In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
208
In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
208Paperback(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520305182 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 hardliner, 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. The group's first communiqué described its project in the context of "the most profound socio-economic crisis in the history of the country." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In Search of the Lost Decade"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Jennifer Adair.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. The Breakdown of Authoritarian Rule,
2. The Campaign for a Democratic Argentina,
3. "With Democracy One Eats": The Programa Alimentario Nacional,
4. "Chernobyl Chickens": Economic Planning and the Caso Mazzorín,
5. "Dear Mr. President": The Transition in Letters,
6. Democratic Pasts, Neoliberal Futures: Hyperinflation and the Road to Austerity,
Epilogue: Carrying Forward the Promise of 1983,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,