Alejandro Gómez

Alejandro Gómez (April 4, 1908 – February 6, 2005) was an Argentine educator and lawyer who served as the Vice President of Argentina.

Life and times Gómez was born in Rosario. His father was a telegraph operator for the local rail line, and the family relocated to numerous towns within Santa Fe Province. They eventually settled in rural Berabevú, where the young man became a school teacher. His vocal support of the centrist UCR, which had been elected to power in Argentina in 1916, cost Gómez his post upon the 1930 military coup against President Hipólito Yrigoyen.

Gómez, however, did not abandon his teaching profession, and he established the Workers' Night School in Rosario, which he operated in a clandestine manner during the authoritarian Concordance regime that followed. Gómez met María Celia Cabos, and they were married in 1936. He enrolled at the Rosario campus of the National University of the Littoral (later converted to the National University of Rosario), and earned a law degree in 1940. Gómez was named political director of the campaign, and as such worked to prevent rifts in the UCRI, notably in Río Negro Province, where a dissident "Green List" had emerged from within UCRI ranks. Gómez persuaded a number of top Green List candidates to rejoin the official UCRI list, and thus neutralized the rival faction; among those so persuaded was Senatorial candidate José María Guido, who was elected and would, in 1962, become President of Argentina. The UCRI ticket received the exiled Perón's endorsement late in the campaign, and the duo won the 1958 elections by 17% over Balbín's UCRP. They were inaugurated on May 1.

A serious policy dispute emerged, however, when the President announced in July that the nation's largely untapped oil resources would be open to foreign exploration via contracts to be signed with the state oil concern, YPF. This was a reversal of a policy adopted by Frondizi with his 1954 treatise, Petróleo y Política, as well as during the campaign, and elicited strong opposition from Gómez. The dispute, though not public at its outset, became the subject of an ongoing series by the satirical news magazine, Tía Vicenta, after its editor, Juan Carlos Colombres, learned of a series of meetings Gómez held with Admiral Isaac Rojas, General Domingo Quaranta (Director of State Intelligence), and others. The periodical referred to the controversy for five months with a corner photo of Gómez in an insert beside an epigraph asking: ¿A mi por que me miran? ("Why are you all looking at me?").

Amid a series of strikes in opposition to the oil contracts policy, the UCRI expelled the Vice President, thus prompting him to resign on November 18. Its ultimate beneficiary would plausibly have been Gómez had the Armed Forces heads opted to depose Frondizi without suspending the nation's governmental institutions. He taught public law at the University of Belgrano until his retirement in 1988, and authored numerous books. His last, Un siglo...una vida. De la soberanía a la dependencia (A Century...A life: From Sovereignty to Dependence), lamented the prioritization of foreign interests in national energy policy as a key factor in the country's decline up to then, and pointed to this as the reason for his 1958 resignation.

He retired in Las Tapias, a scenic Córdoba Province town, and died there of a brain aneurism in 2005; he was 96.