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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
The sociologist Gerardo Aboy Carlés has demonstrated that the possibility of 1983 represented a “double rupture” with Argentina’s turbulent political history by putting an end to the terror of the most recent dictatorship and breaking the pattern of institutional instability that dominated the twentieth century.21 Yet for all of its forward-looking construction of a new political frontier, Alfonsín’s government actively relied on the memory of the past for its political legitimacy and foundations. He and his cohort referred to the dawn of the democratic era as inaugurating a tercer movimiento histórico (third historical movement), which could fulfill the earlier “democratic transitions” surrounding the movements of both Hipólito Yrigoyen and Juan Perón. Yrigoyen, the historic leader of the modern Radical Party, had extended popular participation in politics at the beginning of the century.22 From the earliest days of his campaign, Alfonsín exploited the memory of the Radical Party as the steadfast guardian of ethics and republican institutions. In equal measure, however, he acknowledged Peronism as a democratic force responsible for the extension of social rights and collective welfare. This interpretation of the nation’s political past provided a road map for Argentina’s democratic future. Accordingly, this “third way” would guide the democratic restoration, leading the way through and beyond the social turmoil and military backlash that Alfonsín and his supporters claimed had often resulted from the corporatist labor mobilization of Peronism. For Alfonsín and the intellectual architects of the newly restored democratic government, the reconciliation of a historic antagonism between political liberalism and social justice would revive the modern political foundations of the nation and put an end to the long cycle of authoritarian violence. When inaugurated on December 10, 1983, the Alfonsín government sought nothing less than a refounding of the republic. Today, however, this project is largely overlooked because it remained largely unfulfilled.
Alfonsín’s election—the first that many Argentines could remember as not marred by violence or exclusion—not only signaled the return to democracy, it also marked the first electoral defeat of Peronism in forty years. This shift upended the logic of mainstream Argentine politics seemingly overnight at the onset of the new democratic era. Within Argentina, the rise of a benefactor state attuned to social justice is indelibly linked to the emergence of Peronism in the 1940s. The history that follows pushes these conversations far beyond their mid-twentieth-century origins by examining a decisive moment when the Peronist party was not in power, and state-led welfare regimes entered into worldwide crisis with the abatement of Cold War antagonisms and the collapse of socialism.
The pledges of Alfonsín’s government conjured up the promises and social gains of the first Peronism. The period’s legacies of expanded social welfare and rights often influenced the ways that individuals articulated their demands for new rights and protections in the years immediately following military rule. And yet the Peronist movement is decentered in this book. For readers of Argentine history, this necessitates an important exercise. Following the Justicialist Party’s (PJ) electoral defeat in 1983, Peronism quickly regrouped to emerge as the most formidable challenger to the Alfonsín government and as a consolidated political party by the end of the decade.23 This book examines these events, but often from the vantage point of actors outside of Peronism. The point of this narrative choice is to revise the sharp line that tends to be drawn between Peronist and other social agendas. By taking seriously Radical Party policy reforms in food security and welfare, we are able to understand how the centrist, “middle-class” Radical Party of Raúl Alfonsín sought to alter the dominance of Peronism through a redefinition of social rights and democracy. This also allows us to see how Peronism did not always reform itself from within, but rather in dialogue with the world around it and in conversation with other political forces. Ultimately, alfonsinismo helped to remake the Peronist party. The constrained political and economic climate in which the Alfonsín government operated often forced it to adopt positions that undermined its own vision for the democratic future. By the end of the decade, in the midst of hyperinflation and food riots, Peronist leaders could once again claim that they held sway in the realm of social justice, shortly before the installation of neoliberalism in the 1990s, paradoxically under the leadership of a Peronist government.
The blueprint for Argentina’s democratic transition was as far-reaching and as ambitious as the structural constraints produced by military rule. In addition to the human rights abuses of the armed forces, the Alfonsín government also faced the burden of a national debt of over US$43 billion, 15 percent unemployment, and up to 25 percent of the population having “unsatisfied basic needs.” These legacies came into focus only with the return to democracy. Indeed, the first two years of the Alfonsín presidency—a “democratic spring” of widespread possibility and popular support—also constituted a taking stock of what had been wrought by military rule.
In the standard narrative of the Alfonsín years, the hope and effervescence of democratic return gave way to the disillusionment of aborted justice and economic crisis. Accordingly, each promise of the new democracy was offset by a betrayal, which gradually undermined the legitimacy upon which the figure of Alfonsín—and with it the newly restored democracy—depended. The most notorious chapters in this history of promise and disenchantment began with the historic trials of the juntas and ended with the passage of impunity laws to halt prosecutions. In the fiscal realm, the bold initial attempts to renegotiate the nation’s external debt receded in the face of the first privatizations of state enterprises, which defined economic life at the end of the last century. As with the return to democracy itself, the confluence of global and domestic conditions in which these events occurred was not of Alfonsín’s making. But by the end of his presidency, the leader who had done so much to consolidate a more holistic vision of democracy saw its undoing based on the very measures adopted by his government. The exuberance of the “democratic spring” was equally matched by the widespread recognition that “democracy,” far from being a panacea for a dolorous past, could also perpetuate and produce its own novel contradictions.
There is still much that satisfies about the narrative of hope and disillusionment that surrounds the Alfonsín government. But like the moniker “father of democracy,” this history is also incomplete. We would do well to revisit the spaces in between the extremes of Alfonsín’s extended moment on the national stage. We should take seriously the “failures” and more ambitious ventures, from the promise that no child would go hungry in Argentina ever again to the attempts to revive a benefactor state beyond Peronism, among others. Along with human rights prosecutions and the rule of law, these projects contained their own refoundational impulses and left their lingering imprints. The dramatic push and pull of the return to democracy, wedged as it was against the twilight of the Cold War and the dawn of the neoliberal age, saw attempts at a hegemonic project that ultimately eased the passage from one epoch to another.
OVERVIEW
The book is organized chronologically and thematically. The opening chapter investigates the breakdown of authoritarian rule. While the collapse of the military regime is often seen as a direct result of the Malvinas (Falklands) War, the chapter offers a fresh interpretation of the central role of Latin America’s 1981–1982 debt crisis, which hastened the end of the dictatorship and shaped expectations for the democratic return. Chapter 2 turns to the presidential election of 1983. Raúl Alfonsín, the leader of the Radical Party, formulated a winning electoral platform that reflected a triple promise of human, social, and political rights, in the process besting Peronism, the movement most intimately linked with social justice in Argentina. Chapters 3 and 4 take an in-depth look at the Alfonsín government’s attempts to fulfill campaign promises to eliminate hunger and restore economic stability. The PAN (Programa Alimentario Nacional), the flagship welfare program of the new democracy and the subject of chapter 3, attempted to curb hunger through deliveries of nonperishable goods to families in need. As the need for food grew more acute in light of the fiscal emergency, the food program exposed some of the shortcomings of the state’s rights agenda, which contributed to the renovation of the Peronist party and the strengthening