Departing at Dawn

Historical Note

163 Historical Note In 1930, the elected president of Argentina, Hipólito Yrigoyen, was overthrown in a coup led by General José Félix Uriburu. There followed a series of authoritarian governments through which the military either ruled directly or used force to control the result of elections. In 1943, the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (Group of United Officers) seized power, and two years later, with popular support, Juan Domingo Perón, an army colonel, emerged as the country’s leader. He encouraged the growth of labor unions and raised wages, and subsequently won the presidential elections in 1946 and 1951. Perón (sometimes referred to as the “Old Man” or the “Conductor”) and his second wife Eva Duarte (Evita, the “Saint”) were popular with the descamisados (the “shirtless ones”) due to their focus on social welfare (justicialismo); however, he became increasingly autocratic as the economy deteriorated. His efforts to secularize the nation after Evita died in 1952 brought him into conflict with the Catholic Church, antagonized the devout population, and alienated the military. He was overthrown in 1955 and sent into exile. Argentina then entered a long period of military dictatorships , interspersed with brief spells of civilian government. During that time Perón remained popular with the masses, 164 and he and Evita became rallying points for the left wing opposition . In 1973, then-president General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse decided to allow elections that included the Peronists (and Perón himself was allowed back for a brief visit). The result was that the Peronist candidate, Héctor Cámpora, won; Perón came back permanently; Cámpora was forced to resign; newelectionswereheld;andPerónreturnedtopower,withhis third wife, María Estela Martínez (better known as Isabel), as the vicepresident. After Peron’s death in 1974, Isabel assumed control. Her regime inherited problems of inflation, constant strikes and demonstrations, and a violent guerilla campaign waged by Marxist revolutionaries called Montoneros. On March 24, 1976, her government was toppled by a military junta led by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti. The junta systematically practiced censorship , torture, and kidnappings. The forced disappearance of people under the pretext of bringing about national peace became commonplace. Yet the officials of the military government who were responsible never admitted that these things were happening and refused up to the end to provide information on those who had been arrested by national security forces to either their families or international organizations. In many cases, people were murdered while being detained or in the hours immediately following their arrest, but the majority were imprisoned in the numerous concentration and extermination camps that the government had secretly set up. The bodies of those who were killed were buried in hidden graves or thrown into rivers or the sea, or destroyed in various 165 ways so that the public would never know what had happened. State terrorism became institutionalized and all political or party activity was prohibited. Such actions left physical, material, and moral wounds on the survivors and on the body of the nation itself. According to figures provided by various organizations working for human rights, there were at the least thirty thousand disappeared persons of all ages, social classes, and cultural levels, as well as a huge number of exiles in other countries and outcasts within their own country. Moreover, the military government was by all accounts a failure—politically, culturally, economically, and militarily. After suffering an embarrassing defeat in the Malvinas War (also known as the Falklands War), which it started in 1982, government turned over power to Dr. Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín, who was elected in democratic voting in December 1983—though not before the police and military had been granted immunity from prosecution for their actions since 1976. Argentina has had democratic governments ever since. Only since 2007 has the citizenry begun to see justice, as several of the people responsible for orchestrating and carrying out the crimes during the military dictatorship have been arrested , tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. ...