Between benevolence and suspicion: political actors in Córdoba facing the putsch of 1943 and the ending of the experience led by Sabattini

Abstract

In contrast to the national level, the 1943 putsch in Córdoba did not put an end to a government constrained by electoral fraud and restrictions on civil liberties, but to a democratically elected government that was in the hands of the “Partido Radical”: between 1936- 1943, Córdoba experienced a period characterized by the full force of Republican policy mechanisms and inter party competition. This singularity rested in a two party system (“radicales” and conservatives) and in the important influence of the left parties and the Catholic Church in the provincial political game.
This article provides a historiographical reconstruction of the behavior of the main political actors before the Revolution of June, from an analytical perspective that associates their role in provincial politics with its horizon of expectations derived from the national level. From this angle of concerns, we focus on the internal tensions caused in the “Unión Cívica Radical” (UCR) and the “Partido Demócrata” (PD) as well as on the different views held from the left parties and the Catholic Church. It also puts in dialogue what happened in Cordoba with the different interpretations of the phenomenon at national level.