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Introduction

On May 1, 1989, María, a high school teacher from Buenos Aires, wrote a letter to President Raúl Alfonsín as he embarked on his final months in office. The country was in the midst of a crisis of hyperinflation, and elections were set for two weeks away. Earlier in the day, María had heard the president’s last address to Congress, and she felt compelled to write to him. “My friend,” she began, then recounted how she and her husband, an adjunct university instructor, had worked hard over two decades of marriage, weathering continual financial difficulties and the sensation of “always having to start over.” María emphasized that she had no “political affiliations” that would cloud her judgment, lest the president think she was writing to ask for political favors. She recalled her happiness at casting her vote for Alfonsín in 1983, after seven years of military dictatorship. Though she did not regret the decision, she was barely able to mask her exasperation when she asked, “But why did you take away our hopes[?] . . . [W]hy did you abandon us?” After mentioning her adolescent daughters and her concerns about their desire to quit their studies and leave Argentina, she concluded her letter with a mix of resignation and renewed appreciation, “So no matter, Mr. President, thank you, thank you so much for helping me recover my dreams and hopes in 1983, and thank you for the democracy that allows me to live and to write you this letter, even though it does not allow for me to get sick.”¹

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 of the story of post-dictatorship Argentina, with most scholars foregrounding changes in the formal political sphere.¹⁰ Yet the social realms of democratic restoration take on greater urgency when considering the aftermath of dictatorship in Argentina. The regime was responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of Latin America’s long Cold War. But widespread social violence also accompanied state terror. The transition from state-led development to neoliberalism initiated by the regime was felt in the form of a punishing assault on the livelihoods of many, made manifest in attacks against organized labor, a rollback of social protections, and the struggle to fulfill basic needs. Understanding human rights in relation to questions of material well-being and social justice offers a more nuanced picture of post-dictatorship Argentina and the making and unmaking of democratic expectations. It also enables us to see that the roots of those democratic expectations were grounded not only in the immediacy of the dictatorship, but also in the memory of a benefactor state that proved less viable as the decade continued.

The promises and pitfalls of democratic return and the ways that individuals made sense of political change in their daily lives often emerged through struggles over food: who lacked it, who provided it, who set prices, and what Argentines ate. Raúl Alfonsín’s campaign pledge to end hunger—at once rousing and banal—took root in an alarming reality. State terror had led to a direct increase in hunger among the most vulnerable sectors between 1976 and 1983. In Argentina, a food-producing nation that historically prided itself on its ability to provide for its citizens, food and consumption had mediated the boundaries between individuals, the state, and the market since the emergence of Peronism in the 1940s.¹¹ The promise of food for all—though far from a fulfilled reality—formed a cornerstone of the modern welfare state, one that linked the most basic of material needs to a functioning democratic system. These values came under fierce attack during the military regime. Though Argentina remained one of the most food-secure nations in Latin America throughout the 1980s, new anxieties about the hunger caused by the dictatorship rattled a belief in Argentina as a land of plenty with the ability to keep its citizens physically safe and well fed. Over the course of the decade, individuals defined food as a fundamental “human right” at the heart of democratic restoration. Food was thus a litmus test of democracy.

But this is not a book about food per se. Rather, it draws from the new food history of Latin America to examine the less commonly explored tensions between rights and political economy during the years immediately following the end of the dictatorship.¹² The story that follows uses food as a narrative thread to render more intelligible the everyday meanings of rights shaped by the ordinary, intimate, though no less political contests in which the dramas of the democratic return played out. The daily struggle against inflation, the rush to beat fluctuating currency boards, and the challenge of feeding families competed with headlines of military trials, rebellions, and palace intrigues. But it was in the supermarkets, banks, and breadlines where citizens engaged most closely and consistently with the promise of individual and collective well-being offered by the new democracy, and where those ideals were most fiercely tested, challenged, and transformed over the decade.¹³ Anchored geographically in Buenos Aires and the surrounding suburbs, this book’s six chapters document how a moral economy of democracy evolved in relation to state programs to alleviate hunger, regulate the price of basic staple goods, and fortify the foundations of a faltering welfare state. When supermarket riots erupted in 1989, they signaled not only the abrupt end of the Alfonsín presidency, but also the radical remaking of the expectations of just six years before, as well as a diminished belief in a type of democratic state that could provide for and protect the physical integrity of its citizens.

Despite political openings across Latin America, the 1980s have been referred to as a “lost decade” because of the twin effects of recession and rampant indebtedness. In this view, economic stagnation and stalled monetary reforms paved the way for the widespread application of neoliberal policies throughout the region. One immediate consequence of the 1989 food riots was to hasten the gutting and privatization of public enterprises during the government of Carlos Menem (1989–1999). In the name of Peronist “productive revolution,” Menem infamously undid the legacies of his party and political movement, ushering in a decade of free-market fundamentalism and widening social inequalities. The painful consequences of those recipes are by now well known. In late December 2001 Argentina defaulted on its debt and plunged half of the population into poverty. Widespread popular rebellion against globalization and the local political class met with state repression that resulted in an estimated forty deaths. The economic collapse that inaugurated the twenty-first century resulted in not just the ousting of one president—as had happened during hyperinflation in 1989—but also the quick succession of a series of five presidents in one month.

The narrative of post-dictatorship Latin America tends to draw a straight line from the violence of state terrorism in the 1970s to the consolidation of a neoliberal worldview in the 1990s, capped off, in the Argentine case, by the economic crisis at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the authoritarian projects of Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships relied on the instrumental use of state violence in the 1970s to lay the foundations for the neoliberal policies that were consolidated by constitutional governments two decades later. Often absent in this telling, however, is the dramatic tension of the decade that came in between the brutality of the 1970s and the massive social severing of the 1990s. Lost in the narrative of the recent past is the actual “lost decade.”

In Search of the Lost Decade slows this history down, demonstrating that the rise of a neoliberal worldview was neither as seamless nor as inevitable as previously believed. The years immediately following the end of the dictatorship in Argentina saw citizens and state actors grappling with the contradictions of a shifting economic order while uncomfortably coming to terms with the expiration of earlier state-led development models. This perspective offers an important corrective to studies that reduce political change to economics or that see austerity as unilaterally imposed on Latin America from the outside. Instead, by zooming in on the everyday realms in which the democratic transition was lived, this account grasps the gradual undoing of the Alfonsín government’s comprehensive rights agenda, which eventually legitimated proposals for the full-scale implementation of neoliberalism over the course of the 1990s.

DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARGENTINA

A guiding premise of this book maintains that Argentina’s “transition to democracy” in the 1980s was not much of a transition at all, but rather a new phase of ongoing contests to define the contours of democracy, rights, and citizenship in the twentieth century. Raúl Alfonsín’s 1983 electoral victory originated in the central conflicts of modern Argentine politics, namely the nation’s frequent periods of military rule, which attempted to keep at bay the more unruly aspects of both representative democracy and mass political participation. Argentina’s first experiment with democracy, which expanded civic rights through voting, electoral reform, and greater popular participation in politics, came to an end in 1930 with a military coup. For the next fifty years, the country alternated between extended periods of military rule and weakened democratic governments. Each successive decade saw the collapse of at least one constitutional government and the installation of de facto civilian-military regimes guided by fealty to the armed forces, the Catholic Church, and the nation’s landowning, export-oriented elite.¹⁴

Juan Domingo Perón, the former labor secretary who came to power through open elections in 1946 and oversaw the unprecedented expansion of social welfare protections and the labor movement, was the only freely elected president to fulfill his term between 1930 and 1952. Under Perón, democracy in Argentina was redefined along emancipatory, fundamentally social lines and as a rebuff of the liberal governments that had come before. Despite opposition to Peronism and the often-factious public arena in which it operated, Peronist ideals of social justice continued to animate popular movements for the rest of the century. The 1955 military coup that overthrew Perón and sent him into exile coincided with the acceleration of the Cold War in Latin America and the radicalization of politics and daily life. By the mid-1960s the Argentine military and the civilian governments that supported it had shown their willingness to persecute political enemies in accordance with an evolving national security doctrine. The military governments that followed intensified a pattern of authoritarianism that was lurching forward in increments of ever-more-repressive regimes.

Following his eighteen years in exile, Juan Perón’s return to the presidency in 1973 generated wide-ranging expectations for order and revolutionary change. His sudden death, nine months after taking office, brought his third wife, María Estela Martínez de Perón, to the presidency and dashed any hopes for the end of political turmoil. Politically weak and ineffectual, the government of “Isabel,” as Perón’s widow was known, authorized the creation of right-wing paramilitary death squads, which began campaigns of repression, torture, and disappearance. State terror was accompanied by rampant economic chaos. In 1975, the draconian economic package announced by the minister of economy, Celestino Rodrigo, rapidly devalued the peso, provoked food and fuel shortages, and gave Argentines their first taste of prolonged inflation. Yet even in the midst of this unrest, Argentina remained the last civilian government in the Southern Cone and the final stronghold of revolutionary movements throughout a region where right-wing dictatorships had recently taken hold in Chile and Uruguay.¹⁵ That government did not last long. On March 24, 1976, the armed forces orchestrated a coup that launched the darkest period in contemporary Argentine history.

Outside of Argentina, “Dirty War” is the label often used to describe the criminal regime that came to power in March 1976. That designation is a misnomer, however. The armed forces did not wage battle against equally matched foes; instead, they wielded a state-sponsored apparatus of surveillance and repression to systematically terrorize, torture, and disappear their civilian victims. For seven years (1976–1983), the regime epitomized the brutality of Latin America’s Cold War, authoritarian dictatorships.¹⁶ The ruling junta, comprised of representatives from the army, navy, and air force, baptized their mission the “National Reorganization Process.” In step with the virulent anticommunism of neighboring Southern Cone dictatorships, the regime also revived homegrown traditions of conservative Catholic doctrine; anti-Semitism; and a form of nationalism that idealized Argentina’s white, European past. Along with their vocal supporters in the Church, the armed forces railed against the excesses of liberal democracy and the corrupting influences of popular social movements, which they blamed for Argentina’s moral decline. They described their project in messianic terms: the salvation of Argentine bodies and souls in the service of the ultimate restoration of Argentine prosperity and Christian civilization. Yet contrary to most accounts of the regime as fundamentally antidemocratic, the junta envisioned its own long-term project for Argentine democracy. As Paula Canelo has demonstrated, members of the armed forces sought to “de-Peronize” the masses, turn back the clock on the achievements of collective political action, and restore the frameworks of elite-led republicanism.¹⁷ This they vowed to achieve by rooting out subversion by any means necessary.

The regime distinguished itself by its savagery. Prisoners were abducted from their homes, workplaces, and schools and disappeared into a vast network of clandestine detention centers, where they were subjected to torture and execution. Hundreds of pregnant women gave birth in captivity. Before the women were killed, their babies were torn from them, and the majority were put up for illegal adoption. The notorious “death flights,” in which drugged prisoners were thrown alive from planes, transformed the murky waters of the River Plate into a cemetery along the shores of Buenos Aires. A trail of secret prisons dotted the landscape of many urban centers and residential neighborhoods. Survivors of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the regime’s most infamous detention center, located in a well-heeled section of Buenos Aires, vividly recall the cheers coming from the nearby stadium during Argentina’s 1978 World Cup victory, which rattled the walls of their cells. Nunca Más, the landmark 1984 investigative report, which provided a chilling breakdown of the regime’s crimes and its victims, estimated the total number of disappearances at close to nine thousand.¹⁸ Human rights organizations have long placed that figure much higher, at thirty thousand. Scholarly attention has recently turned to the degree of tacit social backing for the regime and the extent to which the armed forces succeeded in galvanizing support for their war against subversion.¹⁹ In 1978, the year of Argentina’s World Cup win, the popularity of the name “Jorge Rafael” peaked for newborns, in honor of the de facto president, Jorge Rafael Videla, who ruled from 1976 to 1981.²⁰

By the late 1970s, the regime had murdered thousands and sent many more into exile or hiding. Yet from the depths of this loss and fear emerged Argentina’s contemporary human rights movement, one of the most vocal forces to resist the regime. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are perhaps the most well-known organizations founded in the face of state terror, recognizable the world over by their iconic white headscarves and their tireless searches for their disappeared children and grandchildren. They joined a growing number of organizations made up of public figures, victims’ family members, survivors, religious leaders, and jurists, among others, who worked to denounce the regime and its crimes and to forge links with transnational solidarity networks. Their efforts to promote the defense of human rights—defined primarily at first as protection of the body from state violence—would shape public life and debate in the decades to come. The movement also helped solidify the maxim that any future democratic government must protect the physical well-being of its citizens from state abuse, an idea later adapted by the Alfonsín government in the 1980s.

Latin America’s Cold War dictatorships relied on terror to initiate radical economic transitions to neoliberalism. In Argentina, the regime and its civilian allies in the financial sector attempted to reverse several decades of import substitution industrialization (ISI) policies, which they blamed for endemic instability and political crisis. Among other measures, neoliberal boosters advocated for a retreat of the state, deregulation, and friendly conditions for foreign capital investment. Unlike in neighboring Chile, where the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet inaugurated a wide-reaching era of free-market reforms, the Argentine junta did not fully realize its economic plan. But it did sufficiently begin to chip away at some of the foundations of mid-twentieth-century economic planning, concentrating wealth in a few domestic firms and weakening labor rights and other social protections in the process. These and other measures sparked a decade-long recession and an extended economic crisis, which shaped the parameters of governability for the rest of the century.

Over the short term, however, the junta ushered in a fleeting period of “sweet money” and consumer spending built on foundations of financial speculation and growing foreign debt. In the early 1980s, recession and an impending regional debt crisis appeared on the horizon. Tensions within the junta, along with international condemnation of its crimes, began to weaken the regime. With its reputation in tatters and more and more domestic voices calling for the end of the dictatorship, the armed forces attempted one final bid to retain power. On April 2, 1982, Argentine forces launched an ill-fated attack on the British-controlled Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, a long-disputed territory in the South Atlantic. British troops quickly defeated Argentine conscripts and exposed the junta’s hollow efforts to hide its losses through widespread propaganda and a surge of nationalist pride. On June 14, seventy-four days after fighting began, Argentina surrendered to Great Britain. Within a month of the surrender, the junta announced plans for open elections and the return to constitutional rule. Just a short time before, few would have predicted the grip of the regime could be loosened. Seven years of state terror, human rights abuses, and financial boom and bust had devastated Argentina, yet the coming end of the regime brought hopes for the end of the armed forces’ long hold on public life. The task of redefining the terms of democracy had begun.

ALFONSINISMO

Since his historic election in 1983, Raúl Alfonsín has been popularly known as “the father of democracy.” The label marked the leader of the Radical Party as a symbol of the break between decades of ever-more-violent cycles of military rule and an era of enduring constitutionality. But the title also misleads in ways that simplify the tensions and disputes at the heart of Alfonsín’s extended moment on the national stage. Often missing in recollections of the “father of democracy” is a fuller account of the democratic project that Alfonsín attempted to install and the complicated ways that its memory resonates in the present.

The roots of alfonsinismo emerged in the crucible of authoritarian rule. For several decades, Argentines on the left and right of the political spectrum declared the exhaustion of liberal democratic institutions in a nation where constitutional governments had been overthrown six times since 1930. But state terror reignited a widespread belief in the ability of institutional democracy to guarantee physical and social well-being. Alfonsín recognized and harnessed this shift better than any of his rivals. His hallmark phrase—“With democracy one eats, one is educated, one is cured”—has settled into nostalgia in the years since his election in 1983. At the time, it gave voice to the promise of democratic return.

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 of a conservative sector that questioned the efficacy of a welfare state. Chapter 4 then turns to an understudied, though infamous, food scandal that shook the foundations of Argentina’s democratic return. In 1988, following the government’s purchase of thirty-eight thousand tons of frozen chicken from Eastern Europe, rumors of rotting poultry exploded in the media with accusations of government corruption and overreach. The incident, which came to be popularly known as the “Caso Mazzorín,” served as a prequel to the neoliberal turn in the early 1990s. Chapter 5 brings together many of the book’s overarching themes and is based on a close reading of over five thousand unpublished letters sent to Raúl Alfonsín from self-described “ordinary” Argentines over the course of the decade. Letter writers tested the limits of the language of human rights and laid bare the growing distance between their expectations and their daily lives in the face of a punishing economic climate and dwindling public resources. The concluding chapter analyzes the anatomy and political economy of the 1989 food uprisings. In the midst of a hyperinflationary spiral, the food riots unhinged the constituent parts of the ambitious rights agenda upon which the democratic transition had been based. The chapter also pushes Argentina’s transition into the early 1990s through an exploration of how the government of Carlos Menem—in a remarkable reversal of his Peronist roots—used the specter of scarcity and social emergency to impose neoliberal policies, and with them a conception of political democracy radically divested from its social foundations.