LITMIR.BIZ

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fanfare as had been the case in years past, the day overshadowed by news of the rising cost of living—13 percent in February 1983 alone—and alarming stories about the debt incurred over the course of the military regime.²⁵ These realities shaped the message of Alfonsín’s candidacy, which placed great emphasis on the social well-being that would result from the restoration of the rule of law. Alfonsín frequently regaled his supporters with lists of the concrete ways that life would improve under a democracy with him at the helm. One flyer encouraging voters to affiliate with the Radical Party in March 1983 listed ten concrete changes that would follow the election, which are worth quoting at length:

      1. Rule of law and effective civil control to subordinate the military and security forces. Dismantling the repressive apparatus.

      2. Defense of salaries and jobs.

      3. Curbing inflation and promoting economic development.

      4. Recovery of national industries.

      5. Affirmation of the rights to health, education, and housing.

      6. Protection of social legislation and the pension system.

      7. Defense of the rights of women and young people in society.

      8. Protection of the family, children, and senior citizens.

      9. Human rights, justice, and administrative honesty.

      10. Affirmation of economic and territorial sovereignty.²⁶

      This ranking, and others like it, emphasized a type of popular republicanism anchored by the twin pillars of civilian rule and sovereignty. Its baseline message conveyed an expansive notion of rights that placed social welfare front and center. While the systematic terror of state violence captured public attention, human rights—defined as protection of the physical body from torture and violence—were often subsumed as part of the promise of a broader rights-based regime. As a candidate, Alfonsín described how all Argentines had “lived through an era of the denigration of their fundamental rights,” identified as health care, food, and shelter, among others.²⁷ The insidious violence of the regime was manifested in the steady degradation of daily life. “Human rights” in this sense meant more than protection from torture; it represented guarantees of social justice as well.

      To that end, Alfonsín reserved special attention for the economic crisis and its most visible effects. On May 1, 1983, International Workers’ Day, he issued a bleak assessment of national life in the wake of seven years of military rule:

      The nation’s soul is saddened by the cruel spectacle of malnourished children. . . . They are the poorest people of the poorest provinces. But we are hypocritically hiding the true geographic limits of hunger: This misery, this malnourishment, this precarious housing, is located on the doorstep of Buenos Aires and in Buenos Aires itself. I vow before the people and the Republic to take back the Argentina that has been robbed from us. No child will go hungry in Argentina ever again. We will apply economic policies that lead to full employment. . . . We will deal with health care and popular education. There will be democratic unions. And let us be clear: There can never be long-term welfare without political liberties.²⁸

      In this speech, Alfonsín introduced hunger—and the economic policies that had caused it—as one of the many cruel legacies of the dictatorship. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the discovery of hunger had already played a role in the breakdown of the regime, and it continued to surface as presidential campaigning got under way. In April 1983, the minister of social action declared that “nobody went hungry in Argentina,” adding that the soup kitchens that proliferated throughout the outskirts of Greater Buenos Aires “were a political ploy.”²⁹ Photos of hungry children from the northern province of Tucumán that surfaced in the press, and the ongoing solidarity campaigns of churches in places such as Quilmes, home of the 1981 Hunger March, exposed a vastly different reality. As the economic situation continued to deteriorate, the minister’s cynical statement belied the palpable effects of economic suffering. Hunger was real, and it was encroaching on the center of the nation.

      Alfonsín’s concerns about hunger built on an idea that was already in circulation, one that he used to differentiate himself from the cruelty of the military authorities and to lay claim to an irreproachable moral and social issue. From that International Workers’ Day on, the promise to end hunger occupied a prominent place in his campaign. Alfonsín frequently boasted that eradicating hunger was the only pledge he would make as a candidate. Along the campaign trail, he announced that his government would create an emergency food program—the Programa Alimentario Nacional (PAN)—to reverse the nutritional emergency created by the dictatorship, and as if to emphasize the urgency of the matter, he declared, “We will not pay the national debt with the hunger of the people.”³⁰

      Expectations for socially attuned democracy came together in Alfonsín’s most well-known campaign slogan; “With democracy, one eats, one is educated, one is cured” quickly became one of the hallmark messages of his candidacy. If state violence killed and disappeared, democracy had the ability to heal and to reverse the most detrimental effects of military rule. Democracy was thus anthropomorphized in the wake of terror. It was living and breathing, and for a brief time, its messenger became Raúl Alfonsín. Argentines projected hopes for their personal and collective futures onto Alfonsín’s broad message, leading one observer to remark at the start of 1983 that Alfonsín “represented the best interpreter of this particular historical moment.”³¹ As a candidate, Alfonsín painted stark contrasts between military rule and constitutionalism, while his attention to social well-being took direct aim at his main challengers in the Peronist party. According to Alfonsín’s definition of democracy, political and social rights could be achieved without sacrificing one for the other. Yet realizing this vision meant confronting Peronism and its historic claim to be the main agent of social change in Argentina.

      CAMPAIGNING BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

      The campaign for the presidency began in earnest in the early months of 1983. Despite a crowded political field that eventually included twelve contenders for the presidency, for most Argentines the race came down to a contest between the nation’s two major political forces—Peronism and radicalism. At the start of 1983, however, Peronism faced a dilemma. The movement had long balanced various internal factions and differences between the party and its union base. Throughout the early 1970s, left- and right-wing sectors battled, first for Juan Perón’s allegiance upon his return from exile, and then for the soul of the movement in the wake of his death. With the onset of the dictatorship in 1976, left-wing militants and industrial workers felt the wrath of state terror and economic liberalization as the junta drew a straight line between what it saw as the revulsive changes wrought by Peronism and political and social subversion. Argentines had to look no further than the shuttered factories in the industrial zones of major cities, falling union rosters, or pink slips to grasp the economic effects of the regime. Of course, the policies that contributed to manufacturing’s decline did not reside with Peronism. Yet for many members of Peronism’s base, the reverberations of abuse and economic retrenchment linked directly back to the persecution of workers over the course of the dictatorship, a type of violence that union bosses had been unable to halt and, in some cases, actively promoted.³²

      Early on in the political race, Alfonsín tapped into widespread disgust with the most conservative Peronist leaders, whom many Argentines linked to the breakdown of institutional rule. Alfonsín exploited those perceptions through a rhetorical strategy that emphasized military and right-wing Peronist collusion. In April 1983, he publicly denounced a “pact” between upper-echelon military and union leaders. The pact allegedly stipulated that if a Peronist government assumed office, it would guarantee a military amnesty. Though Alfonsín admitted that he did not have technical proof of such an agreement, that was hardly the point.³³ In equating Peronism with the nation’s darkest period of repression, the charge fueled fears that a Peronist victory would perpetuate a pattern of violence and impunity that many were anxious to leave behind.

      As the opening salvo of Alfonsín’s campaign, the strategy worked on a few fronts. It first consolidated Alfonsín’s power within his own party. In July 1983, Alfonsín beat his contender, Fernando

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