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2

The Campaign for a

Democratic Argentina

When Ana Pérez de Vera cast her vote in the presidential election on October 30, 1983, she accompanied her ballot with a letter to the candidate of her choice, Raúl Alfonsín. In her brief note, the eighty-five-year old widow and seamstress explained that she had been working since she was thirteen, and now that her vision was failing her, she hoped that Alfonsín could “find the kindness” to grant her a pension. Pérez de Vera’s decision to vote for Alfonsín surprised members of her family. As she explained, “I was a strong Peronist. . . . I was for Perón and Evita.” But after failing to secure a pension under the government of Isabel Perón (1974–1976), her support for the movement waivered: “[The Peronists] slammed the door in my face and now I have stomped them [le pisotié] with my vote.” But her decision did not stem from frustration alone. For Ana Pérez de Vera, Alfonsín also seemed to offer her the same benefits that Peronism once had. As she followed Alfonsín’s campaign on television, she was drawn in by the candidate’s calls for full employment for women, pensions, and retirement funds for housewives. “I couldn’t speak to him, but I felt like he was speaking to me.” And so, as Ana entered the voting station in October 1983, she resolved to take a chance and to cast her vote for Alfonsín and the Radical Party. After all, she concluded, “Perón always said that it was better to do than to promise.”¹

While most accounts attribute Alfonsín’s 1983 electoral victory to his pledges to restore the rule of law and uphold human rights after seven years of a criminal military regime, Ana Pérez de Vera’s letter, with its references to pensions and social welfare, also suggests that Alfonsín’s appeal was more wide-ranging than is generally considered.² Scholars of the return to democracy have tended to downplay Alfonsín’s social agenda in favor of his commitment to constitutionalism.³ For Ana Pérez de Vera, however, these were not mutually exclusive projects. To cast a vote, she believed, would guarantee for her a measure of economic security. In addition to promises to prosecute the armed forces and rebuild institutions, Raúl Alfonsín’s popularity reflected expectations that political rights, once restored, would also bring forth an era of material well-being. Yet Alfonsín’s presidential win was anything but a foregone conclusion. In October 1983, his victory stunned the political field by besting the Peronist party in the movement’s first electoral defeat in open presidential elections. He did so in part, as this chapter argues, by adapting a Peronist message of social rights and justice to the realities of life at the end of the military regime.

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 wanted to salvage the party system and revive the Radical Party as part of a project for “Argentine liberation.”¹⁴ This particular political ethos of young Radicals located them on the margins of the revolutionary era. It also uniquely positioned them to survive the next decade of political terror and to gradually rise through the ranks of the Radical Party. Throughout the dictatorship in the 1970s, the organizational strategies they had incorporated during the days of their student activism helped maintain and extend Radical Party bases in the midst of widespread repression, forming the basis of their growing allegiance to Alfonsín and their eventual participation in his campaign and government.

Despite the formal suspension of political life after the dictatorship began in 1976, Raúl Alfonsín, like many politicians, remained active. He maintained a public presence throughout the late 1970s, publishing when he could. He returned to his law practice and used his influence to defend a handful of political prisoners, even meeting with his old schoolmate, Albano Harguindeguy, interior minister during the military regime, to secure the safety of leaders of the Coordinadora. Critically, he participated in the growing human rights movement as a member of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights (APDH), founded in 1975, and maintained Radical Party networks with the support of the Coordinadora and his most trusted colleagues.¹⁵ By the early 1980s, when the regime began to show signs of decay, Alfonsín and his cohort formed part of a heterogeneous oppositional front of political parties, unions, and human rights organizations that began to play a vocal role in calling for a democratic return.

In their later recollections of Argentina’s descent into terror, Alfonsín and his collaborators would flaunt their calls for temperance, implying that they had foreseen the extremes that state violence would reach following the 1976 coup.¹⁶ It would be a mistake, however, to construe this position as political prescience. Alfonsín and his growing cadre of advisers and supporters caused more of a stir within the Radical Party than within a political climate hurtling toward violent confrontation. The limited reach of Alfonsín’s reformist message—not its originality or foresight—spared his cohort the worst forms of repression following the March 1976 coup. As formal political life began to resume after the Malvinas War, Alfonsín took full advantage of the shift in public mood in favor of democratic institutions.

In June 1982, as the Malvinas War came to an end, Alfonsín was known as one of the few outspoken critics of the conflict, which he labeled a reckless and doomed endeavor. Even before the end of the fighting, he called for “the immediate creation of a civilian transitional government.”¹⁷ Though the plan did not materialize, Alfonsín’s objections to the war set him apart from other political elites, the majority of whom lent their support to the military adventure. When plans were put in motion for the return to constitutional governance, Alfonsín’s opposition to the war afforded him a legitimacy that his counterparts lacked, and this allowed him to confront the armed forces, Peronism, and internal Radical Party rivals all at once.¹⁸ Over the course of the sixteen-month period encompassing the junta’s announcement of its inglorious withdrawal from power, the onset of presidential campaigning, and the elections of October 1983, the Alfonsín-led wing of the Radical Party designed a democratic future—and a winning electoral platform—that promised a break with Argentina’s authoritarian past, as well as a broadly defined notion of rights that responded to expectations for individual liberties as well as social well-being.

THE EMERGENCE OF ALFONSINISMO

But as preparations for constitutional return got under way following the Malvinas War, few would have predicted that Raúl Alfonsín would ever win the presidency. A mid-career politician and prominent member of the Radical Party, in mid-1982 he was still better known within his party than outside of it. Nonetheless, Alfonsín took an early lead in channeling the popular expectations and anxieties of the coming transition. On July 16, 1982, shortly after the military regime lifted a ban on political gatherings, Alfonsín organized a rally at the Argentine Boxing Federation in the center of Buenos Aires. According to some estimates, up to four thousand people crowded into the venue to hear him speak. Another three thousand gathered outside in the wintry night air next to speakers set up at the last minute to blast the event into the streets. Behind the elevated stage, a banner announced the rallying cry of the evening, and mimeographed pamphlets floated from the rafters; “Let’s Take Back the Nation with Democracy and Participation!” they declared.¹⁹ Earlier in the day, event organizers had scrambled to finalize the preparations, spacing chairs throughout the vast hall. Many worried they would not attract enough people to fill the space.²⁰

Alfonsín’s fifty-minute speech reflected the frustrations of many Argentines in the aftermath of the Malvinas War. Every day, new details emerged about the mistreatment and neglect of soldiers returning from the South Atlantic, the mass graves of disappeared victims of state terror, and the contested timeline for the restoration of constitutional government. The situation facing Argentina was not “an ideological problem,” Alfonsín proclaimed; it was “life or death” itself.²¹ Seated in the balcony, members of the human rights organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the evening’s most prominent attendees, listened as Alfonsín called for a “moral response” to the disappeared and as he addressed all Argentine mothers who had “suffered the on-going pain of seeing [their] children recruited by the guerrillas, punished by state repression, or driven to war and the humiliation of defeat.”²² Turning finally to the military junta, he condemned the unjust economic policies that had plunged “workers and young people into poverty” and warned, “there will not be democracy without democratic armed forces.”²³ Amid the rising tide of chants and songs, the rally foreshadowed the tenor of the months leading up to the October 1983 presidential election with a vocal demand to remake a political system based on “morality” and “ethics.”

The Boxing Federation rally was not the first, and certainly not the largest, demonstration in and around Buenos Aires at the time. Just a few weeks before, thousands of demonstrators had met with violent repression during a protest following Argentina’s surrender to Great Britain. Despite its small size compared to the growing mobilizations sweeping the country, the Boxing Federation rally marked an important turning point in the long struggle against the dictatorship. It was the first semisanctioned political meeting since the official lifting of a ban on political gatherings. As such, the rally was also a projection for the immediate future, an opening—real and symbolic—of Argentine political life following six years of military rule, and the unofficial launch of the presidential campaign that would culminate in Alfonsín’s inauguration in December 1983.

From the night of the Boxing Federation rally, Alfonsín gradually began to build momentum, not only besting internal Radical Party rivals but also upending—if only briefly and in ways that would condition the trajectory of his government—the historic dominance of the armed forces and Peronism in Argentine politics. Radical memories of the Boxing Federation rally play on party mythology of the UCR as the erstwhile defender of democratic institutions. Alfonsín drew upon this historical memory, capitalizing on renewed popular demands for institutional democracy following the violent suspension of public life.²⁴ By the end of 1982, Alfonsín’s public appearances and rallies, which attracted ever-larger crowds and attention, followed a familiar pattern. The starting premise of his stump speeches evoked Argentina’s decade-long political crisis, dating to the chaotic presidency of Isabel Perón and the military coup of March 1976. Alfonsín drew stark contrasts between this recent civil strife and its foil—a restored republic guided by adherence to the constitution. This “democratic commitment,” as he termed it, depended on each individual of the body politic rejecting the extremes of both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing militancy. One hallmark of his rallies was a collective reading of the preamble to the constitution. The theatrical gesture moved crowds, as it also underscored a guiding principle of Alfonsín’s message that from constitutionalism all else would follow to put an end to Argentina’s endemic breach of institutions.

Upon first glance, Alfonsín’s rising popularity took root in a standard platform of political liberalism, grounded in a notion of ethics and decency, with Alfonsín at its symbolic center. In 1983, however, the promise of restored democratic institutions was inextricably tied up with the response to the economic and social suffering caused by the dictatorship. As 1983 began, the economic situation continued to deteriorate, with the ongoing effects of the regional economic crisis now being fully felt. The seventh anniversary of the military coup on March 24, 1983, came and went with no official message or fanfare as had been the case in years past, the day overshadowed by news of the rising cost of living—13 percent in February 1983 alone—and alarming stories about the debt incurred over the course of the military regime.²⁵ These realities shaped the message of Alfonsín’s candidacy, which placed great emphasis on the social well-being that would result from the restoration of the rule of law. Alfonsín frequently regaled his supporters with lists of the concrete ways that life would improve under a democracy with him at the helm. One flyer encouraging voters to affiliate with the Radical Party in March 1983 listed ten concrete changes that would follow the election, which are worth quoting at length:

1. Rule of law and effective civil control to subordinate the military and security forces. Dismantling the repressive apparatus.

2. Defense of salaries and jobs.

3. Curbing inflation and promoting economic development.

4. Recovery of national industries.

5. Affirmation of the rights to health, education, and housing.

6. Protection of social legislation and the pension system.

7. Defense of the rights of women and young people in society.

8. Protection of the family, children, and senior citizens.

9. Human rights, justice, and administrative honesty.

10. Affirmation of economic and territorial sovereignty.²⁶

This ranking, and others like it, emphasized a type of popular republicanism anchored by the twin pillars of civilian rule and sovereignty. Its baseline message conveyed an expansive notion of rights that placed social welfare front and center. While the systematic terror of state violence captured public attention, human rights—defined as protection of the physical body from torture and violence—were often subsumed as part of the promise of a broader rights-based regime. As a candidate, Alfonsín described how all Argentines had “lived through an era of the denigration of their fundamental rights,” identified as health care, food, and shelter, among others.²⁷ The insidious violence of the regime was manifested in the steady degradation of daily life. “Human rights” in this sense meant more than protection from torture; it represented guarantees of social justice as well.

To that end, Alfonsín reserved special attention for the economic crisis and its most visible effects. On May 1, 1983, International Workers’ Day, he issued a bleak assessment of national life in the wake of seven years of military rule:

The nation’s soul is saddened by the cruel spectacle of malnourished children. . . . They are the poorest people of the poorest provinces. But we are hypocritically hiding the true geographic limits of hunger: This misery, this malnourishment, this precarious housing, is located on the doorstep of Buenos Aires and in Buenos Aires itself. I vow before the people and the Republic to take back the Argentina that has been robbed from us. No child will go hungry in Argentina ever again. We will apply economic policies that lead to full employment. . . . We will deal with health care and popular education. There will be democratic unions. And let us be clear: There can never be long-term welfare without political liberties.²⁸

In this speech, Alfonsín introduced hunger—and the economic policies that had caused it—as one of the many cruel legacies of the dictatorship. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the discovery of hunger had already played a role in the breakdown of the regime, and it continued to surface as presidential campaigning got under way. In April 1983, the minister of social action declared that “nobody went hungry in Argentina,” adding that the soup kitchens that proliferated throughout the outskirts of Greater Buenos Aires “were a political ploy.”²⁹ Photos of hungry children from the northern province of Tucumán that surfaced in the press, and the ongoing solidarity campaigns of churches in places such as Quilmes, home of the 1981 Hunger March, exposed a vastly different reality. As the economic situation continued to deteriorate, the minister’s cynical statement belied the palpable effects of economic suffering. Hunger was real, and it was encroaching on the center of the nation.

Alfonsín’s concerns about hunger built on an idea that was already in circulation, one that he used to differentiate himself from the cruelty of the military authorities and to lay claim to an irreproachable moral and social issue. From that International Workers’ Day on, the promise to end hunger occupied a prominent place in his campaign. Alfonsín frequently boasted that eradicating hunger was the only pledge he would make as a candidate. Along the campaign trail, he announced that his government would create an emergency food program—the Programa Alimentario Nacional (PAN)—to reverse the nutritional emergency created by the dictatorship, and as if to emphasize the urgency of the matter, he declared, “We will not pay the national debt with the hunger of the people.”³⁰

Expectations for socially attuned democracy came together in Alfonsín’s most well-known campaign slogan; “With democracy, one eats, one is educated, one is cured” quickly became one of the hallmark messages of his candidacy. If state violence killed and disappeared, democracy had the ability to heal and to reverse the most detrimental effects of military rule. Democracy was thus anthropomorphized in the wake of terror. It was living and breathing, and for a brief time, its messenger became Raúl Alfonsín. Argentines projected hopes for their personal and collective futures onto Alfonsín’s broad message, leading one observer to remark at the start of 1983 that Alfonsín “represented the best interpreter of this particular historical moment.”³¹ As a candidate, Alfonsín painted stark contrasts between military rule and constitutionalism, while his attention to social well-being took direct aim at his main challengers in the Peronist party. According to Alfonsín’s definition of democracy, political and social rights could be achieved without sacrificing one for the other. Yet realizing this vision meant confronting Peronism and its historic claim to be the main agent of social change in Argentina.

CAMPAIGNING BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

The campaign for the presidency began in earnest in the early months of 1983. Despite a crowded political field that eventually included twelve contenders for the presidency, for most Argentines the race came down to a contest between the nation’s two major political forces—Peronism and radicalism. At the start of 1983, however, Peronism faced a dilemma. The movement had long balanced various internal factions and differences between the party and its union base. Throughout the early 1970s, left- and right-wing sectors battled, first for Juan Perón’s allegiance upon his return from exile, and then for the soul of the movement in the wake of his death. With the onset of the dictatorship in 1976, left-wing militants and industrial workers felt the wrath of state terror and economic liberalization as the junta drew a straight line between what it saw as the revulsive changes wrought by Peronism and political and social subversion. Argentines had to look no further than the shuttered factories in the industrial zones of major cities, falling union rosters, or pink slips to grasp the economic effects of the regime. Of course, the policies that contributed to manufacturing’s decline did not reside with Peronism. Yet for many members of Peronism’s base, the reverberations of abuse and economic retrenchment linked directly back to the persecution of workers over the course of the dictatorship, a type of violence that union bosses had been unable to halt and, in some cases, actively promoted.³²

Early on in the political race, Alfonsín tapped into widespread disgust with the most conservative Peronist leaders, whom many Argentines linked to the breakdown of institutional rule. Alfonsín exploited those perceptions through a rhetorical strategy that emphasized military and right-wing Peronist collusion. In April 1983, he publicly denounced a “pact” between upper-echelon military and union leaders. The pact allegedly stipulated that if a Peronist government assumed office, it would guarantee a military amnesty. Though Alfonsín admitted that he did not have technical proof of such an agreement, that was hardly the point.³³ In equating Peronism with the nation’s darkest period of repression, the charge fueled fears that a Peronist victory would perpetuate a pattern of violence and impunity that many were anxious to leave behind.

As the opening salvo of Alfonsín’s campaign, the strategy worked on a few fronts. It first consolidated Alfonsín’s power within his own party. In July 1983, Alfonsín beat his contender, Fernando de la Rúa, in the Radical Party primary, securing for himself the UCR nomination for the presidency. For their part, some of the most orthodox Peronist leaders only seemed to confirm Alfonsín’s charges of union-military collusion. Following the release of the military junta’s “Final Document,” the armed forces’ attempt to justify state terror and to secure exemption from possible prosecution, Ítalo Lúder, who would in a few months gain the Peronist nomination for president, declared: “[Responding to] these excesses is not the responsibility of the constitutional government, rather of those who committed them.”³⁴ Such comments did not allay anxieties about Peronism’s illicit dealings with the armed forces or the prospect of an amnesty for military leaders. By contrast, Alfonsín presented himself as the alternative to a future of impunity, with a promise of transparency to break a pattern of authoritarian repression.

As has been well documented, the human rights abuses of the dictatorship presented some of the most pressing concerns in the waning months of the military regime.³⁵ On a daily basis, the revelation of crimes committed by the armed forces wrenched open the viciousness of the junta and fueled the ongoing mobilization of human rights organizations, which led the charge to make the prosecution of the military a principal responsibility of any future government.³⁶ Yet in the uncertain period between the end of the Malvinas War and the October 1983 election, there was no societal consensus around human rights or overnight adhesion to its values. Despite evidence of the regime’s crimes, no agreement existed about how and to what extent the military’s abuses should be addressed, save the powerful (and often diffuse) notion that the crimes committed by the armed forces should not be allowed to happen ever again. As campaigning picked up during the first half of 1983, Raúl Alfonsín emerged as the candidate with the clearest plan for prosecuting the armed forces. His proposal for prosecution evolved in conversation with jurists from the University of Buenos Aires’s Society for Philosophical Analysis (SADAF, Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico) and identified three levels of responsibility.³⁷ It distinguished between officials who gave orders, subordinates who followed orders, and those who “had committed excesses” in fulfillment of their duties.³⁸ Like the major human rights organizations at the time, this proposal stood firmly against any type of amnesty for military officials. Writing later about the plans to prosecute the armed forces and the eventual trial of the military juntas in 1985, Alfonsín emphasized what he saw as their ultimate purpose: “We needed to leave a mark on the collective conscience that there was no group, however powerful, that was above the law, and that could sacrifice human beings in the service of supposedly valuable undertakings.”³⁹

More so than his Peronist contenders, Alfonsín began to gain notice as the mainstream politician who best articulated a clear break between an era of impunity and a new age defined by the rule of law.⁴⁰ Despite a robust oppositional labor movement that emerged as a powerful voice against the regime, Peronist leaders with closer ties to the armed forces remained the public face of Peronism. The general picture of the movement in the months leading up to the elections was of chaotic, often violent, power struggles.⁴¹ Several rallies erupted in brawls and gunfire, scenes that evoked raw memories of the breakdown of civilian rule. The vacuum left in the wake of Juan Perón’s death in 1974 had intensified bitter contests between conservative hardliners, moderates, regional factions, and union leaders. While most parties had confirmed their candidates by July 1983, the Peronist candidate for the presidency was not selected until early September, less than eight weeks before the October 30 election. Eventually, Ítalo Lúder secured the nomination. A longtime party leader, Lúder had served for a time as president of the senate, then as interim president of the nation for thirty-four days in 1975. Despite his reputation as a moderate, during his brief tenure he had signed off on some of the most contentious decrees of the period immediately preceding the dictatorship, which authorized state repression and the “annihilation” of subversion nationwide.⁴²

But in many ways, it was still Peronism’s election to lose. In the months before the election, political parties scrambled to affiliate voters according to new election rules and timelines. By April 1983, 2,966,472 people had reaffiliated with a party. While a record number of those affiliations went to the Radical Party, the majority of new voters formally identified as Peronist. Polls throughout 1983 revealed that while many Argentines supported Alfonsín’s growing momentum, a large segment of the population believed that the Peronist candidate, Ítalo Lúder, would ultimately win.⁴³ Lúder himself boasted that “being the Peronist candidate for president is equal to being the future president of Argentina.” After all, the Peronist party had never lost in open presidential elections during its forty-year history. In the last free elections in 1973, the party had swept 61 percent of the vote. Peronist campaign materials in 1983 relied on this precedent and proclaimed, “the memory of the people will be enough for us.”

The Peronist and Radical Party candidates thus presented Argentines with a striking choice between adherence to rebuilding institutions and the continued specter of political crisis. A closer look at campaign materials illustrates this point. Some of Alfonsín’s earliest pronouncements as a candidate emphasized the history of the Radical Party as the political force most dedicated to the defense of democratic institutions in Argentina. Campaign flyers and literature frequently cited Leandro Alem, the founder of the UCR, who in 1890 laid the groundwork for the nation’s first mass political party. With even more fervor, Alfonsín drew inspiration from Hipólito Yrigoyen, whose second presidency was deposed by a military coup in 1930, inaugurating a cycle of military dictatorship that would endure for the next fifty years. Since Alfonsín’s first attempts to gain control of the Radical Party in the early 1970s through his Renovation and Change movement, he had presented himself as following in the footsteps of Yrigoyen and his commitments to popular democracy, morality, and ethics, which Alfonsín actively cultivated. Through this reading of his party’s history, Alfonsín connected his campaign for a new and just Argentina to the nation’s first experiments with democracy. Likewise, Alfonsín placed great emphasis on the impact that the 1966 military overthrow of Arturo Illia had had on the evolution of his anti-dictatorial beliefs. Illia’s downfall, which had initiated a decade-long descent into state terror, provided further proof of the UCR’s steadfast moral compass against the antidemocratic impulses of the nation’s economic and military elite. Though this interpretation overlooked a conservative cadre of Radical Party luminaries who frequently threw their support behind nondemocratic rule, Alfonsín’s message emphasized over a century of steadfast party enthusiasm for constitutionalism. He made the case that the UCR “was ready to govern” in line with the most progressive of Radical Party traditions.⁴⁴ To that end, Alfonsín rarely missed the opportunity to remind Argentines that the Radical Party had defended “the rule of law and full democracy” during the many years that it had held power during the twentieth century.⁴⁵