Question

Why did Peron, Vargas, and Cardenas expand their state's economic role?

Answer 1

When the war ended there was widespread discussion in Latin America of the place the region would occupy in the new world order. At this point segments of the reformist left in particular began to sketch out an alternative vision of Latin America's future development. The most articulate exponent of the new vision was the Mexican labor leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, who in 1938 used the large Mexican labor confederation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México to set up the Confederación de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL). The CTAL gained the support of the largest union confederations of most of the Latin American nations, and by the end of the war around three quarters of the total organized labor force throughout Latin America, some three million workers in all, were affiliated with it.^[8] Making due allowance for exaggeration and the unreliable measures of unionization, this was an impressive and unprecedented achievement. However, the CTAL lacked the support of the labor movements of Argentina and Brazil. Argentina did not join because Perón was now pursuing his own brand of unionism, and he eventually established a Peronist international union organization, the ATLAS (Agrupación de Trabajadores Latinoamericanos Sindicalistas). In Brazil labor law prohibited unions from establishing international links, and Vargas, who like Perón was seeking to develop his own union following, made sure the prohibition was enforced.

a new approach to Latin American development. He toned down his earlier anti-imperialism and urged national unity between labor and industrialists against what he portrayed as the twin menace of fascism and oligarchic reaction. His position became closely reminiscent of the "Browderism" supported by most Latin American Communists, who had now abandoned the notion of irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor in favor of a strategy of class compromise. Regardless of the merits or demerits of Browderism in the United States (where it originated), there was strong reason to support it in Latin America, where the emergent urban capitalists and the working class shared a strong common interest in industrialization. Lombardo Toledano and others saw workers and industrialists collaborating in a progressive development program based on protectionism. The intent was to clear away any remaining "feudal" remnants led by the landed classes and to provide a means to resist imperialist penetration. The state would coordinate and oversee this class alliance. The no-strike pacts during the war, despite their adverse impact on real wages, would serve as a model for future class compromise.

At the onset of the world depression in 1929, the nations of Latin America were still overwhelmingly rural and their political systems dominated by agrarian or less commonly by mining elites. Urban middle-class groups had already begun to challenge the prevailing systems of oligarchic parliamentarism and personalistic dictatorship but without so far having any noticeable impact on policy.^[2] The crisis of the 1930s brought into power regimes seeking alternatives to those systems, and so-called revolutionary challenges to oligarchic control became frequent. But apart from the sweeping transformation brought about in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the movements supporting change were mostly unsuccessful: the Cuban insurrection of 1933, the Socialist Republic in Chile in 1932, the tenente movement in Brazil in 1922 and 1924, the rise of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) in Peru. Generally speaking, the ideological mainspring of these short-lived movements and regimes was an inchoate form of statism that drew inspiration from Mussolini's Italy and Catholic social thought, as well as from more conventional liberal sources. Some of the successful regimes, however, notably those of Brazil under Getúlio Vargas and Mexico under Lázaro Cárdenas, created novel and complex systems of corporatist intermediation whose principal aim was to control rapidly growing labor movements.

Toward the end of the war past international alignments bred some strange political alliances. In Nicaragua, for example, the Communists and labor leaders joined with the dictator Anastasio Somoza against the prodemocracy movement of the urban middle class and parts of the agrarian elite. Somoza had supported the Allies and was therefore aligned with the "democratic" camp; opposition to him was automatically defined as oligarchic and reactionary. In addition, during the war Somoza had adopd an authoritarian populist stance, promulgating a labor code and looking favorably on union organizing.^[7]Similar circumstances led much of organized labor in Brazil to support the dictator Getúilio Vargas in an unsuccessful bid to retain political power at the end of the war.