Conventional wisdom in the United States concerning Latin American affairs has tended to reduce political conflicts in this continent to contests between a right-wing military, which supports the interests of a conservative landholding class, and democratic forces, which strive for progress, liberty, and the defense of the popular masses. This is a simplistic outlook. At least as far as Brazil and Argentina are concerned, such a point of view is far from corresponding to complex historical reality. The paradigm of political and social unrest in Brazil and Argentina should rather follow the classical model, proposed by Plato and Aristotle more than two thousand years ago: In opposition to the wishes of long-established rural and urban "aristocracies" with varying degrees of commitment to constitutional forms of government, changes are introduced or provoked by populist leaders, whom the Greek philosophers used to call "tyrants."

Brazil's Getúlio Vargas and Argentina's Juan Perón were typical tyrants in this classical sense. Personal ambition, mere competition between groups and clienteles for the sake of the spoils of power, the intervention of the armed forces and ideologies of the Left and Right are complicating factors but not the heart of the problem. Actually, the Roman Republic can be taken as a basic model of what generally happens in Latin upheavals: At the end of the republic, the old constitution, which gave preeminence to patrician families with seats in the Senate, was being jeopardized by the emergence of leaders or tribunes of the plebs (Marius, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Octavian), often fighting against representatives of the patrician classes (Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Brutus). Thus was the republic overthrown.
In Latin America, the process of modernization can be directed either by the Right or the Left-and liberal-constitutional government can similarly be defended either by conservatives or socalled progressive elements. The fact that Vargas was a civilian and Perón a general is of secondary importance: The main significance of their historical role is the populist impact exerted by their charismatic personalities at the onset of the Industrial Revolution in their respective countries. Ideological polarities seem to have less import than the fact that both men subverted legitimately organized, liberal-constitutional schemes of ideological plurality.
As an introductory scheme for my discussion, I propose a triangular formula, whereby the dichotomy between the Jacobin revolutionary urge and Bonapartist authoritarianism is superseded by a third factor, representing the educated liberal-constitutional middle classes ("liberal" in the Continental sense of the word), which are strongly influenced by Western European and North American models of tolerant pluralism.
Personalities play an immense role in the political struggles of Argentina and Brazil, with little connection to ideologies, party programs, or philosophical or religious convictions. Ideologies are shifting instruments of public policy, rather than the other way around. The strong personality of the caudillo constitutes a general phenomenon that has been enhanced by the Industrial Revolution, the process of modernization, and the progressive enlargement of the franchise.

The word democracy should not be used indiscriminately to describe events. Very often it is hard to decide on which side democratic forces are fighting. Populist leaders such as Perón and Vargas are modern expressions of the personal role of charismatic caudillos in Latin American history, in a tradition that does not necessarily stem from nineteenth-century Iberian history. Vargas of Brazil inherited the caudillo stigma from the southern frontier state of Rio Grande do Sul, close to Argentina and Uruguay, where the caudillesco tradition is strong.

Brazil and Argentina are definitely not Third World countries: They are simply poor, developing countries of the First World, to the same extent, for instance, that Greece, Spain, and Portugal were until recently. Their populations are mostly of European extraction (neighbors jokingly describe the Argentines as "Italians who speak Spanish and believe themselves to be British"). They speak Romance languages, profess the Christian religion, read Western books and see Western films. They dress like Westerners; dwell on Western political, social, and cultural ideas; and are economically and financially linked to the West.

The two nations are historically as much a result of the European imperialistic expansion following the great navigations, discoveries, and conquests of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries as the United States, Canada, or Australia. It is easy, therefore, to understand how political ideologies and institutions in Brazil and Argentina follow the patterns set up mainly by southern Europe, and less distinctly by Western Europe and North America, a consideration which is absolutely essential to an understanding of the changes occurring in our relatively isolated part of the world.

Another point to be emphasized is that the thirty-odd countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, although showing many points in common as far as their political and social characteristics are concerned, differ strongly among themselves on the cultural level. If we wish to evaluate the very complex composition of the area, we should be wary of the concept of "Latin America," often used for convenience's sake in the United States to sum up the whole of the continent south of the Rio Grande.

Vargas of Brazil
Brazil won its independence peacefully in 1822, thanks to the initiative of the Portuguese King Joâo VI's son, who proclaimed himself emperor under the title of Dom Pedro I. Pedro I's son, Dom Pedro II, reigned from 1831 to 1889, a long and enlightened regime that granted Brazil an extraordinary period of stability, peace, and freedom. Quite in contrast with the anarchy then prevailing in most of South America (with the sole exception of Chile), this unique monarchical "childhood" determined the course of Brazilian history. A landed slave-owning aristocracy (slavery was abolished only in 1888) ruled the country under the benign supervision of the emperor, who exercised what came to be known as the "moderating" power.

European immigration, stimulated early under the empire, grew at the end of the last century and early in this one. From three to five million Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Polish, and, later, Lebanese, Jewish, and Japanese immigrants entered the country, fundamentally changing the anthropological makeup of the southern states. Brazil now holds the largest Japanese population outside of Japan (more than a million Japaneseborn nisei and sansei).

French influence growing among the intelligentsia, both civilian and military, and the modern model of the U.S. federal and republican Constitution, led to the proclamation of the republic in 1889 by a sudden and unexpected military coup d'état. From 1889 to 1930, the "old republic" was in fact an oligarchic regime dominated by the coffee growers of the state of Sao Pâulo and the cattle ranchers of the state of Minas Gerais, both surrounding the capital of Rio de Janeiro. Presidents were chosen by political caucus. A paternalistic sort of regime grew, under a ruing class that never made a clear distinction between things public and things private. The British parliamentarian model of the empire was replaced by an American model, with its presidential and federal features. Only once did an opposition candidate seek office in presidential elections, and when this happened, in 1930, the results were violence and the collapse of the old republic.

The new head of state was Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, who lived from 1883 to 1954. A former governor of Rio Grande do Sul and minister of finance, Vargas brought an entirely new concept to bear on Brazilian politics, for he was the first Brazilian representative of the typically Spanish style of caudillo leadership (albeit corrected by the Brazilian inclination to tolerance and laissez-faire and modified by a French pseudo-"positivist," or Comtean, ideology).

The state of Rio Grande do Sul is a sort of Texas in Brazilian geopolitics: It has, since its early colonization in the seventeenth century by Azoreans, been inextricably linked to the destiny of the River Plate region. The long, drawn-out struggle between the Portuguese and Spaniards for control of the left bank of the Rio de La Plata, as well as the upper reaches of the Uruguay and Paraguay rivers, created a frontier mentality. Río Grande do Sul was the advance headquarters of the Portuguese colonial empire in South America and bred a particularly pugnacious sort of people, still called the gaúchos (with the accent on the u). Many of the customs of these cowboys are quite similar to those of the gaúchos (with accent on the a) of Argentina and Uruguay. The aggressive, extroverted personality of the gaúcho also owes something to the presence of German and Italian immigrants in the northern, mountainous ar ea of the state.

The first republican governor of Rig Grande do Sul, Julio de Castilhos, was an authoritarian lawyer of positivistic persuasion who imposed on the state a constitution that drew heavily on Comte's idea of "republican dictatorship." The Castilhista tradition of centralized, authoritarian government dominated that part of Brazil and became associated with the typical "gaúcho" inclination for dictatorial caudilhismo. The authoritarian elements very often came into conflict with the parliamentarian wing of the liberal maraga tos, leading to internecine warfare throughout the period.
Vargas belonged to a political family deeply involved in the struggles of the early republican period. A lawyer by profession, he was elected deputy in the House, appointed minister of finance (1926) in the cabinet of President Washington Luis Pereira de Souza, and made governor of his state (1928-30). Vargas then was chosen to lead the "Liberal Alliance" as an opposition candidate but was defeated in the ensuing rigged elections of 1930 (note the fallacious use of the term liberal). The defeat was followed by the "revolution" of October of that year, which overthrew the old republic and in so doing removed the paulista oligarchy, so named for the dominant position of Sao Pâulo.
For four years Vargas was a provisional president (note again the Orwellian use of the term provisional), and during this period he maneuvered with supreme ability in the conflicts between the revolutionary tenentes-the Young Turks of the 1930 movement-and the entrenched regional political oligarchies. In 1932 he suppressed, after a brief civil war, an attempt by the paulistas to regain the upper hand. In 1934 Vargas was elected president by a constitutional as sembly, but in 1937 he engineered a new coup d'etat, supported by the armed forces; dissolved Congress; and established a "New State" (Estado Novo), a strongly centralized sort of corporatist regime modeled both on Comtean ideas and the fascist governments of Latin Europe that were then fashionable.

The Machiavellian way Vargas dealt with the two "extremist" movements, the communists and the Integralistas, is also characteristic. After having encouraged the National Liberation Alliance of the Left (1933-34), he suppressed a communist rebellion (1935) in Natal, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro, putting most of the Red leaders in prison. Again he goaded the right-wing Integralistas in the last few months of 1937, using them for his coup d'état against democracy, and then took advantage of the resentments of the true democrats to suppress the Integralista movement.

Vargas thus zigzagged with consummate expertise amid the chaotic political currents of the nation wrongly described by one of his main supporters as "a desert of men and ideas." Vargas himself never was a convinced ideologue, the dominant facet of his character being an absolute lack of convictions. He was actually a supreme opportunist. He named a son after Luther, not because he was in any sense a Protestant, not even because Luther is one of the heroes of "Humanity" commemorated in Auguste Comte's Calendar, but because in so doing Vargas could challenge the dogmatic positions of power of the Catholic Church-an institution he despised while showing its hierarchy every mark of respect.

The Vargas regime was in short a strictly personal affair, with very little of the trappings and crowd-pleasing methods typical of the fascist and communist regimes of the period. The corporatist constitution Vargas granted to Brazil was never implemented. The regime remained strictly personal, though any attempt to foster a cult of personality was limited to plastering Vargas' picture all over the country under the slogan "The nation places its faith and hope in the President of the Republic." This was enough to ensure the faithfulness of the masses, who quickly responded by granting him the messianic title of "Father of the Poor" (though he was known in other quarters as the "Mother of the Rich").

In the international context, Vargas applied the same efficient opportunistic methods. He was first feared abroad as a right-wing dictator, attuned to the totalitarian tendencies then spreading all over Europe. Soon afterward, however, he reduced the federal states' autonomy and promoted a campaign to "nationalize" the nuclei of German and Polish immigrants that had formed in southern Brazil. Nazi activities among German settlers were crushed and relations with Hitler's Germany were nearly broken, although trade between the two countries grew.

When war started in Europe, Vargas immediately declared Brazil's neutrality. But in June 1940, just as the French army had collapsed under the onslaught of the Wehrmacht and London was being blitzed by the Luftwaffe, Vargas chose the site of a battleship in Rio's harbour to deliver a speech of great impact, in which he praised the "new order" arising in the world, the demise of "old-fashioned ideas" concerning liberty, and the emergence of youthful nations, full of energy and ready to lead the planet to a new civilization.

The speech quoted Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, echoing its antiSemitic overtones. So did the immigration legislation secretly introduced by Vargas, which impeded the entrance into Brazil of thousands of "Shylocks" trying to escape the coming Holocaust.

In February 1942, this pro-Axis attitude suddenly disappeared: A Pan-American conference gathered in Rio and was presided over by Brazil's pro-American foreign minister, Oswaldo Aranha, one of the most intimate of the dictator's gaúcho friends. Aranha led the efforts, resisted only by Argentina and Chile, for a general break in diplomatic relations with the Axis powers by the American republics. Soon, Vargas was sending an expeditionary force of two infantry divisions to fight in Italy; he also granted the United States bases in the northeastern bulge of Brazil, allowing the Allies to reach the coast of Africa by air, and thus preparing for the successful landings in North Africa at the end of that year. In return, Vargas obtained from the Americans financial and technical support for the installation of a huge steel plant in Volta Redonda, which subsequently was to become the spearhead of Brazil's rapid industrialization.

The years 1938 to 1945 were surprisingly peaceful. Vargas himself excelled in the art of reducing tensions and conciliating the opposition. His ability was such that he managed to put all the blame for the regime's brainwashing/propaganda machinery on the minister of information and propaganda; all the blame for the imprisonment and occasional torture of members of the opposition fell to the chief of police, Felinto Mueller.
During the twenty-four years of Vargas' sway, very few cases of deliberate killing for political reasons could be blamed on his government. Some grim lapses did occur, of course. One of the worst examples of abuse held against the dictator was the detention of the Jewish wife of Brazilian communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes. As a German-born citizen, she was expelled from Brazil and handed to the Gestapo; she disappeared in a concentration camp.

One of the reasons for the opposition's reluctance to come out loudly and violently against the regime was the permanent possibility of making a deal with Vargas: The man wielded incontestable power but never showed a consistent and lasting determination to stick to any definite policy.

After the war, Vargas decided the time had come for a change of course: The Allies had won the war, but the USSR appeared to be the main beneficiary of victory over the Axis powers. The Soviet nomenklatura system seemed especially attractive, due to Vargas' authoritarian, nationalistic, and bureaucratic propensities, more so than American democratic "anarchy." As in Mexico, bureaucrats and intellectuals from the Left became convinced that Soviet-style rule by the nomenklatura was much more congenial to their interests than liberal capitalism. To be on the safe side, however, Vargas took the initiative of founding two new parties: on his right, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which in spite of its name was conservative and represented the power of regional oligarchies, and on his left, the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB). Thus provided with support from the Left and Right, he could handle the situation as expedience dictated.. But his preference seemed to go to the PTB, since by then he had discovered his true populist vocation.

Vargas had never cared much for the working classes or the poor. Originally, he was linked mostly to the landlords of his own state, whose interests he continued defending even after he had turned into a populist rabble-rouser. Just after the 1930 "revolution," one of his young followers, Lindolfo Collor, suggested the introduction of a new labor law under which workers' demands would cease to be "a question for the police" to handle, as proclaimed by the former president. Vargas accepted Collor's ideas with misgivings: "Let's hope this little German will not cause us too much trouble," he said, referring to Collor's birth in the German colonial area of Rio Grande do Sul. But then Vargas understood that the new labor and social welfare laws were copied from the Italian fascist Carta del Lavoro, keeping labor unions strictly under the thumb of the Ministry of Labor in his own government. Thus, the proletarian masses could eventually be mobilized to his advantage-a development that became a certainty after the introduction of universal franchise and a legal electoral system guaranteed the rights of the voting masses.
In the mid-forties, as he perceived the growing power of the Soviet Union, Vargas realized the political advantages of coloring his own prestige with a socialistic legitimizing ideology and started shifting his posture more and more to the left. He personified fully the national socialist trend of his time, that peculiar fusion of Left and Right that was to spread triumphantly throughout the so-called Third World after 1945. Soviet communism of the Stalinist type, Hitlerism, fascism, the Spanish Falange, Brazilian Integralismo and Argentinian Justicialismo were a national expressions of the deep socialist hatred of freedom, money market economies, and the open society. Consequently, all the nationalistic slogans that had been used prior to 1940 by the Brazilian Right quite naturally fitted into the rhetoric of the Left after 1945. Vargas was the principal beneficiary, and the Unite States became the main punching bag.

The former dictator was reelectec in 1950, thanks to the alliance of his own PTB (Labor Party) with the conservative oligarchic PSD on a nationalistic platform. During his new tenure as president, Vargas introduced legislation inimical to foreign capital and began to whip up xenophobic feelings among the populace. The relative growth of the public sector of the Brazilian economy, which hay now reached enormous proportion (about 70 percent of GNP), started at that time. For example, Petrobras, the state oil monopoly, was created under the slogan "the oil is ours." Vargas' enemies were all liberal constitutionalists of the UDN (National Democratic Union), representatives of the growing urban middle classes who nevertheless thought it best to board the nationalistic bandwagon.

In the fifties, Vargas emerged as the, "father of the poor"; at the same time, he relied more and more on the control of labor unions by the PTB clientele of his disciple "tango" Goulart in the Ministry of Labor. In short, Vargas was by then the greatest populist leader and first real caudillo in Brazilian history, as well as the last and most powerful coronel (political boss) in the old-fashioned politics based on patronage and the spoils system. Vargas created his own Brazilian ideology, Getulismo: a mixture of nationalism, welfare-state laborism, demagoguery, and the eternal utopian expectations of the masses, who hoped for a savior to inaugurate the tropical paradise on earth. But in 1954, when his government sank into corruption and inefficiency ("a sea of mud," as he himself sadly defined the mess brought about by his closest followers), Vargas coldly and deliberately chose to quit by suicide, rather than surrender to a new military coup.

The PTB-PSD alliance formed by Vargas persisted; after a new military countercoup, it managed to elect, with about one-third of the vote, Juscelino Kubitschek, the governor of Minas Gerais. Kubitschek, an enlightened pragmatist, was the builder of Brasilia and a father of Brazil's Industrial Revolution. But Goulart, as vice president, took over the presidency in 1961 when a new president, Jânio Quadros, suddenly resigned. The tradition of gaúcho caudillismo persisted with Goulart, but he was so incompetent and so vulnerable to his communist friends that he was overthrown by the military in April 1964. Contrary to precedent, the military took over the government itself; the authoritarian regime it established lasted for twenty years and provided Brazil with a period of economic growth that became known as the `Brazilian miracle." Nevertheless, military rule further strengthened the bureaucratic, authoritarian tradition of the paternalistic state. Goulart's brother-in-law from Rio Grande do Sul, Leonel Brizola, still carries the flame of populism and gaucho caudillismo: He was an important candidate for president in the elections held in November 1989, and in October 1990 won election as governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The distinctive mark of Vargas' personality, which so admirably fitted Brazilian national character and gave him such unheard-of popularity, was his shrewdness, his devious behavior, his lightheartedness, the way he knew how to profitably use or discard friends and enemies when the moment came, with no feelings whatsoever of resentment or compassion. He was admired for his simple wizardry. Short, plump, with a permanent expression of simpatico cordiality so congenial to the Brazilian temperament, Vargas maintained on his lips, as a critic once remarked, a perennial "Gioconda smile."
Unlike Perón, who forced a real national socialist revolution by attacking the so-called oligarchy of landlords, the estancieros who took their tea and drank their whiskey at the Jockey Club, Vargas managed to reduce the violence of the ideological revolution. His Machiavellian genius left a lasting imprint. Just before he shot himself on the morning of August 24, 1954, he wrote a letter (a spurious document according to his enemies), in which he blamed his demise on the "oc cult power" of foreign interests. Claiming he was offering his life as a sacrificial victim for the "liberation" of Brazil from unspecified imperialistic plots, Vargas threw back at his adversaries the blame for the crisis into which the country had fallen.

Vargas' suicide was a masterpiece of self-promotion beyond death. Far from ensuring his disappearance in shame and obloquy, it provoked a popular upsurge that led eventually to the permanent hegemony in Brazilian politics of left-wing national socialistic Third Worldism, populism, statism, and authoritarian positivism, lasting up to the present. It was partially against Getulismo and its alleged corruptive effects that the armed forces rose to power in 1964. Yet again, in 1985, the shadow of Vargas would inspire those who took over the "democratic" new republic.

PERON AND ARGENTINA
The story of Juan Domingo Perón becomes more interesting and meaningful when compared with that of Vargas. The similarities and discrepancies between the destinies of the two men may contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of populist caudillismo in Latin America, as well as to an analysis of the cultural structure and collective psychology of the two nations. One has to take into consideration, to begin with, the great social and cultural contrasts between them. Argentina is younger than Brazil, yet more mature. Its settlement by Europeans started in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century, and for a hundred years it consisted simply of a large port, Buenos Aires, with a huge hinterland inhabit ed by half breed cowboys (the gáuchos). There were a few cities (Tucuman, Córdoba, Mendoza, Rosario) on its northern borders with Bolivia and Paraguay, on which centers the Argentines depended.

Argentina was consolidated only around 1880 when the anarchy in the pampas was finally crushed by the bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires. Thereafter, in a short, fantastic burst of prosperity stimulated by European immigration, Argentina raised herself to the forefront of developing nations. The immensely fertile plains around Buenos Aires, the pampas, perfect for cattle raising and wheat growing, created around the enormous, cosmopolitan city, definitely European in character, one of the most successful economies in the New World.
By 1929, Argentina had become the fifth-or sixth-richest nation in the world, and the leading power in South America. Its per capita income was higher than that of Canada and the countries of southern Europe, including Spain and Italy.

A joke then current in Latin America claimed that the Mexicans were descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, and the Argentines ... from ships. At some point, there were more Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Irish, and other energetic and adventurous foreigners in Buenos Aires than native-born Argentines. In his celebrated A Study of History, written in that era, Arnold Toynbee maintained that even southern Brazil was "inferior in civilization to regions farther South, on either side of the La Plata estuary"; using his theory of "challenge and response," he claimed that "along the South American Atlantic seaboard, the equatorial sector is not stimulating but positively relaxing," when compared to the optimum climate of "the Argentinian State of Buenos Aires."

But then something went wrong. Argentina stagnated in unprofitable civil discord, and central Buenos Aires now offers an air such as that of the decadent capitals of decayed empires, like Vienna or Constantinople in Europe. Argentina today stands well behind Brazil, Mexico, and even Venezuela in economic power. Its GNP is half that of the state of Sao Pâulo, which lies in that "less stimulating equatorial sector" of which Toynbee spoke merely fifty years ago.

Argentina has become an enigma to all those friends and observers who share in the huge disappointment that it has caused. Robert Crassweller, in his enlightening book Perón and the Enigma of Argentina, investigates the mystery of the nation's fall and the possible relation between Perón's appearance, the military's role, and the permanent contention and violence plaguing Argentine politics. "The fall from grace," says Crassweller, "was seen to be almost biblical in its sweep, as if a judgment had been rendered. But throughout all this, the basic sources of Argentine success remained unchanged. Why, then, the fall from which redemption is still uncertain? That is the first great enigma." Raul Prebish, himself an Argentine and-as the author of the disastrous statist recipes of ECLA (the UN Economic Commission for Latin America)-among the men mainly responsible for the fatal conceit that led Argentina to ru in, finally confessed at the end of his life that Argentina represents a peculiar case of a country that made a deliberate option for underdevelopment.

I believe that nations, like individuals, may be subject to collective diseases. The disease that affects Argentina, like the nosos recorded by Plato and other ancient philosophers of Greece, has a triple source: nationalism; the pseudo-Christian modern version of socialism that Perón named Justicialismo-a tyranny of labor unions similar to that which almost destroyed Great Britain; and the virulent form of caudillismo represented by Perón, certainly an evil genius if ever there was one.
The pseudology that emerged from this confused situation took some time to clear out. Originally, in most of Latin America, the struggle between liberals and conservatives was strictly a contest between anticlerical enthusiasts of the French model and Tridentine Catholics, stubbornly resisting modernity. Internecine civil war, coups, countercoups, assassinations, and cyclical revolutions (Emperor Dom Pedro II jokingly compared Brazil's neighboring republics to clocks, which made a "revolution every twentyfour hours") were no more than expressions of the power struggles between competing politicians and generals. Personalities were involved, not ideas. The concept of the rule of law was nonexistent.

Just as in the bloody conflicts of the feudal period (e.g., the War of the Roses in England), Argentine warlords fought against each other for purely selfish ends, in the defense of their patrimonial and family possessions. Personal loyalty was the bond that linked the attendants and vassals to their destiny-an emotional relationship that had very little to do with adherence to any ideological program. This personal bonding to the spellbinder is still the best explanation for the blind loyalty and worship so many Argentines exhibit toward the memory of Perón (and so many Brazilians toward that of Vargas).

In the period between the two World Wars an ominous phenomenon took place, adding a complicating factor to the picture. Brazil and Argentina formerly had stabilized their political lives under the rule of oligarchies, which gave them not only internal peace but prosperity. Democratic procedures were a sham, but government was effective and did not much interfere in the lives of private citizens. It is true that in Brazil little was done by the state to provide elementary education and a minimum level of health to the poorer classes-but at least in Argentina and in southern Brazil social improvement of immigrant families was the rule, thanks to their private initiative. In the thirties, however, while liberal democratic ideas were under siege in Europe, the Great Depression hit dramatically, affecting the prices of coffee in Brazil and of meat and wheat in Argentina. The specter of national socialism was rising, and the dialectics of Jacobinism and Bonapartism took new forms: With socialism on the left (communism on the extreme left) and nationalism on the right came the seductive hope of transcending those two enemy brothers.

National socialism was the answer that empowered Peròn and Vargas, though the two tyrants called it by different names: Justicialismo and Getulismo. National socialism may be defined as the obscene pseudology of the twentieth century. It was the tragedy of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century; it became the disease of the Third World in the second half. Peròn himself used the expression national socialism to describe his own brand of Justicialismo in a discourse in 1968.

As with Vargas, Perón's career was marked by a drift from the Right to the Left. When he took over the government just after the Second World War, still under the impact of Hitler's demise in Europe, Perón was universally feared abroad as a representative of an exotic brand of Nazi ideology. The American ambassador, Spruille Braden, fought him as such. Peron welcomed many former Nazi and Gestapo refugees, who helped him in his rise, and even an Austrian charlatan who promised to make an atomic bomb for him at low cost.

Under the influence of his wife Eva, Peròn deviated more to the left. Through Eva he took control of the Ministry of Labor with its descamisados, "shirtless ones," a crowd he used as a sort of SS cohort to overturn his enemies. Left and Right always divided the Perónistas, and when Perón returned from exile in Spain in 1974, the two arms of the party gave him a bloody welcome at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires: Hundreds are said to have been killed in this first skirmish between the Montoneros of the Left and the anticommunist death squads of Lopez Rega, a crony of Perón's third wife, Maria Isabel. The violence that followed, with terrorism and counterterrorism after the military returned to power in 1976, was called the Dirty War. It degenerated into a sort of Sicilian vendetta and is said to have left fifteen thousand dead and "disappeareds" (desaparecidos) . "These were only a few of the scars that hinted at the social and psychic destruction wrought at deeper levels," as Crassweller writes.

Violence and terrorism are also contagious; they are collective diseases. Here again, we cannot speak of causes of underdevelopment, poverty, or ignorance: Violence of that sort has been a scourge of even the advanced nations in Europewitness France in 1793-94, Russia in 1917-1953, Spain in 1936-39, Germany in 1933-1945, and even Northern Ireland nowadays. In Latin America, we find a vocation to violence in some countries (Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina) and not in others, a tendency quite apart from the cultural level of the countries involved.

THE MALASIE OF LATIN AMERICA
The enigma of Argentina is not only her own; it is the enigma of Latin America. Argentina is distinct only as the worst example of the deep malaise that affects the countries of our continent. Many scholars, Argentine, Brazilian, and foreign, have tried to offer a diagnosis of the collective disease that gnaws at our peoples and impedes our development. Recently, after the collapse in the early eighties of the Brazilian "economic miracle"-which in the seventies had turned Brazil into the eighth-largest industrial economy in the Western world-many observers have started to speak of an "Argentinization" of Brazil. They somberly anticipate a syndrome of decadence similar to that of our neighbor. In the last four or five years, however, liberals (in the Continental sense) have diagnosed the cancer of the huge mercantilistic, bureaucratic, and paternalistic state, an obsolete monster that breeds runaway inflation, stagnation, corruption, inefficiency, civil disorder, and evil-minded autarchic policies.

Some contrasts between the two countries may help highlight these parallels. Argentina is still culturally and socially superior to Brazil. Indicators of life expectancy, primary education, wealth distribution, and health conditions are distinctly higher or better than in Brazil. Due to the basically European origin of the population, Argentina's development was smoother and more balanced than that of Brazil, whose main feature is its highly heterogeneous racial and geographic constitution. Compare the per capita income of around U.S. $300 in the northeastern state of Maranhao with that of U.S. $6,000 in Sao Pâulo: Argentina does not register such scandalous contrasts.

Argentina does not suffer from the handicaps created in Brazil by the tropical environment, high birthrate, and proliferation of racially and culturally heterogeneous masses. It never went through historical disasters; perhaps this is precisely what it lacks to become serious. All the factors that according to Adam Smith determine the nature and causes of the wealth of nations were present up to 1929, save that a politically corrupt and monstrous state intervened in the free development of the potential of the country, leading it to perdition. Obviously, the malaise that disturbs Brazil and Argentina has deeper causes, with no relation to the two countries' cultural advancement: Argentina can produce a sophisticated literary genius such as Jorge Luis Borges and still register political upheavals that one would only expect in banana republics.

SARMIENTO'S DIAGNOSIS
One of the most illustrious of Argentina's liberal thinkers, educators, and statesmen, Domingo Sarmiento, who was president from 1868 to 1874, carefully studied the "collective disease" represented by caudillismo. "The schoolteacher president," as he was called, put the blame for the anarchic character of the Argentine on the Iberian inheritance, contaminated by the long Arab presence in the peninsula during the Middle Ages. In his view, that type of collective behavior, which always oscillated between anarchy and despotism, was unable to create lasting institutions, because it never reached the level of intellectual abstraction that transcends personal relationships.

In his masterpiece, Civilization and Barbarism, directed against the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas, Sarmiento undertook to describe the pampas caudillo Facundo Quiroga. A lieutenant of the dictator, Quiroga became a symbol of the barbarism of the nomadic gáuchos; primitive people, they were intractable to any type of legal democratic organization and averse to any restraining moral principle. Borges remarks, in an article of 1961, "Violence and barbarism are not a lost paradise, but an immediate risk. Since 1940 or thereabouts we are again contemporary to Sarmiento and to the historical process which he analyzed and anathematized; we were also before that date, but we did not know it." Sarmiento argued that "reason is impotent at certain stages of culture ... generally in our countries, nobody has a clear awareness of law and justice."
Irrationality and lack of consciousness of the rule of law-what better explanation could be found for the havoc wrought on a society that seemed to follow obsessively the path of lawlessness and murder? When Sarmiento achieved the office of president at the height of his career, he could not have imagined that caudillos like Quiroga, Rosas, and Urquiza, the terrible "tyrants" he had fought all of his life, would one day spawn a man like Perón, the greatest caudillo of them all, whose legitimation rested on the mad ideologies of twentieth-century Europe; nor could he foresee that the violence of the Montoneros would spread even among those army officers whose initial program was the elimination of popular despotism. Even less could he anticipate, admirer that he was of Anglo-Saxon culture, with its liberal tradition and institutions, that the despotic arbitrariness of military leaders would one day launch an absurd war against Britain herself.

In Argentina, it seems that the "barbarism" of the pampas contaminated the masses of alienated immigrants who landed in Buenos Aires. Public education, without a real paideia in political culture, proved incapable of repressing the emotional outbursts of hero worship, messianic expectations, and anarchic controversy. No abstract, impersonal concept of the rule of law could prosper in a milieu otherwise very advanced. As long as the country was governed by a small, well-educated elite, brought up in the atmosphere of European rational culture, everything went well. But then, like an insidious disease, socialistic and nationalistic pseudologies took over, acting in the body politic as true collective psychopathologies.
Sarmiento believed that Arab blood, which he took to be so conspicuous in the composition of the Iberian population after centuries of Moorish occupation, was responsible for those inertial elements hostile to the civilizing influence of Europe and acting by way of Buenos Aires. His mother's family had an Arabic name, Albarracin, but he considered that the Arabs' tendency to nomadism had combined with a similar disposition among the pampas Indians to generate a temperament incompatible with the legal stability preferred by city dwellers. The great educator was probably wrong in this surmise. Yet it seems to be true that Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East share with the southern Latins an ominous bent for political incompetence, resistance to the concept of the rule of law, and a proclivity to follow caudillos who appear as father figures or big brothers, carriers of messianic promises.

RACE IS NOT THE EXPLANATION
Many republics of Central and South America suffer from the same vices, and yet one cannot attribute their similar propensities to the presence or absence of Arab blood. Racial explanations cannot be accepted, since one finds among Latin American caudillos pure Europeans like Rosas, Perón, Vargas (and for that matter, Castro); mestizos like Quiroga and the Venezuelan Gomez; and blacks such as the Haitian dictators.

Sarmiento could not have foreseen the consequences of his own enlightened immigration policies. Immigration would urbanize Argentina to the point that more than one-third of the total population is today concentrated in Greater Buenos Aires alone. But the change in social, economic, and cultural structure brought in its wake an unstable, urban proletariat that became easy prey to populist demagoguery. Quiroga and Rosas were rural caudillos, men on horseback. Perón was a typical urban one. The root of the problem is therefore more complex than Sarmiento thought. The agriculture and urban industrialization that he stimulated did not hinder the phenomenon that he so much abhorred.

Sarmiento insisted strongly on the importance of education as a means to overcome barbarism. He emphasized the role of the written word and thought that the strength of the American Constitution lay in its abstract norms of legal and moral conduct. But the paradox is precisely that while Argentina is a highly cultivated country, with quite satisfactory levels of literacy, education, and social equilibrium, Argentines, just like Brazilians or Uruguayans, are politically no more sophisticated than Nicaraguans or Haitians. In 1973, Perón himself confessed in a message to his countrymen, "We are a politicized country but one without a political culture."

The appearance of political aberrations is a mysterious phenomenon of collective psychology. After all, Germany at the beginning of this century was one of the most cultivated countries in the world. Yet, it produced the warmongering hysteria of August 1914 and twenty years later delivered itself to a monster. Barbarism and Kultur can mix easily, and social philosophy has never been able to understand the why and how of a people's descent into violence and anarchy. Who could have surmised in the French salons, at the height of the eighteenth century, that the land of the Enlightenment would soon be ruled by a Robespierre and use the guillotine as the main instrument of persuasion?
This brings us to the nefarious influence of the French Revolution on our continent. Brazil, at the time of the empire, seems to have been the only country to take English evolutionary paradigms as models for political organization. Subsequently, U.S. presidential and federal paradigms dominated superficially, while the French Romantic spirit ruled in the depths of the collective persona. The unfortunate fact is that French effusions were much stronger than the cold, clear, and pragmatic Anglo-Saxon ideas.

Apart from the example of the struggle for independence, the concepts that inspired the American Founding Fathersideas that proceed from such thinkers as Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Smith and Montesquieu, an admirer of the English constitution-were never entertained by Latin American "liberators" and nation builders. In fact, the Latin leaders were obsessed by the aura of the French Revolution: They worshipped Jacobinic turbulence, the flowery rhetoric of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and, finally, on the opposite side of the spectrum, the epic of Napoleon's legend. From then on, apart from Miranda of Venezuela, who had an actual role in the French Revolution, every Latin American revolutionary commander tried to copy either Robespierre or Bonaparte. Quite often (think of Castro), one started by imitating Robespierre or Saint-Just and ended up a pseudo-Napoleon.

The contradictory paradigm repeats itself indefinitely in the agitated political life of countries that otherwise are kept under the strictly conservative structure of their traditional paternalistic society. This is certainly the Original Sin of our political history. The great prophet for them all was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's perverse mind is greatly responsible for the emotional derailment that occurred during the second phase of the French Revolution-and it would be no exaggeration to contend that Latin America was brought up under the teachings of the great Romantic, with his emphasis on emotional irrationality.

Crassweller, like other authors who have pondered the question, emphasizes the deep feeling of solidarity that evolved between the Argentine people and Perón, a bond surviving forty years of struggles and constant economic decline. The election of President Menem proves that these bonds are still strong, although the new president seems to be a courageous pragmatist striving to overcome the per Saint-Just and ended up a pseudo-Napoleon.

The contradictory paradigm repeats itself indefinitely in the agitated political life of countries that otherwise are kept under the strictly conservative structure of their traditional paternalistic society. This is certainly the Original Sin of our political history. The great prophet for them all was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's perverse mind is greatly responsible for the emotional derailment that occurred during the second phase of the French Revolution-and it would be no exaggeration to contend that Latin America was brought up under the teachings of the great Romantic, with his emphasis on emotional irrationality.

The common people of Argentina do not perceive that the satisfaction of their immediate corporate desires (thus, for instance, to have their salaries always increased) cannot coincide with the longterm needs of the nation as a whole. A country that wants to develop has to save in order to invest, but the rule of law, work, and thrift are virtues that seem to have been forgotten in the wake of Perónista rhetoric.
A capacity for sacrificing current satisfaction for later greater advantage requires an effort of rationality that passionate links to charismatic leadership do not favor. A Kantian-like "Critique of Short Reason" is required when the desire for early returns obscures the greater opportunities, held out by delayed gratification. Thus, instead of thrift one finds extravagance, waste, inflation, administrative ruin, economic recession-precisely the path Argentina trod with Perónism, and, incidentally, the same path that ruined the "Brazilian miracle" after populism dissolved the economic discipline imposed by military hard-liners. Caudillismo and populism find their support in the deep-seated selfishness of the masses; volatile and opportunistic, they are incapable of thinking for the long run or looking beyond the promise of happiness in the present.

Many authors have tried to diagnose the malaise affecting Latin America. Alain Peyrefitte, the French writer and politician, speaks of a contagion by the mal Latin that disturbed France and the other Latin countries of Europe not so long ago. Some have pointed out the consequences of the Counter-Reformation, which made thinking on moral questions the private domain of clerics who punished any deviation from dogmatic orthodoxy. Others have called attention to Roman law and the Napoleonic Code derived from it, which became the basis of the legal systems of Latin America and lent further emphasis to the authority of the state. Others still, like Hernando De Soto of Peru, who studies in depth the mercantilistic organization of our "political" economy, and like myself and friends of mine in the Tocqueville Society of Rio de Janeiro, focus our attention on the absolutist and patrimonialist centralizing obsession of Philip II in Spain, the marquis of Pombal in Portugal, and Louis XIV and Napoleon in France -enlightened despots who could think of no way to modernize without strict governmental control of all aspects of the people's economic activities. Many also believe that the paternalistic tradition in our countries is too strong: In their eyes, democratic regimes and a sort of liberal paideia will be necessary to change an underdeveloped state of mind.

I lay particular emphasis on the fact that Latin America never went through an Age of Reason, such as that which enlightened Western Europe and North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dictators like Vargas and Perón are products of an infantile collective mentality: Children are emotional; they take time to liberate themselves from their parental complex, and some people never do so. Let's hope that the new liberal-neoconservative revolution that is spreading over the world will soon have some impact on our marginal continent.