Democratic Utopias: The Argentine Transition to Democracy through Letters, 1983–1989

La correspondencia en sí misma ya es una forma de la utopía. Escribir una carta es enviar un mensaje al futuro; hablar desde el presente con un destinario que no está ahí, del que no se sabe cómo ha de estar (en qué ánimo, con quién) mientras le escribimos y sobre todo, despues: al leernos. La correspondencia es la forma utópica de la conversación porque anula el presente y hace del futuro el único lugar posible del diálogo.

–Ricardo Piglia

On May 1, 1989, María, a high school teacher from Buenos Aires, wrote a letter to President Raúl Alfonsín as he began his final months in office. The country was in the midst of a hyperinflation crisis and elections were set for just two weeks away. Earlier in the day, María had heard the president’s last address to the congress, and she felt compelled to write him. “My friend,” she began, as she recounted how she and her husband, an adjunct university instructor, had worked hard over two decades of marriage, weathering continuous 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 said 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 … why did you abandon us?” After mentioning her adolescent daughters and her concerns about their desires to quit their studies and leave Argentina, she concluded her letter with a mix of appreciation and resignation: “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

María’s letter offers a glimpse into the lived experience of Argentina’s “transition to democracy.” Her letter narrates intimate details of personal and family history and weaves them into the broader social expectations that accompanied constitutional restoration. This article examines letters sent to the president during Argentina’s democratic transition, which corresponds roughly to the government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989). Alfonsín’s election in October 1983 heralded the return of democratic rule and the end of the nation’s most brutal period of military dictatorship (1976–1983), in which up to 30,000 people were disappeared. Alfonsín was a leading member of the Radical Civic Union party (UCR). His election, the first many Argentines could remember that was not marred by violence or exclusion, not only signaled the return to democracy but also marked the first electoral defeat of Peronism in its forty year history. Over the course of the 1980s, thousands of Argentines saw the democratic opening as the opportunity to write unsolicited letters to the president, and their messages inspire reevaluations of the history of Latin America’s democratic restorations.

Until recently, investigations of this period have been dominated by studies that analyze Latin America’s democratic transitions as guided by government elites, electoral politics, and military trials.² The personal letters examined here take place between and around the headlines of the most dramatic institutional moments. As such, they complicate the very notion of a “democratic transition” by grounding political transformation in the quotidian realms of family, neighborhood, and marketplace, among others. Though writers filled their letters with details of the changes that accompanied the end of military rule in Argentina, they did so in dialogue with past political frameworks and with an eye toward an uncertain future. Based on a close reading of approximately 5,000 letters to the president, this article makes the central argument that Latin America’s democratic openings in the 1980s constituted a...