Invited to the UCEMA Online Seminars, as part of the cycle “History and Freedom” organized by the historian and professor of UCEMA Alejandro Gómez, the historian and economist Emilio Ocampo presented the contents of his latest work about the myths of Peronist industrialization, to be published in the forthcoming months by Editorial Claridad.

In his presentation, in which there were 171 persons connected via zoom, Ocampo explained that Peronism generated a web of economic interests and a development logic so complex and interconnected that it has Argentina trapped in the same system for decades. No political leader contemporary to Perón continues to star as protagonist in the scene and in the conversation as the three times president does, pointed out Ocampo.

"Peronism did promote industry, it is true, but it was a lame industry, that cannot survive without an agricultural sector that gets it the dollars. That Peronism turned businessmen into rent seekers instead of investors. I do not know if we could have been Korea, but we could have a more efficient industry and not lost in such magnitude the market share of the traditional products produced by the country. Due to the inconsistency of Peronism with the international framework of the times we lost a lot", said Ocampo.

According to the economist and historian, the foreign policy of Perón´s time was much linked to the economic policy and traversed by the nationalism in vogue at that time. "Nationalism was strong and the confrontation with the United Sates was very popular. In this framework the so-called Peronist industrialization also took place".

The Peronization of Argentina

For Ocampo, there is a main idea that is installed since 1946 that is the Argentine Peronization, based on three syllogisms: that the Peronism is Perón, that the State is Peronism and that everything outside Peronism is not State; and that the industrial unions are the Peronist party, leaving as a result that the industrial unions are part of the State. "This is nothing more than Mussolini style corporatism. But here it was halfway, because State and the unions were there, but the industrial establishment was missing in the equation".

According to the historian and UCEMA professor, the corporatist recipe is a wrong recipe because it is inspired in economic ideas from the Depression of the 1930´s for solving the current problem of unemployment. "Díaz Alejandro says that Peronism is the late response to the Great Depression, and there comes the great blunder. Those policies were wrong in 1946, when it was obvious that the world was not going to stagflation and that Argentina had strong connections with the world that could be taken advantage of, he said.

In short, for Ocampo the recipe of corporate unionism and friendly capitalism applied by Perón, with companies close to power, is a misguided and mistaken recipe, that led to the total destruction of savings, the debasement of currency, lame industrialization and the loss of export markets and trade volume, precipitating our economic decline.