When Raúl Alfonsín was inaugurated on December 10, 1983—following a brutal period of military dictatorship that had disappeared thousands—he offered this succinct but compelling definition of democracy: “With democracy,” he said, “one eats, one is educated, one is cured.” This equation of political rights with physical and social well-being resonated in a country where many understood political terror and social deprivation to be bound up with one another. Alfonsín had campaigned on a pledge to address the junta’s human rights violations, as well as to fight hunger, improve welfare, and make education more readily available. But when he took office he assumed the burden of a national debt of over US$43 billion and rising rates of poverty, particularly in heavily populated Buenos Aires and its environs. Partly as a result of these challenges, his government’s ambitious social agenda stalled, overwhelmed by rampant inflation and debt. In 1989, during a crisis of hyperinflation, food shortages led to riots and supermarket lootings throughout the provinces of Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba, forcing Alfonsín’s resignation six months before his term was to expire.
This is a book about how Argentines defined a just, democratic society after years of military rule and fiscal emergency. It begins with the effervescence of new democracy and vows to eliminate hunger and ends with food shortages and supermarkets aflame. Whereas many observers tend to interpret these events as a history of failure, this book restores a sense of process and possibility to Argentina’s democratic restoration and to the Alfonsín government’s attempts to stave off social emergency during a decade of simultaneous political openings and a looming neoliberal world order. As María’s letter makes clear, Argentines took seriously Alfonsín’s pledge that democracy would feed, educate, and heal. Her message also crystallizes a key contribution of this book, which argues that the bold promise of the Alfonsín government had its roots in a holistic definition of democracy that saw political, social, and human rights as mutually reinforcing and capable of ending the armed forces’ long reign over Argentine public life. Over the course of the 1980s, individuals measured the Alfonsín government not only in terms of its attempts to prosecute the crimes of the armed forces and to restore political institutions, but also in terms of its ability to fulfill demands for material well-being. The book chronicles these everyday meanings of rights—often expressed as demands for basic needs such as food, welfare, and full employment—and the lived experience of Argentina’s democratic return, which took shape far beyond the ballot box.
BEYOND “TRANSITIONS TO DEMOCRACY”
In Search of the Lost Decade moves from the presidential palace to the streets, from the family table to the marketplace, and back again to examine the making of what many social scientists consider the most emblematic of Latin America’s “transitions to democracy.” Until now, there have been few social histories of this period, during which nearly the entire continent moved away from violent civil wars and vicious dictatorships to constitutional governance.2 An influential body of scholarship focused on electoral process and elite decision making has long been the standard against which the region’s constitutional returns have been judged.3 The first writings on Latin America’s redemocratization were published years before dictatorships ended in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. The demise of the Greek military regime in 1974 and the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, which initiated Spain’s transition to democracy, sparked great interest in the possibility of the return of competitive governments in South America.4 State terror and authoritarianism prompted intellectual networks in European and North American think tanks and universities and exile communities throughout the hemisphere to reevaluate the possibilities for political democracy in Latin America as understood up to that point. Their debates, publications, and exchanges produced the idea of “transitions to democracy” and theories about the conditions necessary to emerge from authoritarian rule, many of which hinged on the consolidation of political institutions and the taming of the armed forces.5 These formulations constituted real-time guideposts for the direction of democratic openings in the 1980s and 1990s.
Though their concerns varied, intellectuals and activists saw the restoration of political democracy as the primary way to protect citizens in-country from human rights abuses and to ensure the end of military dictatorships. As Guillermo O’Donnell reminds us, “The horror of the repression suffered at both the macro and the micro levels, as well as the memory of the huge mistake committed by those who scorned democracy because they wanted to jump immediately into a revolutionary system, seemed to all of the authors during that first wave of writings on transitions to be reason enough to give a process-oriented focus to our studies.”6 To be sure, there were compelling reasons for the more limited, institutional focus of these works. The staggering violence of authoritarian rule lent pressing urgency to the task of theorizing democratic returns. But it also had the effect of narrowing the field of the politically possible in the aftermath of dictatorships and of constraining the protagonists of transitions to a limited set of individuals, institutions, and questions.
In Search of the Lost Decade moves beyond the more narrowly defined institutional spaces of constitutional restoration and complicates the very notion of a “democratic transition” by grounding political transformation in the quotidian realms of neighborhood, home life, and marketplace, among others. The key actors here include self-described “ordinary Argentines,” church officials, internal food producers, welfare recipients, government ministers, and the president himself. By widening the scope of the democratic return to include a broader range of protagonists, events, and concerns, we can grasp the less commonly known, but no less decisive, social forces and agendas that shaped the reemergence of a democratic public sphere in Argentina after years of military rule.
EVERYDAY RIGHTS
Observers often point to human rights as a towering achievement of post-dictatorship Argentina. In 1985, it became the first democratic nation to prosecute its armed forces, in historic trials that resulted in initial convictions for five of the nine junta leaders who had ruled from 1976 to 1983. The Nunca Más investigative commission inspired similar efforts in Chile, Guatemala, and postapartheid South Africa. Advances in genetic testing innovated by the world-renowned Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team helped to identify victims in the aftermath of genocidal violence in Guatemala and El Salvador, and more recently of state violence in Mexico. Argentine jurists worked to enshrine human rights protections in international law and to establish conventions against torture and forced disappearance.7 On the home front, the human rights movement quickly evolved into a political force of its own. Activists have fought for decades against impunity and bitter reversals of justice and in favor of remembrance. These “labors of memory,” to borrow Elizabeth Jelin’s phrase, have made reckoning with Argentina’s authoritarian past a benchmark of civil society, and human rights a language of the post-dictatorship era inaugurated in 1983.8
The domestic and global reach of the Argentine human rights movement is undeniable. But we have not yet fully understood the broader social meanings of rights-speak and the work that it did in the years immediately following the end of the dictatorship. Most accounts that trace the rise of local and transnational human rights regimes in the 1970s and 1980s define human rights in connection with their liberal democratic origins, placing emphasis on political liberties and individual protections from state violence.9
By contrast, a principal finding of this book demonstrates that human rights became a multivalent political language that revived historic struggles for social justice dating to the emergence of state-led welfare at midcentury. Given the violent imprint of authoritarianism, which left behind legacies of torture and disappearance, the centrality of social questions to the making of the democratic return has so far been left out