LITMIR.BIZ

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return to the presidency in 1973 generated wide-ranging expectations for order and revolutionary change. His sudden death, nine months after taking office, brought his third wife, María Estela Martínez de Perón, to the presidency and dashed any hopes for the end of political turmoil. Politically weak and ineffectual, the government of “Isabel,” as Perón’s widow was known, authorized the creation of right-wing paramilitary death squads, which began campaigns of repression, torture, and disappearance. State terror was accompanied by rampant economic chaos. In 1975, the draconian economic package announced by the minister of economy, Celestino Rodrigo, rapidly devalued the peso, provoked food and fuel shortages, and gave Argentines their first taste of prolonged inflation. Yet even in the midst of this unrest, Argentina remained the last civilian government in the Southern Cone and the final stronghold of revolutionary movements throughout a region where right-wing dictatorships had recently taken hold in Chile and Uruguay.¹⁵ That government did not last long. On March 24, 1976, the armed forces orchestrated a coup that launched the darkest period in contemporary Argentine history.

      Outside of Argentina, “Dirty War” is the label often used to describe the criminal regime that came to power in March 1976. That designation is a misnomer, however. The armed forces did not wage battle against equally matched foes; instead, they wielded a state-sponsored apparatus of surveillance and repression to systematically terrorize, torture, and disappear their civilian victims. For seven years (1976–1983), the regime epitomized the brutality of Latin America’s Cold War, authoritarian dictatorships.¹⁶ The ruling junta, comprised of representatives from the army, navy, and air force, baptized their mission the “National Reorganization Process.” In step with the virulent anticommunism of neighboring Southern Cone dictatorships, the regime also revived homegrown traditions of conservative Catholic doctrine; anti-Semitism; and a form of nationalism that idealized Argentina’s white, European past. Along with their vocal supporters in the Church, the armed forces railed against the excesses of liberal democracy and the corrupting influences of popular social movements, which they blamed for Argentina’s moral decline. They described their project in messianic terms: the salvation of Argentine bodies and souls in the service of the ultimate restoration of Argentine prosperity and Christian civilization. Yet contrary to most accounts of the regime as fundamentally antidemocratic, the junta envisioned its own long-term project for Argentine democracy. As Paula Canelo has demonstrated, members of the armed forces sought to “de-Peronize” the masses, turn back the clock on the achievements of collective political action, and restore the frameworks of elite-led republicanism.¹⁷ This they vowed to achieve by rooting out subversion by any means necessary.

      The regime distinguished itself by its savagery. Prisoners were abducted from their homes, workplaces, and schools and disappeared into a vast network of clandestine detention centers, where they were subjected to torture and execution. Hundreds of pregnant women gave birth in captivity. Before the women were killed, their babies were torn from them, and the majority were put up for illegal adoption. The notorious “death flights,” in which drugged prisoners were thrown alive from planes, transformed the murky waters of the River Plate into a cemetery along the shores of Buenos Aires. A trail of secret prisons dotted the landscape of many urban centers and residential neighborhoods. Survivors of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the regime’s most infamous detention center, located in a well-heeled section of Buenos Aires, vividly recall the cheers coming from the nearby stadium during Argentina’s 1978 World Cup victory, which rattled the walls of their cells. Nunca Más, the landmark 1984 investigative report, which provided a chilling breakdown of the regime’s crimes and its victims, estimated the total number of disappearances at close to nine thousand.¹⁸ Human rights organizations have long placed that figure much higher, at thirty thousand. Scholarly attention has recently turned to the degree of tacit social backing for the regime and the extent to which the armed forces succeeded in galvanizing support for their war against subversion.¹⁹ In 1978, the year of Argentina’s World Cup win, the popularity of the name “Jorge Rafael” peaked for newborns, in honor of the de facto president, Jorge Rafael Videla, who ruled from 1976 to 1981.²⁰

      By the late 1970s, the regime had murdered thousands and sent many more into exile or hiding. Yet from the depths of this loss and fear emerged Argentina’s contemporary human rights movement, one of the most vocal forces to resist the regime. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are perhaps the most well-known organizations founded in the face of state terror, recognizable the world over by their iconic white headscarves and their tireless searches for their disappeared children and grandchildren. They joined a growing number of organizations made up of public figures, victims’ family members, survivors, religious leaders, and jurists, among others, who worked to denounce the regime and its crimes and to forge links with transnational solidarity networks. Their efforts to promote the defense of human rights—defined primarily at first as protection of the body from state violence—would shape public life and debate in the decades to come. The movement also helped solidify the maxim that any future democratic government must protect the physical well-being of its citizens from state abuse, an idea later adapted by the Alfonsín government in the 1980s.

      Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships relied on terror to initiate radical economic transitions to neoliberalism. In Argentina, the regime and its civilian allies in the financial sector attempted to reverse several decades of import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies, which they blamed for endemic instability and political crisis. Among other measures, neoliberal boosters advocated for a retreat of the state, deregulation, and friendly conditions for foreign capital investment. Unlike in neighboring Chile, where the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet inaugurated a wide-reaching era of free-market reforms, the Argentine junta did not fully realize its economic plan. But it did sufficiently begin to chip away at some of the foundations of mid-twentieth-century economic planning, concentrating wealth in a few domestic firms and weakening labor rights and other social protections in the process. These and other measures sparked a decade-long recession and an extended economic crisis, which shaped the parameters of governability for the rest of the century.

      Over the short term, however, the junta ushered in a fleeting period of “sweet money” and consumer spending built on foundations of financial speculation and growing foreign debt. In the early 1980s, recession and an impending regional debt crisis appeared on the horizon. Tensions within the junta, along with international condemnation of its crimes, began to weaken the regime. With its reputation in tatters and more and more domestic voices calling for the end of the dictatorship, the armed forces attempted one final bid to retain power. On April 2, 1982, Argentine forces launched an ill-fated attack on the British-controlled Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, a long-disputed territory in the South Atlantic. British troops quickly defeated Argentine conscripts and exposed the junta’s hollow efforts to hide its losses through widespread propaganda and a surge of nationalist pride. On June 14, seventy-four days after fighting began, Argentina surrendered to Great Britain. Within a month of the surrender, the junta announced plans for open elections and the return to constitutional rule. Just a short time before, few would have predicted the grip of the regime could be loosened. Seven years of state terror, human rights abuses, and financial boom and bust had devastated Argentina, yet the coming end of the regime brought hopes for the end of the armed forces’ long hold on public life. The task of redefining the terms of democracy had begun.

       ALFONSINISMO

      Since his historic election in 1983, Raúl Alfonsín has been popularly known as “the father of democracy.” The label marked the leader of the Radical Party as a symbol of the break between decades of ever-more-violent cycles of military rule and an era of enduring constitutionality. But the title also misleads in ways that simplify the tensions and disputes at the heart of Alfonsín’s extended moment on the national stage. Often missing in recollections of the “father of democracy” is a fuller account of the democratic project that Alfonsín attempted to install and the complicated ways that its memory resonates in the present.

      The roots of alfonsinismo emerged in the crucible of authoritarian rule. For several decades, Argentines on the left and right of the political spectrum declared the exhaustion of liberal democratic institutions in a nation where constitutional governments had been overthrown six times since 1930. But state terror reignited a widespread belief in the

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