The period spanning from 1916 to 1930 in Argentina is known as the Radical Phase (), as it began with the election of the Radical Civic Union candidate Hipólito Yrigoyen, ending the conservative Generation of '80's domination on politics. Yrigoyen's second term, which started in 1928, was interrupted by Argentina's first military coup, which established José Félix Uriburu in power and initiated the Infamous Decade.
The First Yrigoyen presidency (1916–1922)
Overview Conservative forces dominated Argentine politics until 1916, when their traditional rivals, the Radicals, led by Hipólito Yrigoyen, won control of the government through the 1916 presidential election, the first national elections in Argentine history conducted by secret ballot (and compulsory voting), only for men, established by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912. 745,000 citizens were allowed to vote, on a total population of 7.5 million (women and immigrants, who constituted most of the population, were not allowed to vote), of which 400,000 abstained themselves.Felipe Pigna, Los Mitos de la Historia Argentina, 3, 2006, ed. Planeta, p. 38. Yrigoyen, however, only obtained 45% of the votes, which did not allow him a majority in Parliament, where the conservatives remained the first force. Thus, on 80 draft laws proposed by the executive, only 26 were voted by the conservative majority.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 42. The moderate agricultural reform was refused by the Parliament, as well as a tax on interests and the creation of a Bank of the Republic (which was to have the missions of the current Central Bank).
The Constitution mandated an indirect system via provincial electoral colleges and that of the Federal Capital; inhabitants of the national territories could not vote. The Radical Civic Union won six of the fifteen districts (Federal Capital, Córdoba, Entre Ríos, Mendoza, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán); conservative parties won five (Buenos Aires, Catamarca, San Juan, San Luis and La Rioja); the Progressive Democratic Party won two (Corrientes and Salta); and the dissident Radical Civic Union won Santa Fe. As a result, the UCR lacked its own majority in the electoral colleges and depended on dissident electors from Santa Fe, with whom it prevailed by a single vote. For several days the result remained uncertain, until the dissident UCR decided to support the ticket of Hipólito Yrigoyen–Pelagio Luna.
The electoral victory brought to positions of state leadership a broad social sector that had until then been excluded from public office. These were middle sectors without great economic resources or connections to the upper classes. The presence of officials “without a surname” became a frequent subject of jokes in the conservative press. Throughout his government, he often had to rely on decrees, since many initiatives sent to Congress did not pass. Only after the 1918 legislative elections did the Radical Civic Union obtain a majority in the lower house. Prior to that, the government had submitted several projects that were not approved, including the expropriation of national-flag ocean-going ships, the construction of a shipyard, and reconstruction of access channels to the river ports of Rosario and Buenos Aires.
During his administration, Yrigoyen promoted a series of policies that together implied a transformative tendency. Between 1916 and 1930, GDP expanded at an average annual rate of 4.34%.
Despite this conservative opposition, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), with their emphasis on fair elections and democratic institutions, opened their doors to Argentina's expanding middle class as well as to social groups previously excluded from power. Yrigoyen's policy was to "fix" the system, by enacting necessary reforms which would enable the agroindustrial export model to preserve itself.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 39. It altered moderate social reforms with repression of the social movements. A student movement started at the University of Córdoba, which eventually led to the University Reform of 1918, which quickly spread to the rest of America. In May '68, French students recalled the Córdoba movement.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 51.
Thus, on one hand, the Tragic Week of January 1919, during which the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA, founded in 1901) had called for a general strike after a police shooting, ended up in 700 killed and 4,000 injured.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 88. General Luis delle Piane marched on Buenos Aires to re-establish civil order. Despite being called for by some to initiate a coup against Yrigoyen, he remained loyal to the President, at the sole condition that the latter would allow him a free hand on the repression of the demonstrations. Social movements thereafter continued in the Forestal British company, where about 600 people (workers and their families) were massacred, and in Patagonia, where Hector Varela headed the military repression, assisted by the Argentine Patriotic League, killing 1,500.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 100.
On the other hand, Yrigoyen's administration enacted the Labor Code establishing the right to strike in 1921, implemented minimum wages laws and collective contracts. It also initiated the creation of the Dirección General de Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), the oil state company, in June 1922. Radicalism rejected class struggle and vouched for social conciliation.Felipe Pigna, 2006, p. 44.
Relations with conservative governments During the first government of Hipólito Yrigoyen, the Radical Party was in the minority in Congress: in the Chamber of Deputies 101 members were radicals and 129 opposition members, while in the Senate only 2 of 58 were radicals.Luna (1964): 205
Federal interventions in the provinces Hipólito Yrigoyen made extensive use of the power of federal intervention in the provinces, usually by decree, taking advantage of parliamentary recess to bypass the Senate approval required by the Constitution. By the end of his first term in 1922, he had intervened in all provinces (then fourteen), except Santa Fe; some were intervened three times. In total, he decreed nineteen provincial interventions. Nine affected conservative-governed provinces (Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Mendoza and Jujuy in 1917; La Rioja, Catamarca, Salta and Santiago del Estero in 1918; San Juan in 1919), and ten affected radical-governed provinces (Córdoba in 1917; San Luis in 1919; Salta and Jujuy in 1921; Tucumán in 1917 and 1920; Mendoza in 1918 and 1920; and San Juan twice in 1921).
Economic policy
Hipólito Yrigoyen believed that Argentina should manage its own currency, its own credit and the commercialization of its production, as well as the exploitation and distribution of energy and transport. To this end, he planned a State Central Bank, in order to nationalize foreign trade, managed by the grain exporters, founded YPF and imposed controls on the concessions of foreign companies that managed the railways. In railway matters, rigorous controls were imposed on the railways in British hands, especially with regard to tariffs and the setting of capital accounts; in addition, the works of the State Railways were promoted, seeking an outlet to the Pacific to facilitate the transport of the production of the northwest and southwest-central parts of the country to reach Peru, Chile and Bolivia.
The historian of radicalism Gabriel del Mazo says that Yrigoyen's government was characterized by its "Land and Oil Plan", in which the State reserved for itself a decisive interventionist role. Radicalism showed an economic tendency that departed from classical liberalism, based on the idea of State intervention in the economy, considered an antecedent of the New Deal that Roosevelt would carry out in the United States almost two decades later. Yrigoyen's economic nationalism is clearly set out in the grounds for the veto of the railway law that the conservative opposition managed to pass in 1920, where he says:
However, Yrigoyen had to face in Argentina the problems arising from World War I. His policy was to maintain neutrality, which in economic terms meant continuing to supply the Allies, traditional clients.Primera presidencia de Yrigoyen [First Presidency of Yrigoyen]. Todo Argentina] The nations at war demanded cheap food, as well as some industrial items such as blankets and canned meat, whose exports tripled during the period from 1914 to 1920. By contrast, exports of corn and chilled meat (of better quality than canned meat) stagnated. At the same time, imports of industrial manufactures that had previously been produced in Europe slowed, since the countries taking part in the conflict focused their resources on the war industry. This caused industries to begin emerging to produce those products that had previously been imported. Between 1914 and 1921, trade with the United States grew, since England and the other European countries had nothing to offer Argentina."Los gobiernos radicales" [The Radical Governments]. Argentina Histórica. Retrieved 25 July 2014.
When the war began, President Victorino de la Plaza ordered the suspension of the delivery of gold in exchange for banknotes carried out by the Conversion Office, as a palliative for the "banking panic" and to prevent capital flight. This allowed the Argentine currency to maintain a fixed backing in relation to gold. Fourteen million pesos in gold were repatriated; their origin was from legations in Paris and London, where it had been deposited as payment made by European merchants on behalf of Argentine exporters. Thanks to this, the Argentine peso came to have 80% gold backing by the end of Yrigoyen's first government. The government unsuccessfully attempted to create the Bank of the Republic in 1917, a financial entity whose objective would be to regulate the national economy and finances. During the five-year period no debt securities were issued, and the external debt was reduced to 225 000 000 pesos; to achieve this, several public jobs were left vacant in order to reduce government spending. Congress did not pass the income tax whose enactment the government requested in 1919. In that year, a regulation on conciliation and arbitration of labor conflicts was sent to Congress, which established a board chaired by the head of the National Department of Labor (also to be composed of one representative from each party to the conflict), to subject both workers and employers to reaching a viable understanding. Also in 1919, a law was brought before Congress regulating work in logging camps and yerba mate plantations, since the conditions of the workers were inhuman; thus Law 11 728 was approved during the following radical administration in 1925. But it would be vetoed by Marcelo T. de Alvear at the insistence of Congress.
International market prices began to decline very slowly from 1914 onward, while the manufactured products that Argentina imported began to become more expensive in relation to the price of cereals. Thus an increasingly difficult situation was created, leading to a general crisis of the economy, whose greatest expression was the year 1929, in step with the international crisis. With an industry with little development that had been created during World War I but later contracted, a fiscal organization that obtained almost all its resources through customs duties, and an almost normally deficit budget, among other aspects, characterized the Argentine economy during the radical period from 1916 to 1930.
Thus, in the metallurgical sector, the companies Tamet and La Cantábrica emerged; the first began as a small workshop and continued growing until it became the largest metallurgical company in South America in the 1920s. At that time the vehicle fleet was 48 000 units, an average of 187 inhabitants per automobile.(8 April 2009) "Cronología [Chronology] ". Coche argentino. Retrieved 13 August 2010.
Energy policy