In Ambassadors of the Working Class, Semán uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of Juan Domingo Perón’s government and its labor supporters—the labor attaché program that assigned union activists to Argentina’s embassies. Using a transnational framework, Semán recounts the story of union men (only a handful of women participated in the program and none in the original cohort) recruited to serve in Argentina’s diplomatic corps, long a preserve of the country’s aristocratic families. The attachés were charged in the early, heady days of the program with propagandizing in favor of Perón’s Third Position and contesting American hegemony in Latin America, in an attempt to promote an alternative to U.S. liberal democracy. They established numerous international connections, especially in Latin America. They even garnered a degree of influence with certain Latin American labor groups that saw in Perón’s economic nationalism and social and labor reforms a possible model for...

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