating new political loyalties and op-
portunities for partisan participation under the banner of planned progress.
Yet partisanship alone does not explain the popular enthusiasm for the
‘ Perón Wants to Know’ campaign. State planning elicited a strong, positive
response from civil organisations because it intersected with traditional
community and neighbourhood activism. The 1951 campaign illustrates how
planning’s appeal derived from the novel impact of Peronist mass politics
and, simultaneously, how it found points in common with pre-existing local
practices.
For many of those who took part in the letter-writing campaign, putting
pen to paper was more than the prosaic act of sending a request to a distant
bureaucrat. It represented direct communication with Perón himself. Critics
of Peronist rule may have looked upon this exchange between the ‘ pueblo’
and Perón as farcical demagoguery. But many letter-writers expressed a
mixture of joy and awe that the government was willing to entertain their
suggestions. In the words of a petitioner from greater Buenos Aires, ‘ before
it was only in dreams that one could imagine that a simple resident of a
lost place could ask something of the National Government ’.33 A corre-
spondent from Santa Fe city sent a handwritten letter to the president asking
for running water for her barrio. Spurred by the combination of municipal
32 33
AGN-MAT, Legajo 360, 9046. AGN-MAT, Legajo 112, 7958.
96 Eduardo Elena
government inaction and Perón’s radio address, she proclaimed with
religious fervour, ‘ it’s a sacrifice that we have kept quiet because we have
no one to complain to here _ it’s like preaching in the desert. Thank God
we have you and that you gave us the order to present our complaints.’34
It was common for writers to address their letters to ‘ Your Excellency ’ or
‘ Mi General’. Even those letters addressed to the Ministry of Technical Affairs
sometimes closed with expressions of good will towards the nation’s leading
couple, or as one male petitioner stated, the ‘ Great General Conductor, Perón ’
and the ‘ Alma Mater of the humble born, Eva Perón ’.35
Such language shows that some of the popular enthusiasm for state
planning is attributable to its close association with the personae of Juan and
Eva. This illusion of personal contact with the Conductor was exactly what the
‘ Perón Wants to Know’ campaign sought to achieve. In general, the letters
reveal the regime’s success in broadcasting its ideal of political power.
This merging of personalist politics and state planning may seem contra-
dictory – indeed, the co-existence of the impassioned Peronist cult of leader-
ship and the paradigm of rational, bureaucratic planning may strike one as
baffling. But that blend was common to other historical experiences of state
planning, including interwar Europe and Third World nationalism. In the
Argentine case at least, the fact that a vigorous, smiling leader was in charge
of the complex machinery of government reassured some petitioners, tap-
ping as well into longstanding political traditions of patron-client relations.
Letter-writers might not be able or care to understand the technical details
of planning, but they could confide in the personal authority of Juan and Eva
to remedy their needs in a just manner. In some cases, supplication verged
on passivity, as petitioners looked to the miraculous intervention of Perón to
transform their rural towns or suburban barrios.
Not all petitioners, however, waited for salvation from the Conductor. The
‘ Perón Wants to Know’ letters also show clearly that ordinary Argentines
sought their own solutions to local problems and capitalised on the oppor-
tunities offered by Peronist state planning. Given the extensive propaganda
depicting the Argentine population as generously cared for by the central
state, it is initially surprising to find letter-writers commenting on their
own struggles for community improvement. Yet the ‘Perón Wants to Know’
letters contain countless demands made by individuals and organisations
with activist experience at the grassroots. Petitioners included sports and
social clubs, mutual aid societies, religious groups, and sociedades de fomento.
These latter associations were common in working- and middle-class
neighbourhoods and served as focal points for activism: building libraries
and social centres, resolving local disputes, functioning as local boosters,
34 35
and lobbying government officials for new roads, sewers, and other
infrastructure – or in some cases, collecting funds to complete these
projects themselves. Like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, men and
women of the popular sectors elaborated institutions for community devel-
opment that became an integral feature of Argentine civil society.
Many advocates of fomentismo saw the Peronist planning state as an ally
in furthering their goals of local uplift. Take for example a letter sent by the
Sociedad de Fomento ‘ Villa Spinola’ of Valentı́n Alsina in the northern suburbs
of greater Buenos Aires.36 Similar to other petitioners, the Villa Spinola
organisation described the daily challenges faced by residents: one-third of
the neighbourhood was without running water, and unpaved roads flooded
during rains. Because of the deep mud, residents were even forced to use
carts to transport corpses out of the barrio – a ‘situation that is profoundly
hurtful and incredible in the twentieth century.’ The sociedad outlined the
efforts they had taken to improve matters, including creating a sports field
and building a makeshift schoolhouse and small library with funds from
member dues (‘ as an example of culture within the Villa ’). Their letter
recounted that the sociedad had contacted government agencies repeatedly
since the 1920s for assistance, but to no avail. Thanks to the ‘Nuevo Plan
Quinquenal ’, however, the situation had radically changed, and the letter
proclaimed gratefully, ‘Today your excellency offers us this magnificent
opportunity, we cannot but become happy and proud of this magnificent
example of pure democracy that you have offered us. ’37 This conception of
Peronism as a new era was integral to the regime’s propaganda about plan-
ning, but the letters suggest how popular organisations adapted this trope
to their own understandings of respectability and community activism. The
Villa Spinola sociedad argued that, as a result of their sacrifices and their status
as workers in Perón’s ‘democratic’ Argentina, they merited having their
proposal form part of the next Five-Year Plan. ‘ We believe ’, the sociedad
concluded, ‘that the realisation of the projects that we present before you
should reach their fruition as a prize to our anonymous, self-denying fighters
[luchadores]. ’38 From this perspective, Peronist planning appeared as a con-
tinuation on a national scale of the self-help efforts undertaken by the resi-
dents of popular barrios.
There were, in fact, significant parallels in how state officials and civil
organisations approached problems of the built environment and public re-
sources. For some letter-writers, the organisation of the Peronist government
36
AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8664. It is important to note that the term ‘villa ’ in this time period
did not necessarily refer to a shanty-town or villa miseria, but rather a neighbourhood of
recent settlement. In some cases petitioners made reference to buying plots of land
through real estate agents, suggesting that villa residents were not primarily squatters.
37 38
Ibid. Ibid.
98 Eduardo Elena
around planning was key : as one group from Rosario argued, ‘it is very
noteworthy that the realisation of these works will obey a plan, that is de-
liberately thought out and that considers the needs of the entire Argentine
pueblo, especially the most poor.’39 National-level planning may have ap-
pealed to petitioners because they employed similar tools, such as plans and
maps in their local efforts. Fomento organisations (including the Villa Spinola
sociedad) frequently attached to their letters detailed diagrams and sketches
of their blocks, neighbourhoods, and towns. Although these maps were often
hand-drawn and rudimentary, others were architectural and engineering
blueprints, which indicated the precise placement of proposed sewers and
roads. Some letter-writers included additional materials, such as photographs
and reports.40 Throughout the 1946–1955 period, citizens submitted their
own comprehensive plans to the Ministry of Technical Affairs – sometimes
highly technical or legal proposals that dealt with agriculture, housing, or
some other facet of state planning.41 ‘ Planning’, in this more expansive
sense, can be viewed as a widespread practice among popular sector
Argentines, one that was not necessarily confined to a coterie of experts in
central bureaucracies.
In addition to extolling the virtues of planning, local activists used a
familiar language of ‘ progress’ to describe their actions. Writers occasionally
appended the adjective ‘progresista’ to describe their towns and neighbour-
hoods, as in the case of a union from the ‘progressive ’ town of Pascanas,
Córdoba.42 In these cases, progress was defined in terms of improvements
to the built environment and local organising. One self-described ‘neigh-
bourhood commission’ from Villa Argerich in Lanús, underscored the
advantages of ‘urbanising the densely populated worker barrios’. Not only
would Perón’s government display its superiority over past political regimes,
but road construction would further these communities’ ‘adelanto edilicio ’
(literally, advancement of building).43 Peronist planners and these popular
actors shared a similar faith in the power of national organisation to create a
more modern nation. While both groups relied upon the same vocabulary
and metaphors of nation-building, the letters suggest that fomentista groups
and their peers also defined progress in the specific terms and geography of
their localities.44
39 40
41
Beatriz Sarlo has examined the fascination of mass reading audiences with popular science
and technological subjects in interwar Argentina. These cultural influences also may explain
the interest of some petitioners with the technical aspects of planning under Perón. Beatriz
Sarlo, La imaginación técnica : sueños modernos de la cultura argentina (Buenos Aires, 1992).
42 43
44
It is noteworthy that this overlapping of local strategies for improvement and the Peronist
version of national planning was not a conscious design of Perón’s regime. In terms of public
works, Perón rarely acknowledged the efforts of neighbourhood and civil organisations.
It bears stressing that involvement in community activism was not
restricted to sociedades de fomento or other civil organisations without a clear
partisan identity. For many petitioners, letter-writing was but one aspect of
their devotion to the Peronist movement. The justicalista regime made great
inroads in reorganising society since Perón election in 1946, and hundreds
of unidades básicas, pro-regime labour unions, and self-described Peronist
sympathiser groups took part in the letter-writing campaign, many of them
in places far from major population centres.45 From the vantage point of
the regime’s leadership, these mediating institutions provided a mechanism
to mobilise followers, attract new converts, and reinforce existing Peronist
loyalties. From the perspective of their members, unidades básicas offered a
channel to communicate local claims to the state, and unions helped to
direct local planning suggestions to federal agencies. Within the limits of
Peronist rule, these institutions opened up the possibility of participation in
civic life to a larger segment of the population, including working and
middle-class women who became protagonists in local politics and social
assistance through female unidades básicas. In the process, older traditions of
fomentismo were reconfigured within the new institutions of Peronist mass
politics.
In their letters, members of partisan organisations presented themselves
as proud collaborators with the Peronist movement. Like many other pet-
itioners, the Centro de Acción Social y Cultural Juan Domingo Perón in
the province of Entre Rios captured this sentiment in military terms in the
closing line of their request for potable water, an industrial school, and public
works : ‘ we have the satisfaction of expressing once more our unbreakable
status as soldiers of your great cause, as is the Peronist cause, of which Your
Excellency is the majestic conductor, illuminating all of us with your un-
extinguishable torch of patriotic and humanist fervour ’.46 Some of these
letter-writers also identified directly with the regime’s futuristic vision of
progress, in which Peronist planners would deploy state bureaucracies and
bulldozers to create a better society. A letter from a union in Cólon, Santa
Fe – requesting a clinic, roads, and public housing for their town – evoked
the poetics of modernisation featured in Peronist propaganda: ‘We feel that
There was no concerted national effort to include sociedades de fomento within the official
framework of the Peronist movement. In this regard, the contrast with labour unions is
important.
45
According to official Peronist estimates, approximately half of the economically active
population was unionised by the early 1950s, up from just 20 per cent a decade before.
Unidades Básicas were divided into male and female branches, under the command
respectively of the Partido Peronista and the Partido Peronista Femenino. Louise Doyon,
‘El creciminento sindical bajo el Peronismo, ’ in Juan Carlos Torre (ed.), La formación del
46
sindicalismo peronista (Buenos Aires, 1988), pp. 174–5. AGN-MAT Legajo 12, 8637.
100 Eduardo Elena
the realisation of these projects will be another segment [ jalón] added to the
luminous road of the New Argentina’s progress, whose direction is guided by
its creator and forger, General Juan D. Perón.’47
In carrying out their partisan duty, letter-writers drew attention to the
entitlement that they felt as Peronists. They often painted poignant scenes
that expressed their newfound sense of empowerment in Perón’s Argentina,
in some cases contrasting their faith in the Peronist cause with the apathy
of others to the everyday problems faced by working Argentines. Marı́a
del C., a resident of a working-class suburb in greater Buenos Aires, com-
plained in her handwritten letter about the neglect that her ‘ sad and desolate
villa ’ had endured for decades. Even now, she lamented, some did not
think that ‘ authentic workers ’ deserved more than muddy roads and poor
public services. In a phrase that echoed the regime’s discourse of social
justice and working-class pride, Maria proclaimed ‘somos dignos de calles
asfaltadas ’.48 But feelings of entitlement could sometimes take on a critical
edge, as the promises made in the Five-Year Plans and their propaganda
outstripped the central government’s ability to meet them. The Peronist
Party office of Caseres, Santiago del Estero stated matter-of-factly that
‘ for years this humble town has been forgotten’. Now that ‘ the Federal
Capital and other Provinces have received some benefits of the first Plan
Quinquenal ’, the petitioners felt that it was their turn to enjoy the benefits
of the New Argentina. These expressions reveal the success of the regime’s
ideal of social progress in shaping the political worldview of popular sector
Argentines, as well as the expectations raised by central planning.
This impact was not limited to partisan diehards alone. The ‘ Perón Wants
to Know’ letters show that the lines separating partisan and non-partisan
groups were not always easy to discern in local communities. Sociedades de
fomento praised the virtues of Perón in their letters, and Peronist party groups
pressed for improvements to collective consumption. In some localities,
new Peronist groups may have competed with other civil actors. But there
is ample evidence of cooperation between partisan and non-partisan organ-
isations on fomento projects. The Ministry of Technical Affairs collection
contains scores of petitions, typically from small towns, signed by several
civil associations. A letter from La Puerta, Córdoba – soliciting a day care
facility, a vocational school for women, and running water, among other
demands – included multi-coloured seals from the community’s authorities :
unidades básicas, the Partido Peronista Feminino, public school officials, the police
department, and a justice of the peace.49 In other areas, traditional opponents
47
48
Literally, ‘ we are dignified enough to have paved roads ’. AGN-MAT, Legajo 307, 6607.
49
came together to petition the state: local government agencies joined with
fomento societies, and business owners with labour unions.50
These revelations challenge many of our existing assumptions about
the relationship between civil society and Peronism. Historians Leandro
Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero were among the first scholars to point
out the significance of neighbourhood associational life. According to these
authors, sociedades de fomento, social clubs, barrio libraries, and political associ-
ations of Buenos Aires city constituted democratic civil society in the 1920s
and 1930s.51 Romero argues that in the Peronist era these practices of citi-
zenship gave way to a more rigidly controlling and ultimately ‘de-politicising’
mode of participation. In his words, ‘the old embryos of participation in
social cells were at root incompatible with this populist and authoritarian
regime that avoided their development in its own womb.’52 This conclusion
applies without question to some of the civil organisations examined by
Romero (such as Socialist Party groups). But the 1951 correspondence
demonstrates that many older forms of civil society, such as sociedades de
fomento, adapted to the challenges presented by Peronist rule. In postwar
Argentina, activist practices that were participatory and empowering at
the local level dovetailed, paradoxically, with the centralised structures of
planning.53
The ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ letters illustrate how certain types of civil
society can co-exist and even work at common purposes with mobilising
variants of authoritarian rule.54 It is clear that the Peronist regime reshaped
civil society, restricting the spaces available for some actors (such as those of
political opponents), redefining the role of established institutions (such as
labour unions), and creating new organisations (such as partisan groups).
What has received less attention by historians is how individual and collec-
tive actors in civil society expanded to meet the opportunities offered by state
50
51
Leandro H. Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero, Sectores populares, cultura y polı́tica : Buenos
Aires en la entreguerra (Buenos Aires, 1995), p. 159.
52
Luis Alberto Romero, ‘Participación polı́tica y democracia, 1880–1984, ’ in Sectores Populares,
p. 131.
53
Even in the pre-Peronist period, sociedades de fomento in Buenos Aires city adjusted to un-
democratic political environments. Adrián Gorelik has argued that while these organis-
ations offered their members opportunities for democratic experimentation from within,
they also formed alliances with city administrations committed to boss politics and ex-
clusionary strategies of urban development. Adrián Gorelik, La grilla y el parque: espacio
público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Buenos Aires, 1998), pp. 439–49. See also
Luciano de Privitellio, Vecinos y ciudadanos : polı́tica y sociedad en la Buenos Aires de entreguerras
(Buenos Aires, 2003), pp. 105–48.
54
For examples of this phenomenon in European history, see Frank Trentmann (ed.), The
Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and
Oxford, 2000), pp. 3–46. Sheri Berman, ‘ Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar
Republic, ’ World Politics, vol. 49 (April 1997), pp. 401–29.
102 Eduardo Elena
planning – in the process, shaping, however obliquely, the implementation
of state planners’ designs. With few ways of directly influencing policy-
making, ordinary men and women struggled to attract the central state’s
attention and resources, justifying their demands as patriotic citizens and
fervent participants in a partisan movement. The 1951–1952 letters offer
a window onto this political dynamic from the vantage of popular sector
Argentines. They reveal that the Peronist regime drew strength from its
newly established mediating institutions, but also more unexpectedly from
pre-existing organisations in civil society, whose members saw in national
planning a means to realise their longstanding aspirations for greater respect-
ability, material well-being, and local progress.
Asking and receiving?

The purported goal of this letter-writing event, as declared in the President’s
December 1951 radio address, was to make the Second Five-Year Plan
reflect popular desires. Within weeks of mailing their letters, individuals
received notes from the government confirming the arrival of their sugges-
tions. What, then, became of the letter-writers’ requests and suggestions ?
How did officials respond to the flood of correspondence, and what, if
any, impact did the letters have on the state? The dearth of sources on the
internal workings of Perón’s government makes it impossible to formulate
comprehensive answers to these questions. The fragmentary historical record
points, however, to the frustration of the demands made by letter-writers,
partly because of the economic constraints of the post-1952 period. More
generally, the ‘Perón Wants to Know’ campaign underscores the ultimate
limits of the regime’s ideal of popular participation within national planning.
Rebuffed petitioners had few means of venting their displeasure; for those
with persistence, the path to material improvements lay in working through
partisan channels, lobbying officials, and continuing local fomentismo efforts.
At the end of the letter-writing campaign, propaganda-makers praised the
cooperation of letter-writers and the value of their contributions. Although
media coverage given to this event was by no means extensive (suggesting
perhaps that officials sought to defuse the petitioners’ anticipation of con-
crete results), references to the letters appeared in the Peronist media be-
tween December 1951 and the announcement of the second Plan Quinquenal
in December 1952. An article published in Mundo Peronista in July 1952
detailed what became of the ‘pueblo’s ’ letters.55 Titled ‘ Here is Your Project! ’
the article offered the first-hand account of José López, a (fictitious?) individ-
ual who decided to visit the Dirección Nacional de Planificación to inquire
55
Mundo Peronista, 1 July 1952, pp. 8–11.
about his letter. López described how he was taken through rooms and
rooms of files until he was presented with his own proposal; this govern-
ment agency functioned with machine-like efficiency, staffed by diligent
bureaucrats who laboured from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for the good of the ‘ pueblo’.
At the end of this impressive tour inside the nerve-centre of Peronist plan-
ning, López could not help but exclaim, as the magazine hoped its readers
would, ‘Es grande Perón! ’
As one might expect, there was a notable difference between this propa-
gandistic public face and the response to correspondence within government
circles. Brief internal memos appended to the letters by bureaucrats provide
some insight into the problems officials faced in meeting popular demands.
The Ministry of Technical Affairs acted as a clearing-house, forwarding the
correspondence to the appropriate national, provincial, or municipal agency.
Some of the surviving ‘Perón Wants to Know’ letters have replies from
these agencies attached to them. But it took anywhere from one to three
years for these assessments to return to the MAT – well after the second Plan
Quinquenal was adopted – indicating either the difficulties of processing the
high volume of letters or that this correspondence was not a priority for
officials.
Despite their brevity and formulaic style, these internal memoranda illus-
trate the variety of state responses to the letter-writers’ requests. Memos
sent to the MAT from the Ministry of Public Works issued terse judgments:
a particular request fell under the jurisdiction of provincial not national
authorities, was already under consideration by the Ministry, or formed part
of a project already underway. In the best case scenario, a letter-writer’s
request was met with the somewhat vague reply that the Ministry would
add the proposal to its list of future projects, which would be built when
the agency received the proper funds. Yet bureaucrats also rejected many
demands, often for sound reasons. A request for a one-million-peso loan
from a sports club was deemed ‘ excessive ’, while a female petitioner’s
personal plea for educational assistance was determined not to be ‘ an
initiative that should be considered for inclusion in the second Plan
Quinquenal. ’56
Budgetary limitations were frequently cited as a reason for refusing
requests, an internal acknowledgement that the economic downturn was
curbing the Peronist planners’ ambition. A memo from the ‘ Technical
Secretary’ of La Rioja argued that Ernesto from Chamical’s request for
multiple ‘ urbanización’ projects (discussed earlier in this essay) did indeed fall
under provincial authority, but the La Rioja government lacked funds
to implement the second Five-Year Plan and depended on national
56
AGN-MAT, Legajo 12, 8676. Legajo 205, 10144.
104 Eduardo Elena
contributions.57 The contrast between the letter-writers’ enthusiasm and the
state’s limitations was striking. In a letter requesting telephone service, parks,
and other public works, the Partido Peronista in the town of Estación Clark
proclaimed triumphantly : ‘ In Perón’s New Argentina the pueblo is joyful
and the country progresses in giant leaps, and thus, we see new public works
appear on a daily basis. ’ Confronted with this demand, the Ministry of Com-
munications concluded that although it had intended to extend phone ser-
vice to this town, it was now unable due to ‘financial needs’.58
Given these practical hindrances, government officials found themselves
in the tricky position of deciding what do about public demands for state-led
progress. Perón had warned his radio audience in December 1951 that not
all planning suggestions could be put into action ; planners would listen and
consider the requests of the ‘pueblo ’, but ultimately make the final decisions
about what the nation needed. Actions taken by Peronist authorities between
1952 and 1955 in response to other challenges helped to diffuse tensions.
In January 1952, Perón announced a sweeping austerity package and called
upon supporters to endure personal sacrifices in the short-term. The death
of Evita in July of that year was accompanied with further entreaties from
Perón for partisan solidarity. The regime’s leadership sought to dispel
anxieties with an elaborate presentation the second Five-Year Plan in
December 1952. Like its predecessor, the new plan was a dazzling display
of the planning state. The second Five-Year Plan showcased the regime’s
new economic priorities, especially with its emphasis on boosting agricultural
production and developing natural resources, but also included the types of
public works projects requested by letter-writers.59 Within the constraints
imposed by the austerity measures, national and provincial governments
funded these projects across the country – continuing to build the New
Argentina, if at a more measured pace.
It is difficult to determine how the letter-writers reacted to this com-
bination of mass politics, policy, and propaganda in the 1952–1955 period.
Despite the partisan loyalty that Argentine men and women expressed in
their letters, they would surely have had their faith in Peronism tested. In
fact, many petitioners were well accustomed to frustration and expressed
their dissatisfaction in their letters. ‘ It’s already been four years ’, protested
one petitioner in 1951, ‘ that all us neighbours have collected signatures to
see if we can get electricity and some paths, not having obtained anything
to date.’ A correspondent from greater Buenos Aires claimed that municipal
officials in her suburb ignored her earlier correspondence; she reached the
conclusion that ‘in order for those people to take action the order has to
57 58
59
Subsecretaria de Informaciones, Segundo Plan Quinquenal, (Buenos Aires, 1952).
60
come at least from General Péron. ’ This irritation with the Peronist
bureaucracy may explain in part why so many petitioners sought to com-
municate directly with Perón about their problems. In these cases, the fusing
of populist politics and technical planning seemed to break apart: for the
petitioners, personal appeals to the nation’s most influential political patron
seemed to offer a path around the bureaucratic barriers of the planning state.
Notwithstanding the obstacles they faced, some groups pursued their
lobbying efforts with remarkable resolve. A letter from a sociedad de fomento in
Greater Buenos Aires recounted its long struggle to get a public plaza built
for its community. Members claimed to have sent 27 petitions to various
levels of government between 1928 and 1950, but that ‘all this was a useless,
begging pilgrimage ’. In 1949, they met with Domingo Mercante, the well-
connected governor of Buenos Aires province, who referred their case
favourably to Evita Perón. The sociedad’s project was considered by the
federal Ministry of Transportation, which eventually rejected their request.61
Rather than give up, this organisation participated in Perón’s call for
planning suggestions, hoping to enlist his personal assistance in overcoming
these obstacles. Perhaps not all petitioners were so tenacious, but this
example points to the determination with which some advocates of grass-
roots fomento pursued their causes. It also suggests that for popular sector
Argentines the era of Peronist planning represented but one episode (albeit
one of high significance) in a much longer struggle for community and
personal improvement, which continued without much outside recognition
throughout Argentina’s turbulent political cycles.
The ‘Perón Wants to Know What the Pueblo Wants’ campaign was an
innovation in the regime’s mass political repertoire – an experiment that was
never repeated. With Perón’s overthrow by a military coup in September
1955, his government lost the opportunity to develop a Third Five-Year
Plan, and as a result, there was no occasion to request popular planning
suggestions. For the remainder of the 1952–1955 period, the regime’s leaders
continued to encourage individuals to write in with demands for personal
assistance. The ability of the central government to satisfy larger requests,
such as those for more comprehensive community development, was cur-
tailed by new economic policies to rein in state spending. Letters on planning
were more likely to gather dust in a bureaucrat’s filing cabinet than to be-
come a guide for government action.
Yet the actors that took part in the letter-writing campaign did not, by
and large, break openly with the Peronist movement. As the ‘ Perón Wants
60
AGN-MAT, Legajo 205, 6401 and 11623. The second petitioners’ requests were eventually
added to the province of Buenos Aires’s planning registry, according to an internal memo
61
from November 1953. AGN-MAT, Legajo 62, 9886.
106 Eduardo Elena
to Know’ letters suggest, there was more at stake in these political inter-
actions than a clientelisic bargain, in which the state rewarded supporters
with public works in exchange for votes.62 Despite the limited form of
participation offered by Peronist planning, men and women from across
Argentina saw themselves as working in concert with those at the highest
level of the state. If the 1951 letters are any indication of further trends,
individuals at the local level continued to take up the banner of planning –
even as the government found it difficult to fulfill its promises. The bonds of
partisan solidarity and the ideal of national progress retained at least some
of their original force. Within the political constraints of the regime, Peronist
sympathisers pressured officials to fulfill the unmet promise of the New
Argentina.
Conclusion
The ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ correspondence supplies new insights into two
political keywords of the mid-twentieth century: planning and participation.
In Perón’s Argentina, ‘ planning’ as a mode of governance was linked to
ideas about progress shared by state officials and popular sector supporters.
The 1951–1952 correspondence shows that the grand technical vision of
national progress expressed in the Plan Quinquenal overlapped at least par-
tially with the dog-eared blueprints of concerned neighbours. The letter-
writers saw the planning state more as a saviour or an ally in providing
material improvements than an unwanted intruder to be resisted. By putting
pen to paper, letter-writers also took part in a type of mass political partici-
pation that offered, in theory at least, a means of communication with the
supreme Peronist authority. Peronist participation built upon classic liberal
forms (such as elections), while creating additional venues for interaction
between state authorities and the public. Similarly, letter-writing represented
an older political and mass cultural practice that was recast within the new
mold of mass politics.
This collection of public correspondence offers a rare snapshot of popular
attitudes towards Peronism, questioning some familiar assumptions about
this Argentine variety of populism. Scholars have drawn attention to how
populist leaders employed a ‘popular ’ style in communicating with their
followers; these leaders peppered their speeches with slang terms or a put
forth a public image that contrasted with the rigidity of traditional politicians.
Even those populists who were more staid, such as Vargas or Cardenas, used
a discursive style in which they placed themselves squarely on the side of
62
For a case study of Peronism and clientelism in present-day Argentina, see Javier Auyero,
Poor People’s Politics : Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Durham, NC, 2000).
63
the pueblo. The 1951–1952 letters illustrate that these popular transgressions
were only part of the story. Petitioners were also inspired by the ‘ science’ of
planning and its ideal of modernisation, in which the central state would
literally build a New Argentina through public works and other interventions.
(Whether planning was truly ‘scientific ’ is another question altogether.)
Peronist planning contained a series of internal contradictions: between
state despotism and the vibrant spark of fomentismo, and between the ration-
ality of the Plan and the empathy of the Conductor. The salient issue here,
which has been overlooked, is the alchemy between these seemingly
opposing elements into an unsteady, if potent amalgam. Perón’s ‘ style’ was a
combination of the popular and the technocratic, which drew strength from
the ‘ substance’ of the planning state in action and the propagandistic vision
of the New Argentina.
Naturally, the ‘ Perón Wants to Know’ correspondence does not provide
a complete view of planning and Peronism. Missing from the letters are the
reactions of critics and opponents of the regime’s partisan brand of statist
intervention. Although this essay has emphasised the common ground
reached by planners and petitioners, resistance has its place in the history
of Peronist planning, especially in the contest among business, labour, and
the state over national economic planning. Likewise, the letters offer glimpses
into the complex worlds of local politics and civil society; one is left to
imagine the patron-client relationships that formed around unidades básicas,
the struggles between socidades de fomento and other organisations, or the dis-
putes among neighbours over where public works would be built.
Yet the conclusions drawn from this correspondence provide a more
complete view of state planning as a twentieth-century political phenom-
enon. There is room alongside the standard accounts of centralised, auth-
oritarian technocracy for a social history of planning, one that takes into
account how ‘ordinary’ men and women came to terms with the utopian
dreams of third-way nationalists. Of course, there are examples of political
regimes that practiced exclusionary planning, with few opportunities for
the popular classes to participate politically even on a symbolic level. In
Argentina, the project of ‘ national reorganisation’ launched by the military
dictatorship of the ‘ Proceso ’ (1976–1983) reworked the discourse of planning
to terrorise workers, leftists, and the population as a whole. But other types
of state planning in Latin America, especially those associated with populist
regimes, spoke to the aspirations of popular households and other sup-
porters – even as state leaders faced structural economic crises (exacerbated
63
On populism and style, see Alan Knight, ‘ Populism and Neo-populism in Latin America,
especially Mexico, ’ Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 223–48; Ernesto
Laclau, Populism and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977) ; Michael L. Conniff (ed.),
Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa, 1999) ; James, Resistance and Integration, pp. 7–40.
108 Eduardo Elena
in most cases by their own poor management) that impeded the realisation of
their ambitious plans. The Peronist state may have lacked the ability of other
planning regimes to implement fully its designs, but its vision of ‘ progress ’
had a deep political and social impact equal to, if not greater than, the actual
number of public works built.
From a contemporary perspective, where the virtues of unregulated
economic markets and small government are defended far and wide, plan-
ning may seem like an odd curiosity. Certainly, many aspects of this period
(such as the Peronist ideal of an ‘ Organised Community ’) are best left buried
in the past. Yet the utopias imagined by national planners such as Perón
and working people such as Zulema have not disappeared entirely. The
connection between progress and public works remains strong in Argentine
communities that still struggle with muddy streets and other problems of
collective consumption, while partisan and neighbourhood associations
still link needy communities to officials who control access to resources.
Although the planning state has faded with the rise of neo-liberalism, the
‘ luminous road’ of progress invoked in 1951 retains, for some Argentines at
least, glimmers of its old lustre.

What The People Want Under Peronism (Eduardo Elena)

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J. Lat. Amer. Stud.

37, 81–108 f 2005 Cambridge University Press 81

What the People Want : State Planning

Eduardo Elena is a lecturer at Princeton University.

Peronists and planners

Building a new Argentina

Table 2. Identity of Letter-writers

community members, and multiple organisations signed the same letter.

The allure of Peronism and progress

Asking and receiving?

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