In the late 1940s President Juan Peron and
his
legendary mistress-who-became-his-wife, Eva Duarte,
moved the country in populist and nationalist directions.
Although Peron had earned the rank of General within the Argentine
military, his relation with the military deterioated to the point that
his presidency was
repeatedly in jeopardy. After Eva
died in 1952 he was overthrown in 1955 by the military. While in
power Eva led and won the fight for the right of women to vote. With
the support of Eva's incredible
appeal to the working class poor from which she, an illegitimate
child, had emerged, Peron promoted nationalist, inward-looking
(especially import-substitution) economic development and forged a
strong alliance with
labor. It was the strength of labor that led the IMF to demand legislation
to "flexibilize" the labor market (in return for more IMF credit) which led the
de la Rua administration to buy off Senate votes for anti-labor legislation in
April 2000. September 2000 revelations of the scandal almost caused the fall
the of de la Rua government
in the fall of 2000.
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Peron lost power to the military in 1955 a few years after
Eva's early death (age 33) and was forced into political exile (he went to
Spain). He returned from exile to assume the Argentine presidency as an
elderly man in 1973 when another candidate ran as his surrogate. But with his
death in 1974, political chaos ensued and finally, in 1976 a military junta
installed a dictatorship and politics moved decidedly from the pro-labor,
populism of Peron to the extreme Right.
Writing
for the Michigan Journal of Political
Science, Katherine Metres argues that "policies of clandestine state terror which the
junta swiftly initiated were on a scale then unknown in Latin America... ."
Over 500 of Argentina's
military personnel have graduated from the School of Americas and
the most notorious of
the SoA graduates achieved their notoriety during the Dirty War.
During the Generals'
"Dirty War" against the political Left, as many as 30,000 people suspected of Leftist
leanings were killed.
Even for those who would rather forget this dark period in Argentine
history, the mothers of the sons and daughters who were killed during the Dirty War maintain a
weekly vigil at the Plaza de
Mayo in their unceasing effort
to find their grandchildren -- the infants (at the time of the reign of the
junta) who the
military adopted as their own after murdering the
parents. But the "Dirty War" is most deeply remembered for the "disappeared"
-- at least 12,000
persons who, we know from subsequent research, were tortured and often
executed by tossing
live, sedated bodies from military aircraft into the sea below.
Nunca Mas (Never Again)
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It is well known that the military pursued the war to
build popular support for their regime and, when the British responded with greater force than
anticipated and when the US supported Britian rather than Argentina, the loss of the war led to
the collapse of the regime in 1983, the year celebrated for the return to democracy. According to Alejandro Dabat and Luis Lorenzano (Argentina: The Malvinas and the End of Military Rule, 1984), a sharp decline in the Argentine economy and subsequent labor unrest led the Generals to invade the Falklands. On March 30, 1982 the military regime faced the largest public demonstration since their takeover in 1976. Three days later they invaded the Falklands. The economic recession that led to the Falklands War was more widespread than just Argentina. Much of it can be attributed to the enormous increase in world interest rates caused by a major tightening of monetary policy in the US.
Argentina's total external indebtedness went from $7.7bil
(at the end of 1975) to $49bil during the 7 year span of the military for an average
annual growth rate over 20%.
It has been argued that much of the sharp increase in Argentina's external during
the Dirty War falls under the legal category of
"odious debt" [undertaken by a prior, corrupt regime] and is, therefore, not
a legal obligation of a legitimate Argentine government.
According to the May 1999 issue of the New Internationalist,
In Argentina, there are no records for 80 per cent of the $40 billion borrowed by the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. A case in the courts there calls for the Government either to produce accounts or have the debts declared illegal. It is claimed that New York banks knew that money was being misused, with kickbacks and fraudulent loans to companies linked to the military, and that the IMF connived with the fraud. It is also clear that the military used some of the money to buy weapons used in the Falklands/Malvinas War.According to Jubilee 2000 the economist, José Luis Machinea, selected as Economics Minister under the new government elected in October 1999, played a role in the accumulation of debt during the military junta. In an article dated February 2000, Jubilee2000 states that
Machinea was Director of Public Finances of the Central Bank during the dictatorship, and oversaw phantom loans to YPF, the Argentine state oil company.
References:
Operation Condor
Emergence of new evidence on military terrorism in the Southern Cone.
