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In Search of the Lost Decade. Jennifer Adair
Читать онлайн.Название In Search of the Lost Decade
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520973282
Автор произведения Jennifer Adair
Издательство Ingram
As has been well documented, the human rights abuses of the dictatorship presented some of the most pressing concerns in the waning months of the military regime.35 On a daily basis, the revelation of crimes committed by the armed forces wrenched open the viciousness of the junta and fueled the ongoing mobilization of human rights organizations, which led the charge to make the prosecution of the military a principal responsibility of any future government.36 Yet in the uncertain period between the end of the Malvinas War and the October 1983 election, there was no societal consensus around human rights or overnight adhesion to its values. Despite evidence of the regime’s crimes, no agreement existed about how and to what extent the military’s abuses should be addressed, save the powerful (and often diffuse) notion that the crimes committed by the armed forces should not be allowed to happen ever again. As campaigning picked up during the first half of 1983, Raúl Alfonsín emerged as the candidate with the clearest plan for prosecuting the armed forces. His proposal for prosecution evolved in conversation with jurists from the University of Buenos Aires’s Society for Philosophical Analysis (SADAF, Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico) and identified three levels of responsibility.37 It distinguished between officials who gave orders, subordinates who followed orders, and those who “had committed excesses” in fulfillment of their duties.38 Like the major human rights organizations at the time, this proposal stood firmly against any type of amnesty for military officials. Writing later about the plans to prosecute the armed forces and the eventual trial of the military juntas in 1985, Alfonsín emphasized what he saw as their ultimate purpose: “We needed to leave a mark on the collective conscience that there was no group, however powerful, that was above the law, and that could sacrifice human beings in the service of supposedly valuable undertakings.”39
More so than his Peronist contenders, Alfonsín began to gain notice as the mainstream politician who best articulated a clear break between an era of impunity and a new age defined by the rule of law.40 Despite a robust oppositional labor movement that emerged as a powerful voice against the regime, Peronist leaders with closer ties to the armed forces remained the public face of Peronism. The general picture of the movement in the months leading up to the elections was of chaotic, often violent, power struggles.41 Several rallies erupted in brawls and gunfire, scenes that evoked raw memories of the breakdown of civilian rule. The vacuum left in the wake of Juan Perón’s death in 1974 had intensified bitter contests between conservative hardliners, moderates, regional factions, and union leaders. While most parties had confirmed their candidates by July 1983, the Peronist candidate for the presidency was not selected until early September, less than eight weeks before the October 30 election. Eventually, Ítalo Lúder secured the nomination. A longtime party leader, Lúder had served for a time as president of the senate, then as interim president of the nation for thirty-four days in 1975. Despite his reputation as a moderate, during his brief tenure he had signed off on some of the most contentious decrees of the period immediately preceding the dictatorship, which authorized state repression and the “annihilation” of subversion nationwide.42
But in many ways, it was still Peronism’s election to lose. In the months before the election, political parties scrambled to affiliate voters according to new election rules and timelines. By April 1983, 2,966,472 people had reaffiliated with a party. While a record number of those affiliations went to the Radical Party, the majority of new voters formally identified as Peronist. Polls throughout 1983 revealed that while many Argentines supported Alfonsín’s growing momentum, a large segment of the population believed that the Peronist candidate, Ítalo Lúder, would ultimately win.43 Lúder himself boasted that “being the Peronist candidate for president is equal to being the future president of Argentina.” After all, the Peronist party had never lost in open presidential elections during its forty-year history. In the last free elections in 1973, the party had swept 61 percent of the vote. Peronist campaign materials in 1983 relied on this precedent and proclaimed, “the memory of the people will be enough for us.”
The Peronist and Radical Party candidates thus presented Argentines with a striking choice between adherence to rebuilding institutions and the continued specter of political crisis. A closer look at campaign materials illustrates this point. Some of Alfonsín’s earliest pronouncements as a candidate emphasized the history of the Radical Party as the political force most dedicated to the defense of democratic institutions in Argentina. Campaign flyers and literature frequently cited Leandro Alem, the founder of the UCR, who in 1890 laid the groundwork for the nation’s first mass political party. With even more fervor, Alfonsín drew inspiration from Hipólito Yrigoyen, whose second presidency was deposed by a military coup in 1930, inaugurating a cycle of military dictatorship that would endure for the next fifty years. Since Alfonsín’s first attempts to gain control of the Radical Party in the early 1970s through his Renovation and Change movement, he had presented himself as following in the footsteps of Yrigoyen and his commitments to popular democracy, morality, and ethics, which Alfonsín actively cultivated. Through this reading of his party’s history, Alfonsín connected his campaign for a new and just Argentina to the nation’s first experiments with democracy. Likewise, Alfonsín placed great emphasis on the impact that the 1966 military overthrow of Arturo Illia had had on the evolution of his anti-dictatorial beliefs. Illia’s downfall, which had initiated a decade-long descent into state terror, provided further proof of the UCR’s steadfast moral compass against the antidemocratic impulses of the nation’s economic and military elite. Though this interpretation overlooked a conservative cadre of Radical Party luminaries who frequently threw their support behind nondemocratic rule, Alfonsín’s message emphasized over a century of steadfast party enthusiasm for constitutionalism. He made the case that the UCR “was ready to govern” in line with the most progressive of Radical Party traditions.44 To that end, Alfonsín rarely missed the opportunity to remind Argentines that the Radical Party had defended “the rule of law and full democracy” during the many years that it had held power during the twentieth century.45
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