Argentina could have been the United States.
Like the U.S., it was one of the world's 10 richest countries at the turn of the last century. And also like the U.S., that made it a New World magnet for Old World immigrants. But unlike the U.S., that was as good as it ever got. There was no Argentinian Dream. Just a nearly never-ending nightmare of either falling behind gradually or falling behind suddenly. All of which was self-inflicted.
Its fundamental problem was how unequal it was. About 300 families controlled most of the land, the economy and the government. Everyone else was just a cog in their beef-and-grain-exporting machine. Or, as the Financial Times' Alan Beattie has put it, Argentina is "what North America might have looked" like "if the South had won the Civil War and gone on to dominate the North." Which is to say that it was a semi-feudal aristocracy dependent on a steady supply of cheap labor.
If this sounds like a good way to start a class war, that's because it was. Up until recently, Argentina had spent most of the last 100 years alternating between left-wing populists who promised to share the country's wealth, and right-wing military dictatorships that tried to stop that from happening. And, of course, with the stakes so high, neither side was willing to play by the rules.
The Peronists tried to tip elections in their favor by locking up the opposition's leaders, shutting down their newspapers, and getting rid of unions that weren't loyal to the regime. The army, meanwhile, didn't bother with any kind of democratic pretense. It launched coup after coup after coup, outlawing the Peronist Party, and, in the 1970s, "disappearing" tens of thousands of activists and ordinary people too.
