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The military commanders, who otherwise would have remained deliberative throughout the revolution, flatly rejected the nominations, and Rawson's insistence on keeping them led to his resignation on 6 June.
From the date of the coup, the new authorities carried out arrests of Communist leaders and militants, most of whom were housed in prisons in Patagonia , while others were able to go into hiding or exile in Uruguay. In August, it passed a set of rules that solidified state control over trade unions. On 23 August, it appointed an "interventor" a kind of supervisor and inspector to the Railway Union who supplanted its leaders.
The government dissolved Congress and took control of the National University of the Littoral. These measures would lead to a confrontation with broad political and social sectors, particularly the student movement.
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Alongside these measures, the Rawson administration decreed that rural rents and leases be frozen, which had a positive effect on workers and farmers, and created a committee to investigate the CHADE scandal, an occurrence during the Infamous Decade in which the Hispano-American Electrical Company CHADE bribed government officials to give them a monopoly of electrical services in Buenos Aires.
Nevertheless, the report was not published until , and the projects were not even dealt due to the decision of the de facto vice-president Juan D. In those first months an incident occurred which would lead to the resignation of Admiral Segundo Storni , the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Storni was one of the few members of the Argentine military at the time who was sympathetic to the United States, where he had lived several years.
Although he was a nationalist, he was also a supporter of the Allies and favored Argentina's entry in the war on their behalf. On 5 August , he sent a personal letter to U. Secretary of State Cordell Hull , anticipating that Argentina intended to break relations with the Axis Powers, but also beseeching his patience while he created a climate of rupture in the country. At the same time, Storni made a gesture to the United States regarding the supplying of arms, thus isolating the neutralists.
With the intention of putting pressure on the Argentine government, Hull made the letter public and further questioned Argentina's tradition of neutrality in harsh terms. This action had the opposite effect of what Hull intended, provoking a recrudescence of already powerful anti-American sentiment — especially in the armed forces — thus bringing about Storni's resignation and replacement by a neutralist, Colonel Alberto Gilbert, who was then acting as Minister of the Interior. The Revolution of '43 handed the management of education over to the right-wing Hispanic-Catholic nationalists.
The process began on 28 July when the government took control of the National University of the Littoral. The Argentine university was governed by the principles of the University Reform of , which established the university's autonomy, the participation of students in the university government, and academic freedom. Genta, known for his far-right and anti-reformist ideas, maintained that the country needed to create "an intelligent aristocracy, nourished by Roman and Hispanic lineage". Although Genta was forced to resign, the conflict between the government and the student movements became widespread and polarized the extremes, while the nationalist Hispanic-Catholic faction continued to advance and occupy important positions in the government.
The group's ultramontanist , hispanist , elitist , anti-democratic , and anti-feminist ideology was defined through several provocative statements. Sarmiento brought three plagues to this country: Italians, sparrows and teachers. Lay education is an invention of the devil.
We must cultivate and affirm our differentiated personality, which is Creole, and thus Hispanic, Catholic, apostolic and Roman. It is from this period that most of the disputes between the military government and university students are usually cited. Sepich director of the National School of Buenos Aires.
On 14 October , a group of political and cultural figures led by scientist Bernardo Houssay signed a Statement on Effective Democracy and Latin American Solidarity, calling for elections and the country's entry into the war against the Axis. In , the Argentine Workers Movement was the most developed in Latin America at the time, consisting of four major groups: the first General Confederation of Labour or 1st CGT mostly socialists and radical syndicalists , the 2nd CGT socialists and communists , the small Argentine Labor Union radical syndicalists , and the almost nonexistent Regional Workers' Federation anarchists.
Paradoxically, this measure had the immediate effect of strengthening the 1st CGT, also headed by a socialist, as many members of the defunct 2nd CGT went to join it. Shortly after the government sanctioned a legislation on unions, that, although it fulfilled some of the unions expectations, at the same time allowed the State to take control of them. In October, a series of strikes were answered with the arrest of dozens of workers' leaders.
It soon became apparent that the military government was composed of influential anti-union factions. From the moment the coup took place, the labor movement had begun to discuss a strategy of cooperating with the military government.
A number of historians, including Samuel Baily, [46] Julio Godio , and Hiroshi Matsushita, [47] have shown that the Argentine labor movement had evolved from the late s to a labor nationalism, [48] which entailed a greater commitment of unions to the state. The unionists asked the government to call an election and offered the support of a union march to the Casa Rosada, but the government rejected the offer and dissolved it.
The person chosen for the initial contact was Colonel Domingo Mercante , the son of an important railroad union leader and member of the GOU. The unionists suggested that the military the create a Secretariat of Labor, strengthen the CGT, and sanction a series of labor laws that would accept the historical claims of the Argentine labor movement.
On 30 September they held a public meeting with 70 union leaders on the occasion of a general revolutionary strike declared by the CGT for October, supported by all the opposition. One of the first effects of the new relationship established between labor unions and the military was the unions' refusal to participate in the general revolutionary strike, which went unnoticed. One of his first measures was to remove the "interventors" from the railway unions and nominate Mercante in their place. At the same time, the Central Committee of the CGT, made up of socialists, decided to create a Commission for Labor Union Unity with the purpose of restoring a single central, traditional objective for the Argentine labor movement [55].
The group assumed an anti-communist position already existing in the 1st CGT and, relying on the power of the Secretary of Labor, organized new unions in the industries which lacked them chemicals, electricity, tobacco and set up rival unions in industries with powerful communist unions meat, construction, textiles, metallurgy.
Essentially there were two groups:. It succeeded in attracting other factions from diverse backgrounds, who expressed their concern about the advance of unions in the government, and it essentially aimed at dismissing Farrell and replacing him with General Elbio Anaya. In addition to this internal division of military power, the government faced an international situation that was utterly unfavorable to them and that left them completely isolated.
At the beginning of it was evident that Germany would lose the war and the pressure of the United States for Argentina to abandon neutrality was already unbearable. The process was broke out on 3 January , when Ramirez recognized the new Bolivian government, the result of a coup led by Gualberto Villarroel. Bolivia declared itself in favor of neutrality and proposed creating a neutral Southern Bloc with Argentina and Chile, the only Latin American countries that had remained neutral.
Exacerbating this was the scandal over the British arrest of the sailor Osmar Helmuth, a German secret agent who had been sent by Ramirez, Gilbert, and Sueyro to buy arms from Germany. The United States reacted forcibly, denouncing Argentina's support of the Bolivian coup and sending at an aircraft carrier as a threat to the La Plata River. Washington's reaction caused the Argentine military leaders to backpedal, and, on 26 January , Argentina broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan.
Shortly after, Ramirez's main supporters— his son Emilio and Colonel Gonzalez— also resigned, followed by Colonel Gilbert the next day. The president's hours were numbered. By 22 February the GOU had already decided to overthrow Ramirez for his severing diplomatic relations with the Axis powers; since the GOU had sworn to support the president, they simply dissolved it, thus releasing them from their oath.
He responded by summoning the main garrison chiefs to his office and ordering them to surround the presidential residence. On the same night, the garrison chiefs near Buenos Aires appeared before Ramirez and demanded his resignation. Ramirez then presented a waiver of resignation in which he invoke "fatigue" as a reason for "delegating" the office of President to Farrell, who became interim President on February. However, Ramirez was formally still president and continued to operate alongside his closest circle.
A few days later, 21 generals met to discuss an electoral exit among them were Rawson, Manuel Savio, and Elbio Anaya. The next day he surrendered. On 9 March General Ramirez presented his resignation in an extensive document, disseminated publicly, in which he recounts all the steps that led to his deposition. On 25 February , Farrell assumed the presidency, first temporarily and after March 9 definitively.
His government was characterized by a twofold tension: he represented an army that was mostly neutralist , but it was becoming impossible to resist the increasing pressure from the United States to join the Allies unconditionally. However, against expectations, he lost internal voting among the officers. At the same time, the United States was increasing its pressure on Argentina to both declare war on the Axis and abandon the British-European sphere, objectives that were deeply related.
On 22 June the United States, followed by the entirety of Latin American countries, removed its Argentinian ambassador. Britain alone maintained their ambassador, rejecting America's characterization of the Argentine regime and accepting "neutralism" as a means to guarantee the supply for its population and armies.
Above all, though, Britain was aware that the real aim of the United States was to displace it as the dominant economic power by imposing a pro-US government on Argentina. It was necessary for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to speak with Winston Churchill in person in order for Britain to withdraw its ambassador. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalls the fact in his Memoirs and recounts that Churchill ended up accepting the requirement "very much to his regret and almost with annoyance.
The British argued that the United States intentionally distorted the facts by presenting Argentina as a "danger" to democracy. If Argentina can be effectively subdued, the control of the State Department over the Western Hemisphere will be complete. This will simultaneously contribute to mitigating the potential dangers of Russian and European influence on Latin America, and will separate Argentina from what is supposed to be our orbit.
In August the United States froze Argentine reserves in its banks, and in September it canceled all permits to export to Argentina steel, wood and chemicals, prohibiting its ships from entering Argentine ports. The measures taken by the United States left Argentina isolated, but at the same time led to an intensification of its industrial and labor politics. In , Farrell decisively imposed the labor reforms suggested by the Secretary of Labor. The government summoned labor unions and employers to negotiate through collective bargaining , a process without precedents in Argentina.
The following year another agreements covering 2. On November 18, , the Field Hand Statue was announced, which modernized the quasi-feudal situation in which rural workers found themselves and alarmed the owners of the large ranches that controlled Argentine exports. On November 30, labor courts were established, which also met great resistance from employers and conservative groups.
On December 4, a retirement program for commercial employees was approved. Likewise, unionization of workers continued to grow: while there were unions with , members in , by this number had grown to unions with , members. One employer opposed to the Peronist labor reforms asserted at the time that the most serious of them was that workers "began to look their employers in the eyes". This great socio-economic transformation was the base of the "pro-labor nationalism" that took form between the second half of and the first half of and which would assume the name of Peronism.
Ramirez and above all Farrell continued an industrialization policy that was in the hands of labor. Both were leading a rapid transformation of Argentine society, prompting a growth of the working class and salaried employees due to the growing presence of women in the job market, the appearance of a large group of small and mid-sized industrial companies, and the migration to Buenos Aires of many rural workers disparagingly known as ' , with different cultural components than those characterized by the large wave of European immigrants — that flooded the country.

Already in the October of the previous year the dictatorship requested a meeting with the Pan-American Union in order to consider a common course of action. Consequently, new members of the right-wing nationalist faction went on to abandon the government: the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Orlando L. Argentina, along with the majority of Latin-American countries, declared war on Germany and Japan on March Concurrent with this international turn, the government initiated a corresponding domestic turn aimed at conducting elections.
The pro-Nazi journals "Cabildo" and "El Pampero" were banned, and university "interventors" were ordered to cease in order to return to the reformist system of university autonomy; professors who had been dismissed were reinstated. For Argentina, the year was characterized primarily by the radicalization of the conflict between Peronism and Anti-Peronism, driven to a large extent by the United States through its Argentine ambassador Spruille Braden.
Henceforth the Argentine population would be divided into two factions directly opposed to one another: a largely Peronist working class and a largely anti-Peronist middle class and upper class. Braden arrived in Buenos Aires on 19 May. Braden was one of the owners of the mining company in Chile Braden Copper Company , an advocate of the imperialist "big stick".
He openly held an anti-union position and opposed the industrialization of Argentina.