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Onward Inspiration. In 1941 Perón returned from Europe, where he had made a study tour. He had been brushed by the wings of inspiration. Soon he was inspiring Argentine officers with what he liked to call a ''crusade for spiritual renovation." This proved to be a program for rejuvenating the Army by kicking out its more senescent generals—a crusade for which it is easy to inspire younger officers in almost any army. Behind the crusade appeared a new force—the GOU—which made its debut in Colonel Perón's garrison at Mendoza. Soon the GOU's influence had permeated the Argentine Army. The GOU's leading ideas were irresistible to soldiers: the Army was the purest, noblest thing in Argentina; it was the group best fitted to rule the country; it was the instrument of Argentine destiny.
In last year's revolution the GOU realized the first two of its ideals. Ever since then it has bossed Argentina. But its dictatorship is headless. For though Perón is the GOU's strong man, nobody, not even Juan Domingo Perón, really bosses the GOU, which remains a chaotic town meeting of military prima donnas. Hence Argentina, though dominated by its Army, has never developed into a typical one-man military dictatorship.
Perón had more influence than any other man with the spiritually renovated officers of the GOU. But, unable to count on the Army's invariable support, he was forced to become a politician. When his power was threatened, as it frequently was, by some other ambitious "colonel," he sought support in nonmilitary quarters. As president of the National Labor Department, he appealed to the workers, flattered them, forced their employers to raise their wages, improve their working conditions. He was even solicitous of farm hands—the lowest circle of Argentina's proletariat.
One of Perón's wiliest moves was his beguilement of the working press. Argentina's newspapers (La Prensa, La Natión, La Razón), traditionally free, frank and influential, smarted under the strict censorship begun by the Castillo regime. Instead of lifting the restrictions, which might have been dangerous for the regime, Perón forced the publishers to raise their employes' wages.
All might have rocked along well enough, had it not been for the third of GOU's ideals—the notion that the Argentine Army is an instrument of destiny.
GOU's sense of destiny was destined to fall foul of the suspicions of other Latin American countries; of the fact that Argentines have long believed that their special role is willy-nilly to defend the South American continent against the Colossus of the North; and of the fact that the U.S., engaged in a life & death struggle with the Axis, was lining up the Latin American nations on her side under the guise of the Good Neighbor Policy.
Onward Destiny. Together with Argentina's Government, Colonel Perón inherited Argentina's feud with the U.S. State Department. President Castillo had been a great Yankee-hater. Relations grew worse when Castillo was overthrown. Some of the new Spiritual Renovators looked not merely anti-U.S., but pro-Axis. U.S. newspapers began to cry that they were setting up a full-fledged Fascist state in the Western Hemisphere.