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The Popular Parties: Brazil and Argentina in a Latin American Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Torcuato S. Di Tella
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THE INSTABILITY OF MOST LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES derives to a large extent from the difficulty of incorporating the working class and other popular strata into the political system. Euro ean countries also had to face a similar challenge decades ago, gut the central position they had in the international economic system helped to ease the tensions. In the Third world or Latin America the problem is compounded because to the working class must be added large sectors of urban marginals, peasants and often the impoverished middle classes. These groups tend to form broadly-based parties which become the main contenders for power against the dominant establishment. They are placed in a somewhat similar position to that occupied by Labour, Social Democratic or Eurocommunist parties in Europe or Japan. But they are based on different organizational and ideological elements, and their popular rather than workingclass nature often involves strange coalitions. Brazil and Argentina share fully these traits. In order to understand the characteristics of the popular political parties in those two countries one must examine them in a Latin American comparative perspective.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1984 , pp. 250 - 268
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Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

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References

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19 The growth of cotton and cattle production in Nicaragua, replacing the previous importance of coffee, was apparently responsible for the displacement and proletarianization of many peasants associated with earlier forms of land management. Crawley, Eduardo, Dictators Never Die: A Portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza Dynasty, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1979 Google Scholar and Diederich, Bernard, Somoza and the Legacy of U. S. Involvement in Central America, London, Junction Press, 1983 Google Scholar.

20 See Araujo, Manuel Mora y and Llorente, Ignacio, El voto peronista, Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1980 Google Scholar. The large vote Peronismo go in the less developed parts of the country was of course numerically mostly rural and peasant, but the support from insecure or downwardly mobile sectors of the middle classes of those areas was strategic. They acted as an intermediary to mobilize popular support via local caudillista structures of a more traditional type than the ones that could function in the more industrialized areas.

21 Peronismo never had the support of a majority of members of those upper status groups, but enough of it, as far as I can see, to create a special component in the coalition of interests that led it to power and maintained it there. I would hypothesize that the social support for the ‘entorno’, that is, the group of subordinates, friends, business associates and ‘hombres de confianza’ around Perón (or his wife later on) comes from those upper status groups. They are a minority within their class, at odds with the dominant sentiments of their peers, and without much legitimate organization of their own. The entorno can be considered, therefore, as a functional alternative to the organization and legitimated representation which they lack in Argentine political life.