Juan Domingo Pern, born in 1895 in Lobos, Argentina, was the President of Argentina on two occasions separated by eighteen years. He first came to power by the election of February 28,1946. He ruled for almost ten years until he was pressured to resign by the Argentine military and in September of 1955 he left the country. He spent almost the next twenty years in exile but never lost touch with the Argentine people and especially the Argentine labor movement. In 1973, after eighteen years of exile, Pern returned to Argentina and was elected president again with his third wife Isabel as vice-president. His power as a ruler came out of the special connection that he made with the working classes and unions before and during his first term. Pern was a military man by trade, attending the National Military Academy at age fifteen. He became a captain by 1924 and a professor of military history by 1930. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1936 and was named minister of war during the unrest and bloodless coup of 1944. Pern got his first experience with labor as the head of the National Labor Department. That position evolved into the head of the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare just over a month later in December of 1944. Right away Pern required that all employers give employees a one month's pay bonus every year. This was the beginning of a series of policies that would make Pern the labor union's president. His ability to come back to power after being out of the country for so long was the product of his close relationship with the labor forces and working class. There are however a few special factors that must be considered when making this claim; namely the background of the labor movement and the way in which labor continued to follow Peronist ideas even after Juan was gone from office. These labor forces developed such tremendous loyalty to Juan Pern as a result of his special brand of politics which provi...
