LITMIR.BIZ

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in the South Atlantic sped up a process of authoritarian breakdown that had already begun, and it constrained, though it did not totally reverse, the military’s ability to fix the terms of democratic return. Military loss exposed the mendacity of the junta’s claims to the guardianship of the nation. Yet even in retreat, the regime still managed to wield control over the timeline of the transition.⁵⁰ Over the long months of political reorganization after the war, rumors of possible coups surfaced frequently. Given Argentina’s long history of military takeovers, they were not totally unfounded. Several prominent politicians associated with the Multipartidaria, which played a prominent role in talks with military authorities, favored an extended transition to elections as a concession to the junta and as a way to ensure that the regime would actually relinquish power. Following Argentina’s surrender to Great Britain, it took close to six months to settle on the official date for democratic elections. Negotiations for the transfer of power from military to civilian rule continued through the early months of 1983, with presidential elections finally set for October 30 of that year.⁵¹

      Eventually, postwar dilemmas and the debates about their possible resolution were channeled into what would become a protracted electoral contest for the presidency. Though campaigning did not pick up full steam until June 1983, when most of the major parties elected their nominees, the opening acts of the election began almost immediately after the junta announced its withdrawal from power. On July 1, 1982, the regime lifted a ban on political organizing in place since 1976, which allowed political parties to regroup. In August 1982, parties began to recruit new affiliates, and over the following months they scrambled to build voting rosters according to revised election rules and new party statutes. By April 1983, almost three million Argentines had formally affiliated with a political party.

      In the almost ten years since the nation’s last open elections, the panorama of political life had shifted in significant ways. Not only had the military been discredited in defeat; but the principal political figures of the second half of the twentieth century were also no longer present. The deaths of Juan Perón in 1974 and Ricardo Balbín, the leader of the Radical Party, in 1981 opened the nation’s two most powerful parties to aspiring contenders jockeying for control. Even more significant, the demographics of the voting public had also transformed, with a generation of younger voters who came of age during the dictatorship inspired by the opportunity to participate in and define a new era in national life. Voting and the heady onset of presidential campaigning were not the only signs of change after the Malvinas War, but the long years of proscription and the absence of basic political rights quickly made the ballot box one of the first battles of the coming transition.

      Sixteen months passed between the end of the Malvinas War and the October 1983 elections. The postwar period was marked by nightmarish revelations of the military’s crimes, the deepening debt crisis, and the acceleration of popular mobilizations. These headlines competed with alarming news of the social effects of the economic crisis gripping the nation. In Quilmes, site of the 1981 Hunger March, for example, Bishop Novak declared the diocese in a “state of emergency,” launching a solidarity campaign to deal with ongoing job losses, child malnutrition, and a spike in cases of tuberculosis.⁵² Novak repeated a by then familiar lament to a reporter: “This is a country that has the most fundamental resource of all: food. It is a country that should be the breadbasket to the world, with an almost infinite number of resources. It is an aberration that there are people who go to bed hungry, often without having eaten anything at all.”⁵³ The bishop painted a vivid picture of the social violence that accompanied military rule. During the dictatorship, the degradation of social life had been an open secret in the national press, thinly veiled or buried in the back pages of newspapers among “lifestyle” pieces. With the regime in retreat following the Malvinas War, tallying the negative impact of the dictatorship on ordinary Argentines moved to the headlines. Implicit in the widespread coverage of human rights abuses, fiscal crisis, and hunger was an assumption that the upcoming democratic government would put a definitive end to those scourges. Novak pushed expectations even further. In sharp contrast to his present surroundings of industrial decline, his commentary tapped into a long-standing trope of Argentine bounty. Many Argentines linked the imminent return of democracy to the restoration of welfare and plenitude.

      The aftermath of the junta’s military defeat also seemed to fix one of the most widespread and enduring assumptions about the coming transition: if authoritarianism was responsible for five decades of political instability in Argentina, it followed that the embrace of institutional democracy would serve as the antidote to state violence and provide guarantees of a just, peaceful society. Gente magazine, whose editorial board had been in firm alignment with the junta, summed up the postwar sentiment: “We left behind the triumphalism of war, which many thought would change everything, and embraced the triumphalism of democracy, as if it were another magic fix-it-all formula.”⁵⁴ The maxim “dictatorship versus democracy” eased the sense of a break with a past that many were anxious to leave behind. The drama of war and the ignominy of military surrender heightened a hopeful sense of new beginnings. Despite pronouncements about the swift remaking of political life after the war, however, there was no immediate shift in values or foregone conclusion about the contours of Argentina’s coming democracy.⁵⁵

      And yet some baseline expectations for democratic restoration had been forged before the war, in the everyday forms in which the social and economic violence of dictatorship were experienced and addressed on the national margins. In Greater Buenos Aires, the protagonists of popular mobilizations against the regime linked civic claims and social justice through an incipient rights discourse that pushed forward calls for democratization. The Malvinas War did not remake the Argentine public life overnight. It did, however, deepen a general antiauthoritarian consensus and rights discourse that linked well-being with democratic restoration. The roots of this idea first emerged via the extension of welfare and social protections at midcentury. By the end of the Malvinas War, the memory of these past struggles electrified calls for the return to democracy. Combined with the refoundational impulse of the postwar moment, the principles of social rights, justice, and human dignity shaped the political field in the months leading to constitutional restoration.

2

      The Campaign for a

      Democratic Argentina

      When Ana Pérez de Vera cast her vote in the presidential election on October 30, 1983, she accompanied her ballot with a letter to the candidate of her choice, Raúl Alfonsín. In her brief note, the eighty-five-year old widow and seamstress explained that she had been working since she was thirteen, and now that her vision was failing her, she hoped that Alfonsín could “find the kindness” to grant her a pension. Pérez de Vera’s decision to vote for Alfonsín surprised members of her family. As she explained, “I was a strong Peronist. . . . I was for Perón and Evita.” But after failing to secure a pension under the government of Isabel Perón (1974–1976), her support for the movement waivered: “[The Peronists] slammed the door in my face and now I have stomped them [le pisotié] with my vote.” But her decision did not stem from frustration alone. For Ana Pérez de Vera, Alfonsín also seemed to offer her the same benefits that Peronism once had. As she followed Alfonsín’s campaign on television, she was drawn in by the candidate’s calls for full employment for women, pensions, and retirement funds for housewives. “I couldn’t speak to him, but I felt like he was speaking to me.” And so, as Ana entered the voting station in October 1983, she resolved to take a chance and to cast her vote for Alfonsín and the Radical Party. After all, she concluded, “Perón always said that it was better to do than to promise.”¹

      While most accounts attribute Alfonsín’s 1983 electoral victory to his pledges to restore the rule of law and uphold human rights after seven years of a criminal military regime, Ana Pérez de Vera’s letter, with its references to pensions and social welfare, also suggests that Alfonsín’s appeal was more wide-ranging than is generally considered.² Scholars of the return to democracy have tended to downplay Alfonsín’s social agenda in favor of his commitment to constitutionalism.³ For Ana Pérez de Vera, however, these were not mutually exclusive projects. To cast a vote,

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