Fascism

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Fascism

The fascist movement in Latin America is not easily equated with such movements in Europe or elsewhere. European fascism emerged before 1914 amid the alienation caused by rapid industrialization. At first an intellectual mood comprising rejection of positivism, liberalism, and (in the arts) bourgeois formalism, it grew mightily owing to the psychic and social mobilization, military experience, sacrifice, and disillusionment of World War I. Its salient characteristics were charismatic leadership; rituals, costumes, and symbols; an ethic of voluntarism, struggle, and instinct; nationalisms that sought to restore folk communities (often mythologized); and the belief that social justice could be achieved only through those folk communities. It comprised a youth revolt and the project of creating a moral, integral New Man. It rejected Marxism and class-based politics as well as bourgeois parliamentarism and democratic institutions generally. In power, fascists proved incompetent and corrupt; some movements (as in Italy) resorted to irredentism and foreign conquest to sustain revolutionary élan. Fascist leadership was middle class; however, mass followings were built among war veterans, uprooted and alienated individuals, and preexisting labor organizations disillusioned with or forcibly wrenched away from Marxism. In central and eastern Europe, fascism was markedly racist and anti-Semitic. In Hitler's Germany the genocidal "Final Solution" was the consequence.

Latin American movements called "fascist" lack many of these attributes; their closer affinities are with populism and authoritarian nationalism. Populist movements emerged before 1914 from the conjunction of increased rural-urban migration and the ambitions of reformist, upper-status politicians (such as Guillermo Billinghurst in Peru and José Batlle y Ordóñez in Uruguay); they arose in part from the "ruralization" of the cities, that is, transplantation of the personalistic patron-client relationships of the countryside. The context of these movements was municipal politics and the content pragmatic, not ideological, issues. Between the world wars the several strains of Latin American populism embraced nationalism, seeking to establish the idea of national identity ("Peruanidad," "Mexicanidad"), to create integrated modern nation-states, and to make the state—not low-level clientelism—the vehicle for social justice. This inclusive nationalism embraced, if only rhetorically, hitherto repressed or marginalized peoples; it denounced as "vendepatrias" (those who sold out their country) those elite groups that had collaborated in the annexation of Latin America's economies to the European- and U.S.-dominated world trade system.

When in the crisis-ridden 1930s the military seized power in several countries, some military politicians (such as Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro in Peru) combined traditional repression with expedient labor alliances, trading public works projects, housing, and beneficial legislation for political support. Others (such as José Félix Uriburu in Argentina) envisioned the military corporation as the only competent, dedicated agent of national integration, a concept adumbrated by the Brazilian tenentes ("lieutenants"), restless, nationalistic young officers who staged the first of a series of minor revolts in July 1922. Although the utility of such projects in thwarting opposition Marxists or Apristas (in Peru) was obvious, they proved unpopular at the time, even among the military; but they would reappear in various guises after 1945.

In the early 1930s a number of fascist groups were founded in emulation of those in Antonio de Salazar's Portugal, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera's Spain. "Mediterranean" fascisms, which evoked past imperial grandeur and drew strength from conservative Roman Catholicism, were preferable to German Nazism, which harbored strains of irreligion and "Aryan" racial exclusivism. Among rightist intellectuals, particularly in Colombia, corporatism became fashionable; it also figured in the theorizing of Catholic intellectuals who, reacting against the anticlericalism of the Spanish Republic (1931–1936) and the outrages of the Civil War (1936–1939), promoted clerical fascism in the style of Engelbert Dollfuss's Austria or the Spanish CEDA (Confederation of Autonomous Rightist Organizations) of J. M. Gil Robles. Following General Francisco Franco's triumph in 1939, Spain's Nationalist regime promoted the doctrine of "hispa-nidad" throughout Latin America; it, too, enjoyed a vogue.

The most important Latin American fascist movements of the 1930s were the Brazilian Integralistas and the Chilean Nacistas—both of which staged abortive putsches in 1938, then went into decline—the Mexican Sinarquistas; factions among the Bolivian veterans of the disastrous Chaco War (1932–1935), some of whom later helped form the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR); and a congeries of authoritarian nationalist groups in Argentina. The latter, unable to gain either a mass following or the unconditional backing of the traditional right, specialized in street fighting and anti-Semitic terrorism. They later attached themselves to Peronism; notwithstanding the vicissitudes of Peronism itself, anti-Semitic violence has remained the hallmark of the Argentine right.

The seeds—and charismatic leaders—were present, yet none of these movements developed into a full-fledged European-style fascism. This can be explained in part by the Axis defeat in 1945, in part by socioeconomic and political factors. The former include the inherent difficulties of creating national identities in societies still strongly rooted in primary local, or ethnic solidarities, much less of mobilizing those societies; and the fact that although European capitalists had sheltered within their respective fascisms and supported them, many Latin American capitalists chose to work within foreign systems. Political factors include the emphasis in populist regimes on redistributive—rather than ideological—politics; and the postwar success of Christian Democratic parties (as in Chile and Venezuela), which offered to conservative electorates nonviolent modernizing alternatives to Marxism. In regimes slow to modernize, the Right retained its privileges through traditional means, which did not include the mobilizations characteristic of fascism. In regimes fractured or paralyzed by modernization—as in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1970s, and in Central America in the 1980s—the new military relied on state terror to suppress dissent rather than on demagogy to mobilize and deflect it.

The fundamental structure of fascism is sometimes taken to be an authoritarian, centralized state apparatus sustained ideologically by nationalism, economically by state capitalism, and socially by a dependent syndically organized mass following. If so, five regimes since the 1930s—Getú lio Vargas's Brazil, especially after 1937; Juan Perón's Argentina; the Bolivia of the MNR after 1952; Fidel Castro's Cuba since 1959; and the Mexico of the PRI since 1928—merit possible inclusion under the fascist rubric. The first two—which were characterized also by charismatic leadership, ritual, and (in Argentina) anti-Semitism—most closely approximated European fascisms. In Brazil, regimes subsequent to Vargas's death in 1954—particularly the military regimes from 1964 to 1983—have dismantled the mass base of varguismo; Argentine Peronism, however, despite its vicissitudes during intervening years, retains some of its earlier dynamic. Bolivia's MNR leadership was uncharismatic; its social mobilization was incomplete and was soon reversed by the military. Cuba's Castro has proven an effective leader; the Cuban people have been mobilized for nationalistic or social justice purposes. However, the regime's affirmation of egalitarianism and rejection of irrationalisms and of capitalism place it outside the fascist category. Mexico's leadership is uncharismatic by design; in recent decades the practice of revolutionary nationalism and populism has drifted far apart from the rhetoric. Even the latter may disappear altogether as the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented after 1 January 1994.

A revival of Latin American fascism is possible, perhaps in response to the swallowing up of national economies in globalization; violence will undoubtedly remain endemic. Elites appear, however, to have learned from the fascist experience that it is easier to create caudillos than to dismiss them, easier to mobilize masses than to demobilize them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John D. Wirth, The Politics of Brazilian Development, 1930–1954 (1970).

Alistair Hennessy, "Fascism and Populism in Latin America," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide, Analyses, Interpretation, Bibliography, edited by Walter Z. Laqueur (1976).

James D. Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, and the State (1983).

Frederick C. Turner and Enrique Miguens, eds., Juan Perón and the Reshaping of Argentina (1983).

Carlos Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (1987).

Max Azicri, Cuba: Politics, Economy, and Society (1988).

T. Halperin Donghi, La historia contemporánea de América Latina, 2d ed. (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Deutsch, Sandra McGee. Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

García Sebastiani, Marcela. Fascismo y antifascismo, peronismo y antiperonismo: Conflictos políticos e ideológicos en la Argentina (1930–1955). Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006.

Ronald C. Newton

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture