In Search of the Lost Decade - Jennifer Adair

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This particular political ethos of young Radicals located them on the margins of the revolutionary era. It also uniquely positioned them to survive the next decade of political terror and to gradually rise through the ranks of the Radical Party. Throughout the dictatorship in the 1970s, the organizational strategies they had incorporated during the days of their student activism helped maintain and extend Radical Party bases in the midst of widespread repression, forming the basis of their growing allegiance to Alfonsín and their eventual participation in his campaign and government.

      Despite the formal suspension of political life after the dictatorship began in 1976, Raúl Alfonsín, like many politicians, remained active. He maintained a public presence throughout the late 1970s, publishing when he could. He returned to his law practice and used his influence to defend a handful of political prisoners, even meeting with his old schoolmate, Albano Harguindeguy, interior minister during the military regime, to secure the safety of leaders of the Coordinadora. Critically, he participated in the growing human rights movement as a member of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights (APDH), founded in 1975, and maintained Radical Party networks with the support of the Coordinadora and his most trusted colleagues.15 By the early 1980s, when the regime began to show signs of decay, Alfonsín and his cohort formed part of a heterogeneous oppositional front of political parties, unions, and human rights organizations that began to play a vocal role in calling for a democratic return.

      In their later recollections of Argentina’s descent into terror, Alfonsín and his collaborators would flaunt their calls for temperance, implying that they had foreseen the extremes that state violence would reach following the 1976 coup.16 It would be a mistake, however, to construe this position as political prescience. Alfonsín and his growing cadre of advisers and supporters caused more of a stir within the Radical Party than within a political climate hurtling toward violent confrontation. The limited reach of Alfonsín’s reformist message—not its originality or foresight—spared his cohort the worst forms of repression following the March 1976 coup. As formal political life began to resume after the Malvinas War, Alfonsín took full advantage of the shift in public mood in favor of democratic institutions.

      In June 1982, as the Malvinas War came to an end, Alfonsín was known as one of the few outspoken critics of the conflict, which he labeled a reckless and doomed endeavor. Even before the end of the fighting, he called for “the immediate creation of a civilian transitional government.”17 Though the plan did not materialize, Alfonsín’s objections to the war set him apart from other political elites, the majority of whom lent their support to the military adventure. When plans were put in motion for the return to constitutional governance, Alfonsín’s opposition to the war afforded him a legitimacy that his counterparts lacked, and this allowed him to confront the armed forces, Peronism, and internal Radical Party rivals all at once.18 Over the course of the sixteen-month period encompassing the junta’s announcement of its inglorious withdrawal from power, the onset of presidential campaigning, and the elections of October 1983, the Alfonsín-led wing of the Radical Party designed a democratic future—and a winning electoral platform—that promised a break with Argentina’s authoritarian past, as well as a broadly defined notion of rights that responded to expectations for individual liberties as well as social well-being.

      THE EMERGENCE OF ALFONSINISMO

      But as preparations for constitutional return got under way following the Malvinas War, few would have predicted that Raúl Alfonsín would ever win the presidency. A mid-career politician and prominent member of the Radical Party, in mid-1982 he was still better known within his party than outside of it. Nonetheless, Alfonsín took an early lead in channeling the popular expectations and anxieties of the coming transition. On July 16, 1982, shortly after the military regime lifted a ban on political gatherings, Alfonsín organized a rally at the Argentine Boxing Federation in the center of Buenos Aires. According to some estimates, up to four thousand people crowded into the venue to hear him speak. Another three thousand gathered outside in the wintry night air next to speakers set up at the last minute to blast the event into the streets. Behind the elevated stage, a banner announced the rallying cry of the evening, and mimeographed pamphlets floated from the rafters; “Let’s Take Back the Nation with Democracy and Participation!” they declared.19 Earlier in the day, event organizers had scrambled to finalize the preparations, spacing chairs throughout the vast hall. Many worried they would not attract enough people to fill the space.20

      Alfonsín’s fifty-minute speech reflected the frustrations of many Argentines in the aftermath of the Malvinas War. Every day, new details emerged about the mistreatment and neglect of soldiers returning from the South Atlantic, the mass graves of disappeared victims of state terror, and the contested timeline for the restoration of constitutional government. The situation facing Argentina was not “an ideological problem,” Alfonsín proclaimed; it was “life or death” itself.21 Seated in the balcony, members of the human rights organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the evening’s most prominent attendees, listened as Alfonsín called for a “moral response” to the disappeared and as he addressed all Argentine mothers who had “suffered the on-going pain of seeing [their] children recruited by the guerrillas, punished by state repression, or driven to war and the humiliation of defeat.”22 Turning finally to the military junta, he condemned the unjust economic policies that had plunged “workers and young people into poverty” and warned, “there will not be democracy without democratic armed forces.”23 Amid the rising tide of chants and songs, the rally foreshadowed the tenor of the months leading up to the October 1983 presidential election with a vocal demand to remake a political system based on “morality” and “ethics.”

      The Boxing Federation rally was not the first, and certainly not the largest, demonstration in and around Buenos Aires at the time. Just a few weeks before, thousands of demonstrators had met with violent repression during a protest following Argentina’s surrender to Great Britain. Despite its small size compared to the growing mobilizations sweeping the country, the Boxing Federation rally marked an important turning point in the long struggle against the dictatorship. It was the first semisanctioned political meeting since the official lifting of a ban on political gatherings. As such, the rally was also a projection for the immediate future, an opening—real and symbolic—of Argentine political life following six years of military rule, and the unofficial launch of the presidential campaign that would culminate in Alfonsín’s inauguration in December 1983.

      From the night of the Boxing Federation rally, Alfonsín gradually began to build momentum, not only besting internal Radical Party rivals but also upending—if only briefly and in ways that would condition the trajectory of his government—the historic dominance of the armed forces and Peronism in Argentine politics. Radical memories of the Boxing Federation rally play on party mythology of the UCR as the erstwhile defender of democratic institutions. Alfonsín drew upon this historical memory, capitalizing on renewed popular demands for institutional democracy following the violent suspension of public life.24 By the end of 1982, Alfonsín’s public appearances and rallies, which attracted ever-larger crowds and attention, followed a familiar pattern. The starting premise of his stump speeches evoked Argentina’s decade-long political crisis, dating to the chaotic presidency of Isabel Perón and the military coup of March 1976. Alfonsín drew stark contrasts between this recent civil strife and its foil—a restored republic guided by adherence to the constitution. This “democratic commitment,” as he termed it, depended on each individual of the body politic rejecting the extremes of both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing militancy. One hallmark of his rallies was a collective reading of the preamble to the constitution. The theatrical gesture moved crowds, as it also underscored a guiding principle of Alfonsín’s message that from constitutionalism all else would follow to put an end to Argentina’s endemic breach of institutions.

      Upon first glance, Alfonsín’s rising popularity took root in a standard platform of political liberalism, grounded in a notion of ethics and decency, with Alfonsín at its symbolic center. In 1983, however, the promise of restored democratic institutions was inextricably tied up with the response to the economic and social suffering caused by the dictatorship. As 1983 began, the economic situation continued to deteriorate, with the ongoing effects of the regional economic crisis now being fully felt.

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