Cárcano, Miguel Ángel (1889–1978)

Miguel Ángel Cárcano was an Argentine lawyer, politician, and historian. In 1929 he was elected national deputy for the province of Córdoba. Following the coup d'état in 1930 that overthrew President Hipólito Irigoyen and dissolved the congress, Cárcano organized the Concordancia (Concordance), an alliance chiefly of anti-Irigoyen radicals, for the fraudulent elections of 1931; he was reelected as deputy.

In 1933 Cárcano was part of the Argentine delegation charged with signing the controversial Roca-Runciman Pact in London. The treaty awarded a broad range of benefits to British enterprises; in exchange, Argentina was allowed to continue exporting beef to the United Kingdom in the adverse international economic context set off by the world economic crisis of 1929. In 1936 he was named minister of agriculture by President Agustín P. Justo (1932–1938).

From 1942 to 1946 he held the post of ambassador to Great Britain. In 1945 he led the Argentine delegation that signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, in spite of opposition by the Soviet Union, who reproached Argentina for its neutral stance during the war. In 1961 Cárcano, a well-known spokesperson for the liberal wing of the Argentine conservative movement at the time, was named minister of foreign relations by the intransigent radical president, Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962). During Cárcano's brief period of service, Argentina abstained on the vote to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States in 1962, notwithstanding U.S. pressure, and lobbied for a stronger Alliance for Progress to keep communism from spreading on the continent. Having published Evolución histórica del régimen de la tierra pública (Historical evolution of the regime of public lands) in 1917, in which he described the process of land concentration in Argentina, he was strongly motivated by confidence in a promising "manifest destiny" for an Argentine nation founded on the value of its "genuinely European" citizenry.

See alsoAlliance for Progress; Argentina: The Twentieth Century; Concordancia; Frondizi, Arturo; Irigoyen, Hipólito; Justo, José Agustín Pedro; Roca-Runciman Pact (1933).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cárcano, Miguel Ángel. La sexta república. Buenos Aires: Araujo, 1958.

Cárcano, Miguel Ángel. Evolución histórica del régimen de la tierra pública, 1810–1916, 3rd edition. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1972.

Paradiso, José. Debates y trayectoria de la política exterior argentina. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1993.

Tulchin, Joseph S. Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship. Boston: Twayne, 1990

                              Vicente Palermo