Ernesto Semán adds another piece to the puzzle of Peronism, one of the most elusive and widely researched historical movements in twentieth-century Latin America. He focuses on the worker attachés programme, established in Argentina by Juan Perón's administrations in 1946–55 and that enlisted rank-and-file union members for diplomatic posts around the world. Organised in seven chapters, introduction, and conclusion, the book provides a transnational history of Peronism and explores the emerging Cold War in Latin America. Semán places organised labour as a critical element of competing projects of international labour activism between Argentina and the United States, informing debates on democracy, social rights, individual freedom, national sovereignty and solidarity across the Americas. Theoretically, the book draws on several frameworks dealing with labour activism related to identity formation, cultural approaches to the history of Peronism, a conceptualisation of populism that rejects top-down analysis, and a multi-dimensional view of the Cold War in Latin America.
The book directly engages with several bodies of literature. The transnational dimension of Peronism is explored through the interrelated national and international dimensions of Peron's concept and policy of the Third Position, an alternative to US- and Soviet-inspired ideologies and international projects. Semán uses William Roseberry's theoretical insights to analyse the attachés’ reports and actions in different countries, presenting Peronism as a ‘“language of contention” open to renegotiation rather than operating as a strict doctrine dictated from above’ (pp. 191–2). Worker attachés actively promoted Peronism's ideals abroad while at the same time adopting, adapting and transforming those ideas according to their own experiences and circumstances. This bottom-up approach complicates other scholarly analysis of Peron's foreign policy in Latin America that focuses on more diplomatic grounds. Furthermore, it enters into dialogue with works on Peronism such as those on cultural approaches by Matthew Karush and Oscar Chamosa (The New Cultural History of Peronism, 2010), and consumption, gender, and citizenship by Eduardo Elena (Dignifying Argentina, 2011) and Natalia Milanesio (Workers Go Shopping in Argentina, 2013). Semán's nuanced approach to Peronist identity reveals continuities and fractures between processes, ideas and policies before and during the Peronist decade, as well as exposing the logic behind multiple examples of contradictions in the worker attachés programme and in Peronism at large.
In addition, the book relates to the scholarship that has revised the Cold War in Latin America. The worker attachés programme confronted US-based labour movements and international networks linked to the emerging Cold War environment. Worker attachés promoted abroad an idea of democracy related to social rights, equality and change linked to rights and benefits achieved in Perón's Argentina. Meanwhile, the United States viewed Peronism as a new form of a totalitarian threat that could facilitate communist penetration.
The book offers a fascinating picture of the competition between regional and international labour organisations in Latin America. Worker attachés sought to establish the basis for a Peronist-inspired Latin American labour organisation, the Agrupación de Trabajadores Latinoamericanos Sindicalizados (Organisation of Unionised Latin American Workers, ATLAS), against the US mobilisation of labour diplomacy and the American Federation of Labor–Congress of International Organizations (AFL–CIO) at the international and regional levels – and both of them in competition with the communist-oriented, Mexican-based Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (Confederation of Latin American Workers, CETAL). In this manner, Semán's perspective relates to the works on the Latin American Cold War of authors like Tanya Harmer (Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, 2011) and Patrick Iber (Neither Peace nor Freedom, 2015), by presenting regional actors and dynamics that disrupt traditional bipolar interpretations of the conflict and rigid ideological and geographical boundaries.
Finally, the book discusses how struggles around labour and Peronism shaped the evolution of political, scholarly and ideological frameworks in the US. Labour activists, diplomats and scholars sought to make sense of Peronism at a time of retreat and reversal of the most radical and pro-labour policies of the New Deal and transition to the Cold War in the mid-1940s. Their vision of Peronism as a totalitarian threat had to do not only with the specific confrontation with Argentina. It also involved the redefinition of labour rights and politics in the US, with contending perspectives about the need for moderate social reform or no reform at all. Peronism informed the views of diplomats and of scholars in US academia, for example, regarding the conceptualisation of modernisation theory. These debates also involved Argentine scholars, who provided many of the original categories and theories on Peronism and populism. This transnational approach to the development of social sciences adds yet another dimension to the complex history of Peronism and a welcome addition to the understanding of the Cold War as not exclusively focused on the unidirectional impact of the United States on Latin America.
Clearly written and based on solid research, the book offers many insights while at the same time leaving some areas open to question. For example, the influence of the New Deal in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s was far more widespread than presented in the text, crossing political and ideological boundaries from conservatives groups to Radicals and Socialists. For that reason, while it shaped the emerging Peronist identity (pp. 52–3), it also appeared in the ideas and platform of the anti-Peronist Democratic Union in 1945–6. There is no clear explanation regarding why the worker attachés programme was expanded in 1949–52 if Perón was precisely at that time attempting to curb its ideas and influence (ch. 6), and the explanation of Peronism's influence on George Kennan's famous ‘Long Telegram’ is tenuous as presented (pp. 62–3).
These criticisms notwithstanding, Ernesto Semán's book is an example of the possibilities offered by a truly transnational historical approach, informed by careful research and relevant theoretical frameworks. It opens interesting comparative perspectives with other movements and countries in Latin America, and it should be of interest to scholars and students of Peronism and the Cold World in Latin America.
