Inspired by Hamilton, I want to write a musical about José Alfredo Martinez de Hoy, Argentina’s Minister of Economy during 1976-80, under the last military dictatorship. This thread explains why I think it will provide a window into Argentina’s soul. 1/

José Alfredo was nicknamed Joe at his English boarding school, so I’ll call him that. He was a member of a famous landowning family that had arrived in the River Plate as merchants in the late 18th century. 2/

During the 19th century they moved into agriculture in response to the massive terms-of-trade boom that began after independence. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/abs/globalisation-the-terms-of-trade-and-argentinas-expansion-in-the-long-nineteenth-century/A36ECDD1234152F8E2AEB7DE44A4EDD1 3/

They became some of the country’s most prominent landowners and helped turn Argentina into one of the world’s richest countries, based on the export of hides, wool, wheat, maize, and beef. It was a landowner's paradise. 4/

Chapadmalal, the 25,500-hectare ranch on the coast of Buenos Aires Province, was the centrepiece of the Martínez de Hoz family's fortune. They built this castle to live in. 5/

Miguel Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, Joe’s grandfather, inherited 12,500 hectares of Chapadmalal in 1888, which he used to fund an extravagant lifestyle that saw him and his wife pass much of their time in England. 6/

Meanwhile, the castle became like a small part of England: a guidebook described how ‘from master to men, nothing but English is spoken; the hours of labour, the cooking, even the making of bread, are all on the English style’. 7/

However, this golden age came to end with the deterioration in Argentina’s terms of trade after the First World War. The country and especially its landowners struggled to adjust to the new international environment. 8/

By the late 1920s, Miguel Alfredo had already been forced to sell off almost a quarter of his share of the ranch. His attempts to start other businesses then proved disastrous. 9/

In 1931 he invested in a business to import automobiles to be sold to the government, but the deal fell through. Miguel Alfredo faced financial ruin. The 9,842 hectares that remained of the Chapadmalal ranch were handed over to his creditors. 10/

The family was eventually able to buy back 5,370 hectares from the banks, but it was obvious that agriculture would no longer bring the same wealth as in the 19th century. What happened next added insult to injury. 11/

In another attempt to diversify away from agriculture, Miguel Alfredo’s heirs, including Joe’s father, José Alfredo Snr, planned to turn Chapadmalal into an extension of the exclusive tourist resort of Mar del Plata, 23 kilometres down the coast. 12/

In 1939, they wrote to the Ministry of Public Works to ask for permission to begin construction of ‘a spa with modern characteristics, such that does not currently exist in the country’. 13/

In total, they built 120 country houses, which they rapidly sold, together with another 420 empty plots, on what was now called the Chapadmalal Maritime Beach. 14/

A national newspaper described how they had been bought by ‘people linked to society, who, as anticipated, are proposing to transform this spot into a modern and aristocratic summer village’. But then Juan Domingo Perón entered the picture. 15/

Perón made the Martínez de Hoz family ‘donate’ prime coastal land for the government’s new programme of ‘social tourism’. Large hotels with a capacity for 4,700 guests were built and opened to poor, urban workers, whose holidays were financed by the Eva Perón Foundation. 16/

In the 1940s the Martínez de Hoz family thus saw their exclusive seaside resort turned into a playground for the ‘shirtless ones’ – the descendants of the peons who had once tended their cattle. 17/

Born in 1925, Joe grew up watching his family’s fortunes collapse. And Joe knew who to blame: Perón and his followers. Perón was the serpent who had ruined their Eden with the forbidden fruit of populism. 18/

The solution was simple: cleanse the country of its sins by rolling back the state and returning to the true faith of liberalism, which had been the dominant ideology in Argentina in the early 20th century. 19/

So Joe plotted. He briefly became Minister of Economy under a military government in 1963, but had little chance to make significant reforms before there was a return to democracy. 20/

A US Embassy report from 1965 describes Joe at a meeting in the house of Alejandro Shaw, a banker, with his cousin, General Jorge Shaw, and the president of Shell Argentina, trying to persuade the US Ambassador to support a coup. 21/

But the Americans refused. https://www.joefrancis.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1965_Shaw_Meeting.pdf 22/

By this point, Joe had become a businessman. Among other roles, he became chairman of Acindar, one of Argentina’s two large private steel companies. 23/

From this position, he saw first hand the problems generated by Argentina’s increasingly militant labour movement. As wages rose, profit margins fell, so Joe thought of a solution. 24/

Ironically, he was aided by Perón. As another US Embassy report shows, shortly before Perón’s arrival back from exile in 1973, the stand-in Peronist president Héctor Cámpora had ordered the formation of vigilante groups. 25/

The report states that he put Rodolfo Galimberti, one of the leaders of the Peronist Montonero guerrilla organisation, in charge. https://www.joefrancis.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/1973_CCS.pdf 26/

These vigilante groups evolved into the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, the 'Triple A’, which helped Joe with his labour problems at Acindar. 27/

In November 1974 a radical group had won the local union elections at Acindar's steelworks in Villa Constitución, defeating the group proposed by the union bosses in Buenos Aires. In response, the Peronist government declared that there was a ‘subversive conspiracy’. 28/

In March 1975 the Peronists ordered the police to occupy Villa Constitución. Aided by the Triple A, they arrested over 100 union activists, many of whom were tortured at a detention centre established in the grounds of Acindar. 29/

One of the police testified how Acindar established “a close bond with the police force through extraordinary cash payments… it paid to all police personnel, chiefs, officers and squad members …, supplementing the payment they already received from the state…” 30/

"Acindar turned itself into a kind of military fortress with barbed wire fences. The police officials that watched over the factory stayed in the houses reserved for the company executives”, he said. 31/

Many unionists were killed. Some of them were members of the Montoneros, the same Peronist guerrilla group that Rodolfo Galimberti belonged to. Peronism is complicated! 32/

Another example of Peronism's complications: this US Embassy report shows how the Peronist union bosses agreed to support the military coup of 24 March 1976 because they wanted to deal with the Left. https://www.joefrancis.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DoS_BsAs_22_3_76.pdf 33/

After the coup, the use of state terror was greatly increased and now involved the army, navy, and airforce. Up to 30,000 people disappeared. http://www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/english/library/nevagain/nevagain_001.htm 34/

Joe was made Minister of Economy and he imposed a series of (neo)liberal reforms that had catastrophic results. 35/

They were best described by the journalist Rodolfo Walsh (also a member of the Montoneros!) in an open letter he sent to the military junta the day before they killed him. 36/

"In the economic policy of this government we must seek not only the explanation of its crimes but also a greater atrocity that punishes millions of human beings with a planned misery.” 37/

"In one year they reduced workers’ real wages by forty percent, reduced their participation in the national income to thirty percent, increased the working day that is needed to purchase the family basket [of basic goods] from six to eighteen hours” 38/

"Freezing wages with the butt of a gun while prices are increased at the point of the bayonet, abolishing every form of collective bargaining, prohibiting assemblies and internal committees, increasing working hours...” 39/

"And when workers have wanted to protest they have been called subversives, with the kidnapping of entire groups of unionists, some of whom reappear dead, while others do not reappear at all.” 40/

Joe was allowed to stay on as Minister of Economy because his liberal reforms, combined with state terror, proved to be good for business. Profit margins recovered. Financial speculation was allowed to run wild. 41/

However, the country’s ballooning external debt and runaway inflation eventually became too much for the military, so Joe was replaced as Minister of Economy in 1980. 42/

This part could drag, so I would keep it brief: from the return to democracy in 1983 to his death in 2013, Joe lived mainly under house arrest, in and out of court due to his activities under the dictatorship. I like to think it was a fairly miserable existence. 43/

Martínez de Hoz: The Musical would, then, be a story about a man who misunderstood his country. He believed that the golden age at the beginning of the 20th century was due to liberalism, so he believed the solution was (neo)liberalism. 44/

Joe could not see the real origins of Argentina’s relative decline: the deterioration in the terms of the trade and the country's inability to adapt to the new international environment. 45/

Instead, he blamed it on the democratisation that took place under Perón in the 1940s, which had seen the working class provided with more public goods, including the vast hotels built on the Martínez de Hoy family’s land. 46/

Like much of Argentina’s upper classes, he had reason to hate Peronism, which represented the intrusion of the barbarous mestizo Argentina into the civilised European Argentina of Buenos Aires. 47/

The irony is that Joe’s attempts to return Argentina to the promised land were facilitated by Perón, who had come back from his long sojourn in Franco’s Spain a very different man. Perón began the use of state terror, which then spread, until it devoured the nation. 48/

Martinez de Hoy: The Musical will thus be about far more than one Minister of Economy: it will be about the rise and fall of a great nation, its triumphs and tragedies, and the maddening contradictions of Peronism, the political ideology that still divides it today. 49/

It will provide a window into Argentina's soul. The music will be a mix of cumbia villera and rock nacional. fin/

If you like this thread, please consider supporting me on http://patreon.com/jafrancis  or http://buymeacoffee.com/joefrancis . p.s./

The artwork in the thread is inspired by the incredible León Ferrari. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ferrari-never-again-96188 p.p.s/

Ya hice una mala traducción de este hilo. https://twitter.com/joefrancis505/status/1391674798493814784 p.p.p.s./