LITMIR.BIZ

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foregrounding changes in the formal political sphere.¹⁰ Yet the social realms of democratic restoration take on greater urgency when considering the aftermath of dictatorship in Argentina. The regime was responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of Latin America’s long Cold War. But widespread social violence also accompanied state terror. The transition from state-led development to neoliberalism initiated by the regime was felt in the form of a punishing assault on the livelihoods of many, made manifest in attacks against organized labor, a rollback of social protections, and the struggle to fulfill basic needs. Understanding human rights in relation to questions of material well-being and social justice offers a more nuanced picture of post-dictatorship Argentina and the making and unmaking of democratic expectations. It also enables us to see that the roots of those democratic expectations were grounded not only in the immediacy of the dictatorship, but also in the memory of a benefactor state that proved less viable as the decade continued.

      The promises and pitfalls of democratic return and the ways that individuals made sense of political change in their daily lives often emerged through struggles over food: who lacked it, who provided it, who set prices, and what Argentines ate. Raúl Alfonsín’s campaign pledge to end hunger—at once rousing and banal—took root in an alarming reality. State terror had led to a direct increase in hunger among the most vulnerable sectors between 1976 and 1983. In Argentina, a food-producing nation that historically prided itself on its ability to provide for its citizens, food and consumption had mediated the boundaries between individuals, the state, and the market since the emergence of Peronism in the 1940s.¹¹ The promise of food for all—though far from a fulfilled reality—formed a cornerstone of the modern welfare state, one that linked the most basic of material needs to a functioning democratic system. These values came under fierce attack during the military regime. Though Argentina remained one of the most food-secure nations in Latin America throughout the 1980s, new anxieties about the hunger caused by the dictatorship rattled a belief in Argentina as a land of plenty with the ability to keep its citizens physically safe and well fed. Over the course of the decade, individuals defined food as a fundamental “human right” at the heart of democratic restoration. Food was thus a litmus test of democracy.

      But this is not a book about food per se. Rather, it draws from the new food history of Latin America to examine the less commonly explored tensions between rights and political economy during the years immediately following the end of the dictatorship.¹² The story that follows uses food as a narrative thread to render more intelligible the everyday meanings of rights shaped by the ordinary, intimate, though no less political contests in which the dramas of the democratic return played out. The daily struggle against inflation, the rush to beat fluctuating currency boards, and the challenge of feeding families competed with headlines of military trials, rebellions, and palace intrigues. But it was in the supermarkets, banks, and breadlines where citizens engaged most closely and consistently with the promise of individual and collective well-being offered by the new democracy, and where those ideals were most fiercely tested, challenged, and transformed over the decade.¹³ Anchored geographically in Buenos Aires and the surrounding suburbs, this book’s six chapters document how a moral economy of democracy evolved in relation to state programs to alleviate hunger, regulate the price of basic staple goods, and fortify the foundations of a faltering welfare state. When supermarket riots erupted in 1989, they signaled not only the abrupt end of the Alfonsín presidency, but also the radical remaking of the expectations of just six years before, as well as a diminished belief in a type of democratic state that could provide for and protect the physical integrity of its citizens.

      Despite political openings across Latin America, the 1980s have been referred to as a “lost decade” because of the twin effects of recession and rampant indebtedness. In this view, economic stagnation and stalled monetary reforms paved the way for the widespread application of neoliberal policies throughout the region. One immediate consequence of the 1989 food riots was to hasten the gutting and privatization of public enterprises during the government of Carlos Menem (1989–1999). In the name of Peronist “productive revolution,” Menem infamously undid the legacies of his party and political movement, ushering in a decade of free-market fundamentalism and widening social inequalities. The painful consequences of those recipes are by now well known. In late December 2001 Argentina defaulted on its debt and plunged half of the population into poverty. Widespread popular rebellion against globalization and the local political class met with state repression that resulted in an estimated forty deaths. The economic collapse that inaugurated the twenty-first century resulted in not just the ousting of one president—as had happened during hyperinflation in 1989—but also the quick succession of a series of five presidents in one month.

      The narrative of post-dictatorship Latin America tends to draw a straight line from the violence of state terrorism in the 1970s to the consolidation of a neoliberal worldview in the 1990s, capped off, in the Argentine case, by the economic crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the authoritarian projects of Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships relied on the instrumental use of state violence in the 1970s to lay the foundations for the neoliberal policies that were consolidated by constitutional governments two decades later. Often absent in this telling, however, is the dramatic tension of the decade that came in between the brutality of the 1970s and the massive social severing of the 1990s. Lost in the narrative of the recent past is the actual “lost decade.”

      In Search of the Lost Decade slows this history down, demonstrating that the rise of a neoliberal worldview was neither as seamless nor as inevitable as previously believed. The years immediately following the end of the dictatorship in Argentina saw citizens and state actors grappling with the contradictions of a shifting economic order while uncomfortably coming to terms with the expiration of earlier state-led development models. This perspective offers an important corrective to studies that reduce political change to economics or that see austerity as unilaterally imposed on Latin America from the outside. Instead, by zooming in on the everyday realms in which the democratic transition was lived, this account grasps the gradual undoing of the Alfonsín government’s comprehensive rights agenda, which eventually legitimated proposals for the full-scale implementation of neoliberalism over the course of the 1990s.

      DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARGENTINA

      A guiding premise of this book maintains that Argentina’s “transition to democracy” in the 1980s was not much of a transition at all, but rather a new phase of ongoing contests to define the contours of democracy, rights, and citizenship in the twentieth century. Raúl Alfonsín’s 1983 electoral victory originated in the central conflicts of modern Argentine politics, namely the nation’s frequent periods of military rule, which attempted to keep at bay the more unruly aspects of both representative democracy and mass political participation. Argentina’s first experiment with democracy, which expanded civic rights through voting, electoral reform, and greater popular participation in politics, came to an end in 1930 with a military coup. For the next fifty years, the country alternated between extended periods of military rule and weakened democratic governments. Each successive decade saw the collapse of at least one constitutional government and the installation of de facto civilian-military regimes guided by fealty to the armed forces, the Catholic Church, and the nation’s landowning, export-oriented elite.¹⁴

      Juan Domingo Perón, the former labor secretary who came to power through open elections in 1946 and oversaw the unprecedented expansion of social welfare protections and the labor movement, was the only freely elected president to fulfill his term between 1930 and 1952. Under Perón, democracy in Argentina was redefined along emancipatory, fundamentally social lines and as a rebuff of the liberal governments that had come before. Despite opposition to Peronism and the often-factious public arena in which it operated, Peronist ideals of social justice continued to animate popular movements for the rest of the century. The 1955 military coup that overthrew Perón and sent him into exile coincided with the acceleration of the Cold War in Latin America and the radicalization of politics and daily life. By the mid-1960s the Argentine military and the civilian governments that supported it had shown their willingness to persecute political enemies in accordance with an evolving national security doctrine. The military governments that followed intensified a pattern of authoritarianism that was lurching forward in increments of ever-more-repressive regimes.

      Following

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