LITMIR.BIZ

      The Breakdown of Authoritarian Rule

      By 1981, the military junta was in trouble. During the half decade after the armed forces seized power in a bloody coup, the regime ruled Argentina through a sinister mixture of terror and economic austerity. But in 1981, the slow breakdown of authoritarian rule began. The free market reforms instituted by Finance Minister José Martínez de Hoz, which relied on speculative lending and an overvalued currency, came undone.¹ Small firms declared bankruptcy, factories shuttered their doors, and industrial workers lost jobs. Argentina’s economic downturn coincided with the beginning of a regional debt crisis and Latin America’s worst fiscal emergency since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The most vulnerable among Argentina’s urban poor bore the brunt of the recession. Throughout the capital region surrounding Buenos Aires, ollas populares (soup kitchens) sprang up to address the growing need. In the Greater Buenos Aires township of Florencia Varela, one soup kitchen set up by the local diocese fed several hundred children daily, many of whose parents had recently joined the ranks of unemployed factory workers in the formerly prosperous manufacturing belts on the capital’s outskirts. “These [soup kitchens] are not politically motivated, as some accuse us,” the priest who ran the site declared, then went on to describe the situation in his town as unprecedented and getting worse by the day.²

      The emergence of hunger in Argentina, a food-producing nation that had fed the world with meat and grains, represented one more alarming consequence of military rule. Even as food production and exports increased throughout the dictatorship, food access fell for the poor and marginalized sectors between 1976 and 1981, as wages were slashed and inflation climbed.³ Yet economic crisis, as the priest who ran the soup kitchen implied, also provided an opening for oblique criticisms of the regime and new opportunities to imagine a future beyond military rule. The social emergency sparked by the junta’s policies marked the beginning of the end of Argentina’s most brutal dictatorship.

      This chapter examines the breakdown of authoritarian rule between 1981 and 1983, a period that has received relatively little historical attention compared to the height of state terror in the 1970s and the years immediately following constitutional restoration in the 1980s. The period began with economic recession and a wave of grassroots mobilizations calling for the end of the dictatorship. It climaxed with Argentina’s defeat at the hands of Great Britain during 1982’s ill-fated Malvinas (Falkland) War, and it culminated in free elections and the inauguration of Raúl Alfonsín as president in December 1983. The collapse of Argentina’s dictatorship is often seen as a direct result of the Malvinas War. In this view, the shock of Argentina’s surrender to Great Britain jolted awake a civil society that then began to clamor for constitutional rule.⁴ To be sure, the war represented a decisive chapter at the end of the dictatorship. But narratives that privilege the war tend to overlook the domestic events leading up to it and the central role that Latin America’s impending debt crisis played in hastening the fall of the military regime and creating expectations for the return of democracy. Turning our attention to the reverberations of economic emergency disrupts standard accounts of the demise of the dictatorship and thus illuminates the popular demands and movements that also brought forth the eventual return to democratic life.

      Though often overlooked in political analyses of the breakdown of authoritarian rule, the marches, land takeovers, soup kitchens, and neighborhood uprisings that gained force in the areas surrounding the capital played a significant role at the dictatorship’s end. In the year leading up to the conflict with Great Britain in 1982, economic recession sparked an upsurge in popular mobilizations that opposed the military junta. Throughout the embattled industrial zones surrounding Buenos Aires, workers, priests, and shantytown residents, among others, made explicit connections between the material deprivations of daily life under military rule and the widespread violation of their basic economic, social, and political rights. The protests, which were gaining momentum by the time the Malvinas War began in April 1982, took their inspiration from hard-won battles for social rights and protections, most especially those achieved during the first period of Peronism (1945–1955), which had been defined by new entitlements and policies geared toward uplifting industrial workers. A central aim of the mobilizations in the early 1980s was to preserve and restore those protections, which the military regime had violently dismantled or significantly diminished. As this chapter argues, popular demands for the restoration of democracy evolved not only in relation to the immediacy of dictatorship or Argentina’s defeat in war with Great Britain, but also in conversation with the memory of past struggles for social rights, which would come to shape the years following military rule.

      Like the priest in Florencia Varela, protesters often expressed their grievances through anxiety about growing hunger, which fueled a moral language of outrage and exposed the military regime’s empty claims to honor and prosperity. Housing issues, job loss, and an overall decline in quality of life also motivated individuals’ decisions to join protests or to march against the military authorities. Taken together, these denunciations force a reassessment of the place of broader rights claims during the final years of the dictatorship. Since the early days of the regime, Argentina’s tireless human rights movement had coordinated domestic and international campaigns against the junta and embedded the figure of the disappeared into the lexicon of global human rights. By 1981, popular mobilizations had begun to add new contours and momentum to campaigns against authoritarian rule. The protagonists of the uprisings analyzed here did not necessarily describe their grievances as human rights violations. Indeed, the preeminence of human rights in relation to constitutional return was not yet as fixed or as clear as it would become in the following years. Nonetheless, rights language broadly conceived lent new energy to historic demands for basic material needs in ways that linked political repression to impoverishment and boosted actions against the regime. The exposés of the socioeconomic emergency of 1981–1982 worked toward two related purposes, functioning as both condemnations of military rule and concrete calls for the restoration of political life prior to the outbreak of war in the Malvinas. In turn, the struggles to fulfill basic needs that emerged within the confines of the final years of authoritarianism informed rights claims well into the post-dictatorship era.

      DEBT CRISIS AND POLITICAL OPENINGS

      Since taking power in 1976, the junta had wielded a fierce repressive apparatus to annihilate its enemies and to initiate radical transformations of national economic life. For members of the armed forces, these projects mutually reinforced one another. The fiscal policies of the military regime sought to dismantle the developmentalist frameworks that had structured the Argentine economy since the 1930s.⁵ Though not without their internal tensions and contradictions, the financial and military alliances at the helm of the Ministry of Economy ultimately succeeded in opening domestic markets to global capital through the liberalization

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