Ch.34 Dictators in South America and Africa
Argentina’s President and His Wife
- Juan Peron and Eva Peron
- As president, Perón went on trying to improve the lives of the poor. He also did his best to get the important businesses of Argentina back under Argentinian control. Like China, Argentina was filled with foreign businessmen who controlled factories, trains, and ports. Great Britain owned most of the railroads. The United States owned almost all of the car factories. Peron brought these businesses back to the people of Argentina -by seizing them in the name of the government.
- Although Perón worked for the people of Argentina, he also used the methods of the Fascists to make sure that he kept his power.
- In 1952, Evita died. She was only thirty-three years old. At her funeral, thousands of Argentinians lined the streets and wept out loud as her coffin was carried past.
- After Eva died, Juan Perón grew more cruel. More and more Argentinians ˝disappeared˝ and were never seen again.
- Perón left his country and went first to Paraguay and then to Madrid, in Spain. Back in Argentina, his own people knocked his statues over and smashed them, and chipped his name out of all of the engravings in public squares.
- Over the next eighteen years, Argentina had nine different leaders. In 1973, eighteen years after his fight, Juan Perón even returned to Argentina and became president again-for asingle year. Then, at the age of seventy-nine, Juan Peron died.
Freedom in the Belgian Congo
- In 1958, Lumumba formed a group called the MNC or the ˝Mouvement National Congolais.˝ Lumumba told his followers, ˝Independence isn‘t a gift that can be given by Bet glum. It is the right of the Congolese people.˝
- When the Belgian government realized that the Congo was out of control, it agreed to give the Congo its independence. In 1960, the first Congolese election was held. It had been arranged so quickly that the people of the Congo hadn‘t been able to form political parties, or find out much about different candidates.
- Patrice Lumumba, the most well-known Congolese leader, was elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo.
- After Civil War, a Congolese general named Joseph Mobutu announced that the Congo would now be ruled by a ˝caretaker government˝ in other words, by military officers who had seized control of the country. (No one tried to organize another election.) Four years later, Mobutu gave himself the title ˝president.˝ (Still no election!)
- The Congo was free from European rule, but it still wasn‘t free from tyranny and corruption.
