Papers of Argentine Juan Atilio Bramuglia, President of UN Security Council during the Berlin Blockade

The Hoover Institution has long had the best collection in any public archive in the world on Juan Domingo Perón and Peronism in Argentina. Although Perón died in 1974, his movement, long splintered and now stretching politically from the Right to the Left, is still in power today. An important part of the Peronism collection, which relates more directly to world politics than most other Perón materials, has long been the personal archive of Juan Atilio Bramuglia (d. 1962), which was recently been strengthened by the acquisition of new materials related to the Berlin Blockade that began in 1948. After research in the Hoover Archives, Raanan Rein, a professor and biographer of Bramuglia at Tel Aviv University, concluded that Bramuglia was “the most eminent and talented of ministers in the first presidency [1946-1952] of Juan Perón.” Bramuglia was a lawyer and union leader who promoted Perón’s “third position” (between the United States and the Soviet Union) and served as Perón’s foreign minister and representative to the United Nations. Of particular interest was his role as president of the UN Security Council, where his handling of the Berlin Blockade, which began during his watch, has been widely praised. This collection now includes cables and private correspondence between Bramuglia and Perón on the Berlin crisis and other materials, including speeches, interviews, and photographs, relating to international and Argentine domestic affairs.