In 1983, Argentines defined democracy not only by voting, but also through the measure of the decline in their lives during the dictatorship. State terror had relied on disappearance, torture, abductions, robbery, and exile to demobilize the population. In the quotidian realm, too, the impact of the regime’s economic policies had incited fear and uncertainty. The images of hungry children and struggling workers from Greater Buenos Aires discussed in the previous chapter were shocking; however, they were not isolated snapshots of impoverishment. The social toll of the dictatorship manifested itself in malnutrition, unemployment, and foreclosures, among others, cutting across broad sectors. Alfonsín issued a call for valid elections and individual political freedoms in addition to a strong state to guarantee justice and the public good. This combination represented the democratic antidote to terror and economic disarray.
As Alfonsín generated more enthusiasm over the course of 1982–1983, he addressed the suffering and economic pain wrought by military rule better than his competitors did, most especially the Peronist party, the political movement traditionally associated with social justice in Argentina. At the dictatorship’s end, many Argentines linked Peronism to a legacy of instability and military repression. Alfonsín exploited this belief throughout his campaign. But he also revived a traditional Peronist message for the post-dictatorship era and in the process gained support in Peronist strongholds such as Greater Buenos Aires. He put forward a convincing platform proposing that together institutional democracy and social justice could put an end to endemic political crisis and authoritarianism. Such an undertaking involved a specific rethinking of national political life and a reconciliation of the perceived antagonisms between political liberalism and social rights. This democratic future imagined by Alfonsín, which was entwined with plans to prosecute the armed forces for their crimes and to rebuild democratic institutions, shaped his mandate and the standard against which his government would be judged. His platform reflected a bold triple promise of human, social, and political rights. Following seven years of military rule, these were ideals that many Argentines could identify with—even those whose lives had not been directly affected by state violence or impoverishment.
“THE YOUNGEST MEMBER OF THE OLD POLITICAL GUARD”
Long before Argentines associated Raúl Alfonsín with the return to democracy, a journalist had described him in a 1979 interview as “the youngest member of the old political guard.”4 It was a fitting description. A lawyer from the town of Chascomús in the province of Buenos Aires, Alfonsín formally entered politics in the 1950s in the context of a Radical Civic Union, or Radical Party (UCR), in flux. By the mid-twentieth century, the nation’s oldest political party was struggling to come to terms with its loss of footing and reach following the ascendance of Peronism. Alfonsín’s initial forays into elected office revolved around the internal party splits of a diminished UCR.5
The beginning of Alfonsín’s political career also overlapped with the final, bloody months of Juan Perón’s second presidency. In June 1955, an insurrectionary band of naval officers bombed the Plaza de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires in an attempt to topple Perón’s government. In the wake of the massacre, which left three hundred civilians dead, Perón had members of the opposition arrested. Alfonsín, then a member of the Chascomús town council, was himself briefly jailed. Like most of his fellow Radicals, Alfonsín welcomed the insurrection. He sided with national party leaders such as Arturo Frondizi, Ricardo Balbín, and Oscar Alende, who supported the military coup and the de facto government of the Revolución Libertadora, the military regime that ousted Perón and sent him into an eighteen-year exile. Like many Radicals in the early 1950s, Alfonsín condemned what he believed were the fascistic tendencies of Peronism and its persecution of political rivals.6 Though his view of Peronism shifted over the coming decades, out of both necessity and his own changing political beliefs, Alfonsín never waivered in his disdain for Peronism’s more corporatist elements, which he blamed for endemic political instability. Alfonsín recalled feeling a sense of “liberation” when Perón was finally overthrown in September 1955.7
Alfonsín’s political star rose in the turbulent decade of civilian and military governments that followed Perón’s overthrow. In 1958, after four years in municipal politics, he was elected to the Buenos Aires provincial congress; he was then elected to the national congress in 1963. In 1965, he became the head of the UCR-Buenos Aires party committee. Throughout these years, Alfonsín negotiated the schisms that divided the UCR during the presidencies of fellow Radicals Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962) and Arturo Illia, whose own government was deposed by another military coup in 1966. The Radical Party split over how and to what extent it should work with Peronism.8 Alfonsín aligned with the most anti-Peronist wing of the party. For several years, he remained loyal to its leader, party boss Ricardo Balbín, who once famously declared that he would rather “lose 1,000 governments” than negotiate with the Peronists.9 Eventually, Alfonsín broke with Balbín and ran for his party’s nomination for the presidential election of 1973. Though he lost to Balbín, out of that defeat emerged Renovación y Cambio (Renovation and Change), a party faction led by Alfonsín that solidified his growing influence within the UCR and brought together a coalition of collaborators and advisers who formed part of Alfonsín’s administration a decade later.
Raúl Alfonsín may be best remembered for his anti-dictatorial stance during the 1970s and 1980s, but many of his political positions were forged in the context of the military regime that preceded the Dirty War. The 1966 overthrow of Arturo Illia left a deep imprint on Alfonsín and the evolution of his antiauthoritarian beliefs. In the polarized climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when across the political spectrum a growing number of Argentines rejected the premise of a liberal party system that many believed had expired, Alfonsín and his cohort called for a defense of institutions and representative democracy. The Alfonsín-led wing of the party promoted a platform that placed it squarely within the ranks of social democracy and avoided the language of revolutionary upheaval.10 Yet Alfonsín’s Renovation and Change movement also couched its platform in many of the same terms as left-wing movements of the day—in favor of “national liberation” and “anti-imperialist” in nature—a political future that Alfonsín believed could only be realized through the ballot box. This stance also rejected the secondary position of the Radical Party in political life. In making their arguments, Alfonsín and his supporters believed that the UCR could reclaim the political clout and constituents that had been lost to Peronism.11
By the early 1970s, Alfonsín’s collaborators included law school peers and congressional colleagues. This close-knit circle worked with Alfonsín over the course of the next decade, becoming key advisers and cabinet members during his presidency. He also began to enjoy the support of a younger generation of new party affiliates, who sought to rebuild the ranks of the Radical Party in universities. In 1968, these young party hopefuls created an organization called the Junta Coordinadora Nacional (JCR), or the Coordinadora, as it became known, which aligned with Alfonsín. As revolutionary movements gained momentum in universities and student centers, the Radical Party activists of the Coordinadora represented a curious anomaly. One observer noted, “During a period of generational conflicts, they followed the footsteps of their fathers into the ranks of the Radical Party.”12 This description rightly reflected the profile of the youngest members of the nation’s oldest political party, who were staid, traditional, and more conservative in aspect and mores than their New Left counterparts. The new party hopefuls were not immune, however, to the markers of youth culture, donning long hair or taking part in sexual experimentation. Keen observers of the changes in the world around them, they were sympathetic to African liberation movements and celebrated the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the election of Salvador Allende in Chile.13 Like Alfonsín, they differed most notably from their contemporaries because they