On Capitalism and Communism
For us, the justicialists, the world today finds itself divided between capitalists and communists in conflict: we are neither one nor the other. We aspire ideologically to stand outside of that conflict between global interests. This doesn't imply in any way that we are in the internationalist camp, dodging the issue.
We believe that capitalism as well as communism are systems already overtaken by the times. We consider capitalism to be the exploitation of the man by capital and communism as the exploitation of the individual by the state. Both “insectify” the individual by means of different systems.
We believe more; we think that the abuses of capitalism are the cause and that communism is the effect. Without capitalism, communism would have no reason to exist; we equally believe that, with the extinction of the cause, there will be the beginning of the end for the effect.
From "La fuerza es el derecho de las bestias" (Force is the Right of the Beasts)
(Ediciones Cicerón, Montevideo, 1958, p 18)
(Translation by T. M. Edsall)
The Hour of the People (1968 critique of US foreign aid)
But the most original thing, if it were not the most suspect, is the appetite that the heads of state feel for the economic aid of the United States, that only coincides in the two unique forms known until now, which are material trade and military weapons. In effect, the two forms are: an offer of loans and the introduction of yankee companies. Technical aid does not come for free, instead those countries that request it have to pay for it through the technicians, and generally, at a quite elevated price.
How can it be explained that the only ten years that Argentina did not need American aid was the only time that it managed to put its economy in order, despite the war that was waged on it!
How is that now that it should be believed that they are going to help the Latin American countries with their loans and companies, whose tricks I know quite well and were the reason that during my government we would avoid such things. In effect, our countries are not “underdeveloped” just as they say that the syndicalist nations are uncivilized, but are like this as a result of trusting in their “help.” We have been first decapitalized and later indebted, because the North Americans first impoverished the countries and then invented aid for progress, which really isn’t aid, but more closely represents a theory of surrendering to poverty, as had been well affirmed by Bolívar almost a century and half ago.
Juan Domingo Perón
(Translated by T.M.Edsall)
|