Arturo Jauretche

Arturo Martín Jauretche (Lincoln, Buenos Aires, November 13, 1901 – Buenos Aires, May 25, 1974) was an Argentine writer, politician, and philosopher.

Jauretche spent his childhood and adolescence in the city of Lincoln before moving to Buenos Aires.

He sympathized with the new model of social integration promoted by the Radical Civic Union and allied himself with the radical faction of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the so-called personalistas.

He was influenced by the poet and Tango lyricist Homero Manzi, whose working-class appeal struck Jauretche, himself of rural origin, as a positive political strategy.

In 1928, when Yrigoyen assumed his second mandate following the interlude of Marcelo T. de Alvear, Jauretche was appointed to the civil service, though it was not long before the Argentine army unseated Yrigoyen in a coup, setting off the Década Infame.

Jauretche joined the armed struggle against the coup, and subsequently opposed the regime with intense political action.

In 1933, in the province of Corrientes, he took part in a failed uprising led by Colonels Francisco Bosch and Gregorio Pomar.

Jauretche was imprisoned for his role in the uprising.

In prison, he wrote a poetic account of the episode in the gauchesque style, titling the work Paso de los Libres.

It was published in 1934 with a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges, with whom Jauretche differed markedly in political matters.

Jauretche's clash with Alvear's leading faction quickly radicalized him.

When Alvear decided in 1934 to abandon the UCR's policy of abstentionism, a significant portion of the left split from the party.

Along with Manzi, Luis Dellepiane, Gabriel del Mazo, Manuel Ortiz Pereyra and others, Jauretche founded FORJA (an acronym for Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina), which pursued a democratic nationalist ideology equally opposed to conservative nationalism and to the economic liberal policies of Agustín P. Justo.

Marginalized by the partisan political system, FORJA expressed its positions mainly through street demonstrations and self-published literature known as Cuadernos de FORJA, or FORJA Notebooks.

In them, FORJA criticized the government's measures, beginning with the Roca-Runciman Treaty.

They argued that the Central Bank had been founded to solidify British control of the Argentine monetary and financial system, and that the Transport Corporation had been established to allow British railways to operate without competition.

FORJA opposed the breaking off of relations with the Soviet Union, on the basis that the Soviet bloc was a major potential market for Argentine agricultural exports.

They alleged that Justo's government had abused the policy of federal intervention to punish provinces where anti-government parties had enjoyed electoral success, and blamed Justo for dropping wages and rising unemployment.

One of FORJA's fundamental principles was the maintenance of Argentine neutrality in the run-up to the Second World War, and it was the only party to adopt this position.

Around 1940 Jauretche broke with Dellepiane and del Mazo, who realigned themselves with the UCR.

FORJA became further radicalized, and shifted towards more nationalistic positions.

Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz, who had always shared a similar ideology, affiliated himself with the party, and along with Jauretche formed a double leadership.

He departed in 1943, leaving Jauretche in control.

He vehemently opposed the government of Ramón Castillo.

Although he was skeptical of the motives of the coup that unseated Castillo, his firm neutrality with regard to the war led him to welcome the government of Pedro Pablo Ramírez.

When the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos unseated Ramírez after he severed relations with the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, Jauretche allied himself with the up-and-coming Colonel Juan Domingo Perón.

Though he was always critical of it, Jauretche supported Peronism after October 17, 1945.

With the support of Domingo Mercante, governor of Buenos Aires Province, he was named president of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires in 1946.

He would hold the position until 1951, when Mercante's falling out with Perón led Jauretche to abandon it.

Jauretche did not return to the public scene until 1955, when the Revolución Libertadora led to Perón's ouster.

Having been out of government for a few years meant that, for once, he was able to avoid political persecution.

He founded the periodical El Líder and the weekly El '45 to defend what he called "the ten years of popular government", and to excoriate the political, economic, and social activities of the de facto regime.

In 1956 he published the essay El Plan Prebisch: retorno al coloniaje ("The Prebisch Plan: a return to colonialism"), refuting the report written by Raúl Prebisch, secretary of the Economic Commission of Latin America, at the behest of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu.

The harshness of his opposition led him to be exiled to Montevideo.

There in 1957 he published Los profetas del odio (The prophets of hate), a polemical study of class relations in Argentina since the rise of Peronism.

In it he criticized various conceptions of Argentine political history which had enjoyed favor, in particular that of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada.

Estrada had previously subjected Argentine history to a bio-sociological analysis in his Radiografía de la pampa, which resembled Sarmiento's Facundo, in its suggestion that the Argentine geography had imposed upon its inhabitants a life disconnected from the flow of history.

In his subsequent work ¿Qué es esto? he presented a devastating critique of Peronism, in which he portrayed Perón as a "snake charmer" whose political movement had instigated the "low passions of the populace", corruption, and "pornocracy".

Jauretche criticized these allusions as the prejudices of a middle class sensibility irritated by the eruption of new participants in a political environment which had been exclusively run by the bourgeoisie since the generación del '80.

Although bourgeois material interests had been advanced by the development of a dense layer of consumers, they nevertheless remained reticent towards the habits of the working classes, a "myopia" which Jauretche would criticize frequently.