Alfonsín and the Dirty War's Aftermath (1983-1989)

The 1983 elections made Raúl Alfonsín the first Radical party president to have won in free elections since 1916, and he had his work cut out for him. He promptly set about to bring the perpetrators of the Dirty War to justice, canceling their amnesty status and creating a Commission on Disappeared Persons, which eventually published a 50,000 page document detailing the human-rights abuses of the former regime. Prosecuting the guilty officers, however, proved to be a monumental—and ultimately impossible—challenge, given the entrenched nature of the Argentine military establishment. Several small-scale military uprisings and an unpopular guerrilla attack on an army base stepped up the pressure on the president to exonerate the lower ranking officers who made up the vast majority of those to be prosecuted. Alfonsín capitulated, and by 1989 only 20 top officers looked likely to be punished.

In this divisive political atmosphere Alfonsín was unable to contain government spending or the expanding bureaucracy that now employed one fifth of Argentina's workforce. A new currency issued in 1985, the austral, was worthless by 1989 as inflation broke the 1000% barrier. General strikes brought Buenos Aires to a halt, mobs looted grocery stores, and the nation prepared itself for another political meltdown as the 1989 elections approached.

Menem and The Roaring Nineties