ABSTRACT
When Juan Domingo Peron became President of Argentina on June 4, 1946, he had full opportunity to make his regime either democratic or dictatorial. Peron's direct instruments of political control during his first period in power were the Partido Peronista and the Partido Peronista Feminino. Peron needed a political philosophy as well as political parties. President Peron unveiled his supposedly distinctive political philosophy, which he named Justicialismo, at a Congress of Philosophy held in Mendoza in April 1949. Aside from the political policies of the Peron regime leading towards dictatorship, the most important aspects of the Peron period in power were the economic policies of his government. An additional attribute of the emerging Peron dictatorship was its efforts to bring under complete government control all of the important autonomous elements in Argentine society, the most crucial of these being the organized labor movement.
