Brown J.C. A Brief History of Argentina

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARGENTINA

246

were harder to explain away. In April 1977, a small group of these

women gathered in silent vigil in the plaza fronting the Casa Rosada.

Some passersby cursed them, and security ofﬁcers threatened them.

They marched in the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday thereafter.

One of the leaders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as the

group came to be known, Hebe de Bonaﬁni, believed that the inter-

national press and foreign diplomatic pressure was protecting these

weekly protests, which grew with each passing month. The New York

Times and the governments of Sweden, Spain, and France stood out

in this regard. U.S. president Jimmy Carter in 1979 suspended loan

negotiations with Argentina because of the military government’s

human rights abuses. Great Britain under Prime Minister Margaret

Thatcher and the administration of Ronald Reagan in the United

States, however, ignored or even applauded El Proceso. In fact, the

Central Intelligence Agency under President Reagan invited Argentine

army ofﬁcers to train the ﬁrst Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries, the

contras, in 1981.

The military withstood the criticism of international human rights

groups. General Videla presided triumphantly as Argentina hosted the

international soccer championships in 1978, at which the home team

won its ﬁrst World Cup. Internally, though, he and the moderados

had to put down a rebellion of hard-liners in Córdoba, led by General

246

Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo during a rally in 1983 (Courtesy of Asociación Madres de Plaza

de Mayo)

247

Luciano Menéndez, in order to pass along the presidency of the junta

to another moderate. Despite the mounting evidence of gross viola-

tions of human rights, the military’s grip on power did not relax until

1980, when the economy contracted severely and inﬂation again shot

upward.

In addition to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, industrial workers

also initiated serious opposition to the military regime. Rank-and-ﬁle

workers launched a series of wildcat strikes in 1976 and 1977, even

as the patotas were decimating union leadership. A new generation

of militant leaders called a general strike for April 1979. Subsequent

strikes of railway and auto workers resulted in wage increases rather

than harsh repression from military authorities. Labor leaders were

among the ﬁrst to demand a return to democracy. “[O]nly by way of

a government elected by the people,” they announced, can the nation

achieve “the anxiously awaited national unity” (Cox 1995, 82). The

sharp contraction of the economy continued into 1981, provoking

another shake-up in the junta and more questions about human rights

abuses. In a second general strike, union leaders declared that “The

Argentine people and the institutions that express the people’s will have

deﬁnitely lost their conﬁdence in the process inaugurated in March of

1976” (Cox 1995, 95).

At this low ebb, General Leopoldo Galtieri took over as president

of the junta and seized upon a dangerous opportunity to redeem the

Argentine military. What ultimately dislodged the generals from power

was neither their abuse of human rights, the labor agitation, nor the

growing debt and rising inﬂation. It was the disastrous war with Great

Britain over the Malvinas Islands.

War in the Malvinas

In April 1982, General Galtieri ordered the navy and army to invade the

Islas Malvinas, known in the English-speaking world as the Falkland

Islands. The small British garrison on these windswept South Atlantic

islands fell quickly. Thousands of Argentines ﬁlled the streets in reac-

tion, not to protest the military government but to hail it. The sparsely

inhabited Malvinas had been captured by the British navy as a coaling

station in 1833 and held ever since. The advent of diesel-fueled war-

ships rendered obsolete this imperial outpost, but 2,000 British citizens

still lived in the Falklands. The United Nations had passed resolutions

pressing for the return of the islands to Argentina, but negotiations

between the two countries consistently broke down over the question of

THE FAILURE OF DE-PERONIZATION

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARGENTINA

248

the rights of the British citizens who tended sheep there. The Malvinas

nonetheless appeared on every schoolchild’s map of Argentina, and

patriotic pride was always just below the surface, even when politicians

had solicited British investments during the liberal age, a century and

a half before.

Although diplomatic right may have resided with the Argentines,

General Galtieri miscalculated. On the evening he issued the order to

invade, Galtieri had called his “good friend,” President Reagan. The

U.S. president was appalled that Galtieri expected him to uphold the

Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century canon that stated that an attack

by any European power on any American republic would be consid-

ered an act of war toward the United States. It approved of Argentina’s

ﬁght against “communism,” but the Reagan administration wanted

no disagreement with Britain, least of all over some South Atlantic

islands of such minuscule importance. The American president and the

British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had deep ideological afﬁni-

ties. Rather than supporting Galtieri, Reagan gave his moral support

to Thatcher as she quickly outﬁtted a British task force to retake the

islands.

Galtieri and his fellow junta members appointed General Mario

Menéndez, a prominent member of the hard-line faction, as military

Argentine troops were ill equipped and poorly trained when asked to defend the occupation of

the Islas Malvinas against the British.

(Archivo Página 12)

249

A Conscript Describes the

War in the Malvinas, 1982

n the way there, when we were ﬂying to the Malvinas, packed

together, one of the boys sitting near me joked: “Stop grumbling

lads, on the way back we’ll be more comfortable.” “Why?” someone

asked him. “Well, there’ll be fewer of us,” he answered and there was

a heavy silence. . . .

We ﬁnally got to our assigned place, but once there neither we nor

the ofﬁcers knew how to set up our position. At ﬁrst we tried to sleep in

tents and build fortiﬁcations to shoot from, foxholes, like the ones we dug

in our training in Buenos Aires Province. But the soil on the islands was

terrible; you dug a hole and within two days it was full of water. . . .

But the times our spirits were low, it was not because we were

afraid of the English but because of the lack of food. If and when they

arrived, the cold rations came in bags that had already been opened,

with the odd tin and a couple of sweets. I [Daniel Kon] never saw the

combat rations box. . . .

[O]n the ﬁnal day of the English attack . . . they attacked us from all

sides, from land and from four frigates. . . . At half past ten at night, the

ﬁnal shelling of our positions began. It was indescribable; about three

rounds a second. We did what we could; all we could do was to protect

ourselves and answer their ﬁre every now and then. . . . They were boys

from Córdoba who had just arrived from Comodoro Rivadavia. They

were really terriﬁed; they had never heard a bomb before and they’d

been put there in the middle of hell. . . .

[We were held as prisoners of the English at the former Argentine

headquarters.] And that was when we began to discover sheds and

sheds, packed to the roof with food! When we’d gone down to steal,

we’d found three or four warehouses, but it turned out there were

more than forty. They couldn’t get in, there was so much food. . . .

In the end we became quite friendly with some of the English sol-

diers. When I told them in one conversation that I’d only done ﬁve

shooting tests and had ﬁfty days’ training, they banged their heads on

the walls. They couldn’t understand it . . . All the English soldiers had

had at least three years’ training. And however much patriotism you put

in, you can’t ﬁght that.

Source: Kon, Daniel. Los Chicos de la Guerra: The Boys of War (London:

New English Library, 1983), pp. 12, 17, 26–27, 31, 38–39.

THE FAILURE OF DE-PERONIZATION

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARGENTINA

250

governor of the “liberated” Malvinas and redeployed his defense forces,

Argentina’s crack combat units, to the Andean border with Chile.

Although both military governments of the bordering countries cooper-

ated in hunting down each other’s ﬂeeing leftists, Chile and Argentina

still disputed certain regions in the Tierra del Fuego, particularly the

Beagle Islands. Argentina worried about an invasion of General Augusto

Pinochet’s Chilean army, because he was the only head of state in South

America to declare support for Great Britain. Consequently, the replace-

ment forces sent to the Malvinas were all poorly trained and equipped

conscripts. Many were not issued sufﬁcient clothing to withstand frost-

bite as they waited in wet foxholes for British troops. General Menéndez

and his staff, meanwhile, hoarded supplies of meat and wine at their

headquarters in Port Stanley, which was renamed Puerto Argentino.

The British forces met little effective resistance. Before landing at the

islands, a British submarine sank the Argentine battleship Belgrano,

and 800 sailors perished in the icy waters. An Argentine air force coun-

terattack sank one British destroyer, taking 200 sailors with it. As the

British ﬂeet neared the Malvinas, however, most Argentine military

hardware remained safe at the mainland bases. British marines faced

minimal opposition, least of all from the Argentine ofﬁcer class. Naval

captain Alfredo Astiz, soon to be infamous for his human rights abuses

250

Argentine medics during the war in the Malvinas (Archivo Página 12)

251

at the Navy Mechanics School, surrendered the outlying Georgian

Islands at the mere sight of British warships. British troops overran

the main islands of the Malvinas, and General Menéndez quickly ran

up the white ﬂag of surrender over his comfortable headquarters. Back

in Buenos Aires, General Galtieri announced the defeat the next day

together with his resignation from the junta.

251

The Political Philosophy

of Jorge Luis Borges

he military debacle in the Islas Malvinas so shocked the nation that

even Argentina’s most renowned literary ﬁgure, Jorge Luis Borges,

welcomed the fall of the military government. He had always been

known for his anti-Peronist views. The famed novelist and poet counted

himself among those members of the Argentine intelligentsia who, like

Victoria Ocampo of the literary journal Sur, equated Perón with Hitler

and Mussolini. He had dismissed Perón’s support among the working

class as a product of demagoguery and labeled Perón a dictator and

tyrant despite the fact that he had won three of the most transparent

elections of the 20th century. Borges even resorted to borrowing the

classic dichotomy from the time of his illustrious grandfather, who had

fought against Rosas: Peronismo represented the triumph of barbarism

over civilization. Borges’s views cost him a small government sinecure

in 1946 when the Peronist administration “promoted” him from library

clerk to chicken and rabbit inspector in the public markets.

Borges subsequently sided with numerous military men in power,

praising leaders such as Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet

in Chile. In Argentina, he observed, the generals were the “only gentle-

men capable of serving the country.” He was also quoted as saying,

“I know I am not qualiﬁed to talk about politics, but perhaps you will

allow me to say that I do not believe in democracy, that strange abuse

of statistics.” Nonetheless, the Malvinas debacle had sobered him so

much that in one of the last interviews of his life, he mentioned that

Raúl Alfonsín’s election had restored his faith in democracy—perhaps

also because this had been the ﬁrst free election in half a century that

the Peronists did not win.

Source: Quotation from González, José Eduardo. Borges and the Politics of

Form (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 196.

THE FAILURE OF DE-PERONIZATION

At ﬁrst, patriotic Argentines were stunned by the news, then angered.

They suddenly realized that the armed forces had been efﬁcient in

disappearing citizens, covering up their own corruption and human

rights abuses, keeping the Peronists from power, intimidating the intel-

ligentsia, taking the largest share of the national budget, and wasting

the proceeds of sizable international loans, but could not accomplish

their constitutional mission of defending the nation.

A caretaker military government realized it could no longer govern.

The middle-class parties ﬁnally developed enough backbone to follow

up the earlier protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and of the

workers. The military attempted to exonerate itself with a last-minute

amnesty for crimes committed by ofﬁcers of the Process for National

Reorganization. In December 1982, Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez

Esquivel led a huge demonstration of 100,000 people condemning the

military for the “Dirty War.” The generals then announced presidential

elections for October 1983, fully expecting a Peronist victory. Instead,

presidential candidate Raúl Alfonsín rallied the many factions of the

Radical Party, refused to forgive the military of its crimes, accused

the Peronists of making amnesty deals with the generals, and swept

to victory with 52 percent of the vote. Even the notorious doubter of

democracy, Argentina’s greatest living literary ﬁgure, Jorge Luis Borges,

had to concede that Alfonsín’s election represented the best hope for a

beleaguered and defeated nation.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARGENTINA

252

253

The Neoliberal

Age Begins

he elections of 1983 marked many transitions for Argentina: The

military returned to the barracks, the ﬁrst freely elected Radical

president since Yrigoyen took ofﬁce, and the Peronists lost their ﬁrst

presidential election. More important, President Raúl Alfonsín and his

advisers had to confront the problems the military had bequeathed

them. They now had to count the victims of the Dirty War and pros-

ecute those military personnel who had tortured and killed Argentine

citizens and mismanaged the war in the Malvinas. The other challenge

facing the new civilian administration in 1983 concerned the economy.

Burdened by inﬂation running at more than 300 percent and by an

international debt that had risen ﬁvefold under the military govern-

ment, the Alfonsín government had to get the economy to grow.

Few in Argentina could be faulted for not recognizing at the time

that another, far more fundamental shift was taking shape as well.

Populism had ended in bankruptcy. No longer would deﬁcit spending

stimulate domestic demand and industrial growth. No longer could the

nation afford to protect inefﬁcient industries behind high tariff walls

that injured traditional agricultural exports. Sooner or later, the state

would have to confront its own failure at running the core industries

efﬁciently and begin selling them off to private investors. The economy

was not going to grow without infusions of foreign capital and technol-

ogy. Finally, the government had to bring down inﬂation and reduce

the debt; indeed, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded

ﬁscal responsibility as a condition to advancing new loans to Argentina.

Sharing in common high levels of debt and inﬂation, all other Latin

American nations, except Cuba, also participated in this trend away

from populist economics.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARGENTINA

254

Thus was born the age of neoliberalism, so-named because its eco-

nomic principles paralleled those that had held sway a century before

during the liberal age. The hallmarks of neoliberalism were open mar-

kets, foreign investment, sales of state industries, lowering of trade bar-

riers, labor ﬂexibility, emphasis on exports, reduction of bureaucracy,

relaxation of government regulation, and absorption of new technolo-

gies. Politicians swore allegiance to these principles, as the IMF looked

on approvingly. But neoliberalism had its enemies in a society as frac-

tured and discriminatory as Argentina’s, and the civilian politicians

would prove themselves just as inept at pursuing the neoliberal agenda

as they had been at the populist one.

The Attack on Impunity

Argentines of all classes viewed the immunity of the military as the

number one national problem in 1983. The weekly march of the

Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued into the period of electoral

governments, and the public demanded accountability for the victims

and perpetrators of the Dirty War. President Alfonsín, therefore, cre-

ated the National Commission on Disappeared Persons. The novelist

Ernesto Sábato (On Heroes and Tombs) presided over the commission,

whose 120 employees traveled the country collecting documents and

taking depositions from victims of torture and from the families of desa-

parecidos. Exiled former prisoners of the military government returned

to give testimony.

Alfonsín had envisioned that the National Commission on Disappeared

Persons would conclude its investigation within six months and turn

over its ﬁndings to the civilian courts for the quick prosecution of the

top ofﬁcers in the Dirty War. If he wished to deal with the problem of

the disappeared expeditiously without provoking an armed response

from the military, the president had miscalculated.

From the beginning, Alfonsín’s policy met resistance on all sides.

Right-wing critics suggested that the process discounted the grave dan-

ger that the armed guerrillas had posed to the nation. Military ofﬁcers

now viewed the Radical Party as a group of communists, notwithstand-

ing prior Radical support for the military’s de-Peronization. On the left

stood the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Nobel laureate Adolfo

Pérez Esquivel. They refused to endorse the commission because they

suspected that the president really intended to limit the search for the

missing and restrict the prosecution to those ofﬁcers who gave the

orders and not the thousands more who carried out the torturing and

254

255

THE NEOLIBERAL AGE BEGINS

255

A Victim of Torture

Returns to Argentina, 1984

n April 1977, 20 armed men arrested journalist Jacobo Timerman in

his apartment. Timerman had reported tentatively about disappear-

ances and about guerrilla activities, two subjects the military regime had

banned from publicity. Timerman was also Jewish, and extremists among

the ruling ofﬁcers were notoriously anti-Semitic. The armed men placed

a hood over his head and bundled him into the back of a sedan. One of

his kidnappers placed a gun to his head and threatened, “Say goodbye,

Jacobo dear. It’s all up with you.” Someone counted slowly to 10, then

his captors broke into loud laughter.

For the next three years, Timerman was imprisoned and tortured

by members of the security forces. He ﬁnally gained release through

the protests of international human rights groups and left Argentina

to write a celebrated chronicle of his incarceration, Prisoner Without a

Name, Cell Without a Number. Timerman returned to Argentina following

the restoration of democracy in 1984. It was a wrenching, bittersweet

experience for the former prisoner of the military government.

Back in Argentina, Timerman pressed charges against two general

ofﬁcers and set out to ﬁnd the clandestine prisons in which he had

been conﬁned for much of his time in captivity. He posed for a photo

in one small cell in which he had been held incommunicado, tortured

with electric currents, and poorly fed. He reﬂected on the renewal of

democracy in the country, as well as on the search for the truth about

the human rights abuses of the previous regime. Timerman expressed

hope for the pursuit of justice against the military ofﬁcers who had

conducted the Dirty War, but he also recognized that not everyone

condemned the past abuses.

Even before Timerman’s return visit in 1984, apologists for the mili-

tary began ﬁlling the newspapers with stories about the internationally

famous Argentine journalist’s former connections with suspected bank-

ers for the Montoneros. His torturer, General Ramón Camps, even

published a book linking Timerman to “communist terrorists.” The

publicity impugning Timerman’s reputation had the impact in Argentina

of justifying his kidnapping and torture.

Source: Quotation from Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner Without a Name,

Cell Without a Number (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 10.

Brown J.C. A Brief History of Argentina

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