Argentina as a safe haven for the Nazis and other stigmas

There were no more Nazi exiles in Argentina than anywhere else in the world, so how did the country come to be known as a safe haven for Hitler's followers?

It was convenient for the United States and Europe after WWII to accuse other countries of harboring Nazis in an attempt to conceal their own negotiations with the Nazis they recruited, mainly scientists and brains in general. There is plenty of research on this subject, which is only now accessible to a wider audience online... Yet, it isn't even easy for a researcher to find it most times.

The most serious problem, however, is that nobody ever finds anything they're not looking for, and for most people the conviction that there were an inordinate number of Nazis, and there still are, in Argentina is so strong that there's no reason they would look for any data saying otherwise.

Argentina was targeted most insistently as a safe haven for Nazis because it was the first country in Latin America (in the 1940s) to nationalize the railroad system the British had built. The UK was paid for the railroads and all the installations, but losing control of such a key strategic tool was a serious, and unforgivable, blow to the British.

This enormous change in the relationship between Argentina and the UK first and the US later, was brought about with the election of Juan D. Perón in 1945...

And here lies the key to unraveling two mysteries at the same time:

Peron won the elections with the support of the most progressive sectors of society, political parties and unions, and the disenfranchised and marginalized. How could this man have been accused of harboring Nazis? Well, against him ran the conservative elite who had no presentable candidate because they were thoroughly corrupt, but they had the support of the US. The conservatives were so corrupt that the whole decade they ruled is called La Década Infame [The Despicable Decade] in our textbooks. The US Ambassador, Braden, was the main supporter of Peron's opposition, so the campaign ads read "Braden OR Peron" meaning the US or Argentina. It was clear that the US represented the interests of Great Britain, as well, and the conservative elite had no problem identifying with Braden. The US and Britain had won the war and they represented "democracy", while Peron was a military man... So the propaganda against him begins.
How could the world ever know the truth when the newspapers belonged to the conservative elite and their masters, the US and Britain?

Peron was then depicted as a dictator, although his supporters were all the progressive forces in the country and he won two consecutive elections with over 50 % of the votes... and he was ousted in 1955 by a rightist military coup allied to the US. The accusation that Peron was a fascist was based on the fact that while he was in the military academy he had been in a seminar in Italy during the Mussolini regime before the war and that was the proof that he was a Nazi. What they didn't say was that most academies sent their cadets to train in Europe, even the European. And before that, the military trained with the Prussians, even those who would later become revolutionaries. But that's an unnecessary fact to mention when all one has to do is see Peron's political career and his supporters to realize that the accusations were false.

I should point out that one of the many Argentine peculiarities is that, because the country has always been underpopulated, it received, proportionately to its population, more immigrants than any other country in the world after WWII. And that was the second wave of immigrants, the first had arrived after WWI and even before that after every crisis in the world from the Potato Famine in Ireland to the pogroms in Ukraine previous to the Russian Revolution....

End of Part I

In our next episodes:

If Peron was a fascist that had a policy for harboring Nazis, why didn't the thousands of Jews already living in Argentina and the millions that settled in the country at the end of the war rise against him? Why were there no persecutions of Jews during Peron's two periods in government? Why have there always been Jews in the Peronist Party, many of whom disappeared during the last, truly fascist military dictatorship? Why have the vast majority of Argentine Jews always been in support of the Palestinian claims in Israel and against American interventions in the Middle East?

How can Europeans be so confused about Argentine politics even to this day that a television reporter in Spain just this week accused Cristina Kirchner of being both a fascist and a leftist guerrilla leader?

Why is the Argentine Catholic Church responsible for crimes against humanity?

These and many other mysteries will be revealed shortly. The purpose is not only addressing some serious misunderstandings and misinformation about Argentina, it's taking Argentina as an example of how little we still know about our complex and fascinating world.