Playground Tactics

Here in the U.S. we are not strangers to aggressive political campaigns. In mid-20th-century Argentina, however, not even children’s magazines were off limits in the quest of President Juan Domingo Perón to turn the working-class family into the government’s most loyal advocate.

“Perón has a famous quote from 1951 where he says, ‘I won the first election with the vote of workers, the second with the vote of women, and I’ll win the third with the help of children,’” says Thomas Brinkerhoff, a doctoral candidate in history who started getting interested in Peronist propaganda in high school. “I had family in Argentina. I would find these old magazines and different pieces of ephemera in Argentine bookshops, and it just grew from there.”

Perón rose to power from a period marked by oppressive, oligarchical regimes. He was a military general who came up through the ranks and in 1946 won the presidency. Only a year later, he passed female suffrage. “This is really the moment when marginalized groups like women, the working class, and the elderly start to gain political attention,” says Brinkerhoff. “The children make for a very interesting dynamic because they don’t actually have a true political voice—they don’t have a vote. Yet the Peronist government spent so much time and attention on them that they became a key link into working-class homes.”

An economic crisis hit Argentina in 1949. Messages likes the ones placed in Children’s World, a government-issued publication, pushed for women to work outside the home. “These were aimed specifically at mothers and called them the ‘guardian angels of the domestic economy,’” says Brinkerhoff. But the message wasn’t always consistent. “The rhetoric being espoused is that women should be frugal, but advertisements within the magazine often displayed fancy clothing and accessories. The state is trying to champion itself as a progressive industrial society, but can’t quite decide how to go about that.”

The propaganda paid off. “Women who worked outside of the home felt empowered and became grassroots mobilizers for the president,” he says. This was further bolstered by first lady Eva Perón, who became a larger-than-life figure. She founded the female branch of the Peronist Party and through her Eva Perón Foundation espoused labor rights. In 1951 she was offered the Vice Presidential nomination by the Argentine congress but declined due to illness and, some have argued, threats from the military, who disliked her influence over the working class. But Eva Perón, like her husband, was extremely divisive.

“Many in the upper class put forward the story that the former actress had slept her way to the top,” says Brinkerhoff. “Eva herself always talked about how to be a good mother, but she was not a biological mother. And even when this austerity campaign was going on, she wore very elegant tweed suits.” 

The Perón dynasty remains controversial, and its campaign tactics continue to impact Argentina’s political landscape. “The current president has appropriated a lot of the same political socialization of children, using sports tournaments as a way to separate children from their families and indoctrinate them,” says Brinkerhoff. “It shows that the past is intertwined with the present and that it’s really inescapable.”