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The Breakdown of Authoritarian Rule

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

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

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

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

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

DEBT CRISIS AND POLITICAL OPENINGS

Since taking power in 1976, the junta had wielded a fierce repressive apparatus to annihilate its enemies and to initiate radical transformations of national economic life. For members of the armed forces, these projects mutually reinforced one another. The fiscal policies of the military regime sought to dismantle the developmentalist frameworks that had structured the Argentine economy since the 1930s.⁵ Though not without their internal tensions and contradictions, the financial and military alliances at the helm of the Ministry of Economy ultimately succeeded in opening domestic markets to global capital through the liberalization of interest rates, high-risk bank lending and borrowing, reduced import tariffs, and a massive surge in public and private debt.⁶ Between 1973 and 1979, private bank lending increased in Latin America from US$30 to $60 billion. In Argentina alone, debt more than doubled, from US$6 to $14 billion over that same period.⁷ Yet contrary to general conceptions of the wholesale introduction of neoliberalism in Argentina, the regime never advocated outright privatization of the economy. In fact, state enterprises took on a majority of new debt in order to maintain high levels of public expenditure.⁸ Nonetheless, neoliberal logics jibed with the refoundational goals of the National Reorganization Process (the junta’s name for its project), which drew a straight line from populism, to economic crisis, to political and social subversion. The fiscal packages of the early years of the dictatorship combined short-term, anti-inflationary measures with a view to long-term structural readjustment. The policies aimed to displace the power of national manufacturing in favor of finance and to replace blue-collar workers with white-collar employees. Drastic economic adjustments correlated with extreme and violent attempts to reform Argentines themselves.

For a brief time, the schemes worked. The economic program of the junta led to immense short-term profits and an increase in capital flows, known better as the era of plata dulce, or sweet money. Many middle-class Argentines reaped the benefits of newfound prosperity as income values rose and purchasing power for the flood of imports increased. The regime wasted no time in putting the power of its propaganda mill behind the economic changes. In one television spot, a lone consumer stands next to an Argentine-made chair. When he sits down, it shatters instantly under his weight. Rattled, the man jumps up to see a flood of new chairs adorned with signs that say, “Made in . . .” crowding the screen as a calm voiceover states: “Before, competition was insufficient. We had good products, but buyers had to settle without being able to compare. Now, [the consumer] can choose from national products and imports alike.” From the jubilant smile on the buyer’s face as he peruses the new foreign-made chairs popping up on the screen, to the splintered pieces of wood with the “Industria nacional” sign in tatters on the floor, the choice, the ad makes clear, is no choice at all.⁹

The regime’s fiscal measures lent themselves to purchases and trips abroad. However, prosperity was fleeting and was based mostly on speculation and an overvalued peso. The first signs of distress began in 1979, when the United States raised interest rates, which increased loan payments for debtor nations worldwide. Increased debt payments led in turn to more requests for loans and assistance. And since debt incurred over the 1970s was mostly in dollars, the real burden of the debt sharply increased. Mexico’s eventual default on its debt in August 1982 set off a regional crisis that endured for the rest of the decade.¹⁰ Yet even before the Mexican default, Argentines felt the effects domestically in the form of an increase in business shutdowns, job layoffs, and looming recession.¹¹

By 1981, divisions had appeared within the ruling junta. The year began with a shift in leadership, with General Roberto Viola replacing Jorge Rafael Videla as de facto president. According to most observers at the time, the decision stemmed from the folly of Videla’s economic policies in the face of mounting fiscal distress, in addition to international reprobation of the regime’s human rights crimes.¹² Viola’s economic measures fared no better than his predecessor’s had, and he was ousted less than a year later on the cusp of the regional debt crisis, replaced by a hard-liner, General Leopoldo Galtieri, who vowed to restore the National Reorganization Process to its founding principles. Viola’s short tenure was nonetheless significant, as the regime made several overtures to allow for the gradual regrouping of political parties and labor. Although still two years off, these events played a role in the regime’s collapse and the return of democratic governance.

In the midst of economic decline and power struggles within the junta, political forces regrouped. In July 1981, the leaders of five of the country’s main political parties came together to create the Multipartidaria, a coalition with designs on a transition to institutional rule, and the most forceful call from political elites for a return to democracy since the dictatorship began.¹³ The group’s first communiqué described its project in the context of “the most profound socio-economic crisis in the history of the country.”¹⁴ Prominent members of the Multipartidaria believed direct negotiations with the junta were essential for a political transition, even borrowing from the regime and the Catholic Church’s calls for “national reconciliation.” The political transition envisioned by the Multipartidaria in 1981 outlined a joint civilian and military endeavor. The coalition’s first pronouncement only briefly referenced human rights and left out mention of state repression altogether. The absence of a more explicit treatment of the armed forces’ crimes said something about the place of human rights in the vision of many political elites at the time, who believed that any intimation of legal redress or punishment for the armed forces would derail a return to constitutional rule.

For its part, the human rights movement, the most vocal force to denounce the regime, continued to mobilize. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had marched weekly since 1977 in the center of Buenos Aires to call for the return of their disappeared children and grandchildren, remained the most visible organizations among a wide-ranging movement made up of victims’ relatives, survivors, and other public and religious figures. The year 1981 saw the Mothers’ first March of Resistance, a twenty-four-hour march and vigil around the Plaza de Mayo, which drew several dozen Mothers and the watchful gaze of the authorities, who surrounded them.¹⁵ The place of human rights during this first moment of political openings was in no way certain, however. It would take another year, when the regime’s exit was assured, for massive crowds to join the marches waving the banners on human rights.

The political opportunities of 1981 also provided a space for renewed labor mobilization. The combative sector of the General Confederation of Labor, known as the CGT-Brasil, named after the street in Buenos Aires where its headquarters was located, intensified its organizing efforts with the goal of promoting an end to the dictatorship.¹⁶ Its leader, Saúl Ubaldini, had led the first general strike against the regime in 1979, after making a name for himself at the helm of the union of beer industry workers. Equally important were cultural openings. In the year before the Malvinas War, Buenos Aires’s effervescent music scene drew crowds to concert halls to hear the emerging idols of rock nacional. The British group Queen played to packed stadiums in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Mar del Plata during its South American tour. At the Vélez stadium in Buenos Aires, army tanks surrounded the arena as the band belted anthems banned by the authorities. Shortly afterward, in February 1982, the folk singer Mercedes Sosa returned from exile. She celebrated her homecoming with ten days of sold-out shows and the release of a live album that became an instant hit and a marker of a decisive cultural shift.¹⁷ Though the regime still firmly held the reins of power, these clamorings—in song and in the regrouping of political forces—reflected a national mood clearly looking toward a future beyond the regime.

POPULAR MOBILIZATION AND THE BREAKDOWN OF AUTHORITARIAN RULE

Amid these rumblings, mobilizations outside of the generally accepted centers of political and cultural activity in Buenos Aires played a vital role in forging popular expectations for the return to democratic life. Indeed, it was in the places that felt the full force of state terror—in terms of both physical violence and economic duress—that notions of a just society came together in ways that would reshape the political field at the end of the Malvinas War. This was especially apparent on the ground in the industrial townships of Greater Buenos Aires, as historic social struggles for housing, employment, and food were recast in light of the emergency caused by military rule.

The densely populated municipalities and townships of Greater Buenos Aires felt the acute impact of military rule. The areas that made up the southern industrial belt of the capital swelled between the 1930s and 1950s, spurred on by an industrial boom and a new wave of migration from the Argentine interior. Residents flocked to the expanding margins of the capital, seeking abundant factory work, social mobility, and the chance to benefit from the inclusive policies of a growing welfare state. It was in these municipalities that Peronism first flourished and the promise of new forms of social citizenship and national belonging were forged. Following the 1976 coup, low-wage earners and industrial workers bore the brunt of terror and free-market reforms.¹⁸ The regime set out to reverse the social gains of the midcentury; between 1975 and 1980, manufacturing employment declined by 26 percent. And in the decade following the 1976 coup, fifteen thousand industrial installations went under.¹⁹ Those workers who maintained their jobs nonetheless suffered real income losses as the soaring costs of daily life made the contradictions of the regime’s policies ever more apparent. Unions, which had constituted the primary link between the working class and the promise of social citizenship since the advent of Peronism in the 1940s, also began to lose membership, declining by 23 percent between 1973 and 1984.²⁰

Like the majority of industrial towns surrounding the capital, the township of Quilmes, one prominent site of mobilization located fifteen kilometers south of Buenos Aires, suffered during the dictatorship as factory workers, union organizers, and progressive members of the clergy were disappeared from their homes and factories. The local newspaper El Sol chronicled the effects of military rule on the urban landscape. As early as 1979, a smattering of articles noted a relatively new phenomenon taking hold in the center of the municipality. They reported a growing number of unemployed factory workers, almost always men, who took to the streets day after day, “taking odd day jobs” (haciendo changas) to make ends meet. The articles varied in their level of sensational and salacious detail. Uniting all of the stories, however, was a familiar arc of long careers in local factories, the shock of job loss, and the very real drama of devising new ways to support families. In manufacturing areas around the capital, industries were finding it more difficult to compete with the influx of cheap foreign goods. Factories shut down their machines, fired workers, and bolted their doors. The specific figures for Quilmes and the surrounding municipalities are difficult to come by, but to give one example, in mid-1982 the local Peugeot factory closed its doors, and forty-five hundred workers lost their jobs in one fell swoop.²¹ Headlines reporting on such events remained mainstays throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, illuminating the human toll of deindustrialization in the southern belt surrounding the city of Buenos Aires.

Against the backdrop of this crisis of labor and the working class, a growing number of protests in Greater Buenos Aires gained national attention. In Quilmes, local church leaders scheduled a day of protest for August 1981.²² Posters announced the event as the Marcha del hambre (Hunger March) and encouraged participants to bring donations of food in a collective call for “bread and work.”²³ The goal of the event, according to flyers, was to “[shine a light on] the urgent situation facing the workers of our diocese . . . to come together in solidarity, and to raise hope.”²⁴ The bishop of Quilmes, Jorge Novak, had risen to prominence as one of the few leaders of the Argentine Catholic Church to denounce the human rights abuses of the armed forces.²⁵ In the weeks leading up to the Hunger March, Novak sent a letter to the police commissioner in Quilmes requesting authorization for both the march and a celebratory mass. As with other actions organized by the activist bishop, police documents reveal that security forces suspected the day would attract “agitators and/or union activists, who [would] use the event as a platform for their own aims.”²⁶ Yet according to a memo from before the march, police were not worried that “subversive elements were involved—as of yet.” The real concern of the local police was that the march would be passing by the villas miserias (shantytowns) and the growing population of pauperized residents recently arrived in the municipality.²⁷ Another result of the economic crisis of 1981 was the further growth of the slums and a burgeoning land takeover movement in the municipality, which put local security forces on edge. The police commissioner ultimately sent word that the march was prohibited. As far as the mass was concerned, however, he saw no “reasons why it should prove a problem.”²⁸

The Hunger March was not the first diocese event that the police had prohibited in the municipality. The year before, Bishop Novak had planned a public mass to celebrate the pope’s mediation of the conflict between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel, which had brought the two nations to the brink of conflict. The local police had prohibited that mass for “security reasons.” The Hunger March, Novak claimed, was different, and its prohibition was even more hypocritical given the current social emergency. He wrote of the police ban of the Hunger March: “This is all the more shocking as today we read in La Nación [newspaper] the declarations of the President of the Republic, confirming ‘that the Argentine people and government must denounce all discriminatory racial and religious practices to promote the defense of the rights of all human beings.’ ”²⁹ Novak’s reference to the junta’s notoriously cynical use of the language of rights was a commentary on the gap between the rhetoric of the regime and the reality of state terror and abuse. At the same time, the bishop’s somewhat sly evocation of the simple act of “walking in the streets” for sustenance and jobs was no small matter in the context of a regime that sought to eradicate such rights. In Novak’s estimation, and increasingly for many Argentines, food and work were fundamental human rights that had been systematically violated.

Though the march was banned, the mass went on as scheduled. On the day of the service, police estimated that a crowd of about 1,200 attended, while church officials and the press reported between 2,000 to 4,000 individuals gathered at the San Cayetano parish in Quilmes.³⁰ The choice of venue sent a clear message; San Cayetano holds a special place in the pantheon of popular religious figures as the patron saint of labor, drawing annual pilgrimages for peace, bread, and work. Before the mass, CGT representatives from the neighboring towns of Berazategui and Florencia Varela distributed packages of food and clothing among attendees. Recently unemployed workers, laywomen who coordinated soup kitchens, members of the clergy, and leaders of neighborhood associations linked arms in orations. Those gathered reflected a cross-section of individuals who felt the social emergency firsthand and who simultaneously attempted to keep at bay its more damaging effects.

The mass began in the late afternoon, and it ended with the crowd singing the national anthem.³¹ Because of the size of the church, which could not hold more than a few hundred, attendees spilled into the street. The visual impact of the gathering made for an impressive sight in the midst of a regime ban on public gatherings. Police presence was strong and intimidating, and clergy later recalled that many more people were afraid to attend. Nonetheless, the mass went on peacefully into the early evening. Although the original plan for the march through the streets had been prohibited, the event accomplished the goal of assembling a crowd to denounce the mounting crisis. The singing of the national anthem also signaled that despite the local focus of the event, participants’ sights were set on a broader protest against the regime.

The Hunger March generated interest and publicity beyond the municipality, drawing national attention to the social situation in Greater Buenos Aires. The newspaper Clarín provided extensive coverage of what it described as Novak’s “dramatic and searing” sermon, which “lash[ed] out against those responsible for the current social situation.”³² During the mass, the bishop placed emphasis on one of the most visible markers of the crisis and the ostensible motivation for the day’s event: hunger. “Is anyone shocked,” he asked, “by the talk of hunger among us? Do we dare speak out against this social scourge which has already entered many homes in this diocese, and which is knocking on the doors of many more? Brothers and sisters, there is hunger. Today many families get by on yerba mate and a bit of bread and crackers.”³³

The discovery of hunger in places such as Greater Buenos Aires had already begun to touch a nerve. Though hunger had long existed in rural parts of the national territory and in more informal urban settlements, by the beginning of the 1980s it began to threaten working people in the industrial suburbs of the nation’s major cities. Added to the national headlines about impending recession, troubling rumors of acute hardship accompanied the financial news. In the face of rising unemployment and a constriction of the manufacturing economy, soup kitchens sprang up in urban centers to address the growing food insecurity of large numbers of residents.³⁴ Most disconcerting of all, these realities were edging closer to the capital region. Novak, among many others, expressed dismay that in a food-producing country “as rich as Argentina,” citizens lacked food.³⁵ Hunger, a hard fact of daily life for many Argentines, was a potent symbol of the social breakdown caused by military rule.³⁶ Researchers later found that meat consumption—an emblem of the social progress of the mid-twentieth century—dropped by almost 20 percent over the course of the dictatorship, with much steeper declines among lower-income sectors.³⁷ By contrast, yerba mate, the traditional tea that also acts as an appetite suppressant and forms a staple of popular diets, saw a spike in consumption over those same years.³⁸ Clarín reported that scores of Argentine children lived on the diet of the desocupado (the unemployed). “They have never known the taste of meat, and are fed on mate alone.”³⁹

Hunger reflected a socioeconomic reality in the final years of the regime. Yet it also functioned as a way to malign the armed forces without direct reference to state terror. Talk of hunger evinced a national emergency that many Argentines could relate to—and voice indignation over—even if their lives had not been directly impacted by physical violence or acute hardship. In a letter to the newspaper Diario Popular, a local resident expressed his frustration: “The police banned the Hunger March in Quilmes. What a shame that the police cannot ban the hunger of the people who organized the march. That would solve all the government’s problems. The police can only make attempts to stop free men from exercising their rights.”⁴⁰ Individuals like this letter writer used the deterioration of their material well-being to expose the recklessness of the regime and to demand a restoration of rights—a process that this writer described as inevitable. The frank letter, signed by the author, would have been unthinkable only a few years before.

Following the Hunger March, the pace of demonstrations in and around the capital accelerated. The most anti-dictatorial factions of the labor movement gained force and numbers. In November 1981, the CGT-Brasil organized a protest for “peace, bread, and work,” which drew ten thousand people to the neighborhood of Liniers, home of the annual San Cayetano pilgrimage. Echoing the aims of the Hunger March in Quilmes, organizers called on participants to “pray for peace, the restitution of the rights of civility and the reactivation of the productive apparatus.”⁴¹

Mobilizations occurred outside of traditional labor channels as well. One of the most dramatic expressions of this was a series of land takeovers that took place in the municipalities of Almirante Brown and Quilmes, where an estimated twenty thousand people occupied a stretch of land over five kilometers long. The groups included the recently unemployed, migrants from the interior, and an array of precariously employed workers—carpenters, mechanics, and others—who had been pushed out of Buenos Aires due to a combination of highway construction, shantytown eradication, and punishing rental laws, which made the capital uninhabitable for lower-income and poor sectors.⁴² The new residents set out to create neighborhoods, buy plots of land, and secure municipal services, appealing directly to state authorities for their entitlement to legal protections. In effect, they sought to reinsert themselves into a society from which they had literally and figuratively been expelled. As one participant summarized, “[We] are people without a roof over our heads. We are the workers and the unemployed individuals who produce (and produced) the riches of this nation. . . . Our right to life, which is defended by the Constitution, is in serious jeopardy.”⁴³ By placing in stark relief the most extreme forms of hardship under military rule, the land occupations buoyed the broader moment of uprisings, even as they exposed deeper, more intractable structural crises.

The demands of shantytown residents were not limited to the most marginal sectors of Argentine society, however. In the months following the land takeovers, middle- and working-class neighborhoods throughout Greater Buenos Aires revolted against a precipitous decline in public services. Beginning in 1978, the regime transferred responsibility for public services from national authorities to provincial governments. As a result of decentralization, municipalities began to outsource trash collection and street cleaning, among other essential services, to private enterprises. The companies charged exorbitant fees and converted many municipalities into centers of graft and speculation. Local citizens bore the burden of tax increases in order to maintain contracts for deteriorated services, which they increasingly refused to (or were unable) to pay. By early 1982, many municipalities were on the brink of ruin. Shopkeepers, pensioners, housewives, and students, among others, moved to the forefront of public demonstrations to denounce local authorities and cost-of-living increases. These vecinazo uprisings, as Inés González Bombal has shown, gained momentum after the Malvinas War, but even before the outbreak of the conflict they had revealed deep networks of neighborhood associations that functioned as intermediaries between citizens and municipal governments during the dictatorship, which were now demanding civic redress and restitution.⁴⁴ In a concise statement that would have been familiar throughout several Greater Buenos Aires townships at the time, the Federación de Sociedades de Fomento (Federation of Development Societies) of Lomas de Zamora declared, “We are suffering . . . due to the violation of official projects and agreements, and eternal promises that are never fulfilled.”⁴⁵

Seen from afar, the capital region was a crucible of unrest on the eve of the Malvinas War. To be sure, authoritarian rule did not affect all communities at the same pace or with the same severity. Yet uniting popular uprisings—from union marches, to shantytown mobilizations, to neighborhood protests—was the economic violence of the regime. Demands for housing, industrial work, public services, and an end to hunger were affirmations of the right to a dignified life, which five years of military rule had torn asunder. In late March 1982, the center of Buenos Aires was flooded with protesters—the largest number since the dictatorship began—as an estimated fifty thousand workers, human rights activists, urban professionals, and politicians joined the CGT-Brasil in a historic march and strike for “Peace, Bread, and Work.”⁴⁶ Similar protests took place throughout the country. In Buenos Aires, the armed forces detained hundreds in a show of force that recalled the bloodiest moments of the regime. Though often heralded as the beginning of the end of the dictatorship, in reality the march saw the culmination of several years of local and national movements against the junta. The call to peace, bread, and work demonstrated the powerful convening force of the socioeconomic toll of the regime, one that was intimately bound up with the realities of state terror. The signs and slogans of the day transmitted an unequivocal message: “se va a acabar la dictadura militar!” (the military dictatorship will end). Three days later, on April 2, 1982, war erupted in the South Atlantic.

TRANSITION TO A TRANSITION

The Malvinas War opened wide a half decade of impunity, abuse, and economic mismanagement.⁴⁷ Since the nineteenth century, Argentina’s claims over the remote and rocky islands had fueled various nationalist causes. The goal to wrest the territory from Great Britain was the junta’s final attempt to restore legitimacy to the National Reorganization Process. The seventy-four-day conflict marked a surreal dénouement to the dictatorship. Almost immediately following the march for peace, bread, and work, the center of Buenos Aires filled again with many of the same individuals, now clamoring for an Argentine victory in the South Atlantic.

Widespread public support for the war did not translate into support for the junta, however.⁴⁸ Human rights groups used the war as an opportunity to further expose the regime’s crimes. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo contributed one of the most enduring refrains of the conflict, which affirmed “the Malvinas are Argentine, so are the disappeared.” Labor leader Saúl Ubaldini, who had been arrested during the CGT march, traveled to Malvinas to attend the inauguration of the newly installed military governor. He and other union leaders used the opportunity to highlight the fact that the working class made up the rank and file of Argentina’s fighting forces. In these ways, the principal victims of the regime were inscribed into the national cause and made public. Although voices of dissent against the military’s campaign were few and muffled, the regime imposed a virtual media blackout on updates from the front. British forces quickly routed the Argentine conscripts, who arrived unprepared and lacking basic supplies. The restricted news of growing losses only made the shock of Argentina’s eventual defeat more bitter. Images of soldiers freezing and underfed on the frigid islands, and the slow trickle of information regarding the military’s misadventure, were the final blows to a weary public, whose own domestic battles to fulfill basic needs had already discredited the junta. On June 14, 1984, Argentina surrendered to Great Britain. In July the military regime announced its withdrawal from power and plans for the return to constitutional rule.

As we have seen, the junta was already weakened before the outbreak of fighting. A week before Argentine forces launched their attack on the islands, the junta announced a plan for the reorganization of political parties, with March 1984 as the projected date for open elections.⁴⁹ Argentina’s defeat in the South Atlantic sped up a process of authoritarian breakdown that had already begun, and it constrained, though it did not totally reverse, the military’s ability to fix the terms of democratic return. Military loss exposed the mendacity of the junta’s claims to the guardianship of the nation. Yet even in retreat, the regime still managed to wield control over the timeline of the transition.⁵⁰ Over the long months of political reorganization after the war, rumors of possible coups surfaced frequently. Given Argentina’s long history of military takeovers, they were not totally unfounded. Several prominent politicians associated with the Multipartidaria, which played a prominent role in talks with military authorities, favored an extended transition to elections as a concession to the junta and as a way to ensure that the regime would actually relinquish power. Following Argentina’s surrender to Great Britain, it took close to six months to settle on the official date for democratic elections. Negotiations for the transfer of power from military to civilian rule continued through the early months of 1983, with presidential elections finally set for October 30 of that year.⁵¹

Eventually, postwar dilemmas and the debates about their possible resolution were channeled into what would become a protracted electoral contest for the presidency. Though campaigning did not pick up full steam until June 1983, when most of the major parties elected their nominees, the opening acts of the election began almost immediately after the junta announced its withdrawal from power. On July 1, 1982, the regime lifted a ban on political organizing in place since 1976, which allowed political parties to regroup. In August 1982, parties began to recruit new affiliates, and over the following months they scrambled to build voting rosters according to revised election rules and new party statutes. By April 1983, almost three million Argentines had formally affiliated with a political party.

In the almost ten years since the nation’s last open elections, the panorama of political life had shifted in significant ways. Not only had the military been discredited in defeat; but the principal political figures of the second half of the twentieth century were also no longer present. The deaths of Juan Perón in 1974 and Ricardo Balbín, the leader of the Radical Party, in 1981 opened the nation’s two most powerful parties to aspiring contenders jockeying for control. Even more significant, the demographics of the voting public had also transformed, with a generation of younger voters who came of age during the dictatorship inspired by the opportunity to participate in and define a new era in national life. Voting and the heady onset of presidential campaigning were not the only signs of change after the Malvinas War, but the long years of proscription and the absence of basic political rights quickly made the ballot box one of the first battles of the coming transition.

Sixteen months passed between the end of the Malvinas War and the October 1983 elections. The postwar period was marked by nightmarish revelations of the military’s crimes, the deepening debt crisis, and the acceleration of popular mobilizations. These headlines competed with alarming news of the social effects of the economic crisis gripping the nation. In Quilmes, site of the 1981 Hunger March, for example, Bishop Novak declared the diocese in a “state of emergency,” launching a solidarity campaign to deal with ongoing job losses, child malnutrition, and a spike in cases of tuberculosis.⁵² Novak repeated a by then familiar lament to a reporter: “This is a country that has the most fundamental resource of all: food. It is a country that should be the breadbasket to the world, with an almost infinite number of resources. It is an aberration that there are people who go to bed hungry, often without having eaten anything at all.”⁵³ The bishop painted a vivid picture of the social violence that accompanied military rule. During the dictatorship, the degradation of social life had been an open secret in the national press, thinly veiled or buried in the back pages of newspapers among “lifestyle” pieces. With the regime in retreat following the Malvinas War, tallying the negative impact of the dictatorship on ordinary Argentines moved to the headlines. Implicit in the widespread coverage of human rights abuses, fiscal crisis, and hunger was an assumption that the upcoming democratic government would put a definitive end to those scourges. Novak pushed expectations even further. In sharp contrast to his present surroundings of industrial decline, his commentary tapped into a long-standing trope of Argentine bounty. Many Argentines linked the imminent return of democracy to the restoration of welfare and plenitude.

The aftermath of the junta’s military defeat also seemed to fix one of the most widespread and enduring assumptions about the coming transition: if authoritarianism was responsible for five decades of political instability in Argentina, it followed that the embrace of institutional democracy would serve as the antidote to state violence and provide guarantees of a just, peaceful society. Gente magazine, whose editorial board had been in firm alignment with the junta, summed up the postwar sentiment: “We left behind the triumphalism of war, which many thought would change everything, and embraced the triumphalism of democracy, as if it were another magic fix-it-all formula.”⁵⁴ The maxim “dictatorship versus democracy” eased the sense of a break with a past that many were anxious to leave behind. The drama of war and the ignominy of military surrender heightened a hopeful sense of new beginnings. Despite pronouncements about the swift remaking of political life after the war, however, there was no immediate shift in values or foregone conclusion about the contours of Argentina’s coming democracy.⁵⁵

And yet some baseline expectations for democratic restoration had been forged before the war, in the everyday forms in which the social and economic violence of dictatorship were experienced and addressed on the national margins. In Greater Buenos Aires, the protagonists of popular mobilizations against the regime linked civic claims and social justice through an incipient rights discourse that pushed forward calls for democratization. The Malvinas War did not remake the Argentine public life overnight. It did, however, deepen a general antiauthoritarian consensus and rights discourse that linked well-being with democratic restoration. The roots of this idea first emerged via the extension of welfare and social protections at midcentury. By the end of the Malvinas War, the memory of these past struggles electrified calls for the return to democracy. Combined with the refoundational impulse of the postwar moment, the principles of social rights, justice, and human dignity shaped the political field in the months leading to constitutional restoration.