"Our hap [fortune] is loss, our hope but sad despair," Shakespeare wrote in King Lear. This has often seemed to be the Argentine national motto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the wish to be as "rich as an Argentine" was common among Europeans, who saw the sons of the estancieros (owners of large farms) living well as they traveled throughout the continent.
In 1912, a new electoral law was passed ensuring greater democratic participation by the emerging middle class, represented by the Union Civic Radical Party. But the military began a half century of domination of politics in 1930, and in 1946 the populist Gen. Juan Perón increased the pace of state intervention in the economy and encouraged the consumption of the nation's resource base. The trend toward democratic capitalism had been reversed.
In 1955, Perón was forced into exile by coup. He had heavily taxed the agricultural sector, which preferred paying taxes to having land expropriated, and then used this money - and the foreign currency reserves built up in previous years - to pay for social programs. But the reserves ran out, the rural sector cut back on production, and Perón could no longer afford his programs. His former supporters, at that point, saw no advantage in opposing Perón's enemies in the military and the church.
The anti-Perónists in the military, who had disliked Perón's power base in the unions, would not allow his party to field candidates in any elections after 1955. They did allow Radical Party presidents to be elected on two occasions but each time threw them out when they were about to legalize Perónist electoral participation. But the particularly widespread and destructive riots begun in Cordoba in 1969 persuaded the military that it would have to let Perón back into the country if order was to be restored.
The now aged patron of the urban poor once again was elected president in 1973, but he was unable to manage the severe tensions that had developed among leftist students, older union leaders, and the military. When he died the next year, he bequeathed to his wife and vice-president, Isabel, a civil war between these groups.
The Perónist option having failed to restore order, the military retook power in a coup in 1976 and soon began an antisubversive war in which illegal and immoral tactics were used. The People's Revolutionary Army and the Montoneros were eventually defeated, but labor opposition to declining wages and increasing unemployment remained vigorous. In 1982, President Leopoldo Galtieri ordered a poorly planned invasion of the Malvinas Islands. The unexpected British response resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Argentine military. Discredited and more hated than ever before, the Argentine military saw its government collapse.
In the 1983 elections, Radical Party candidate Raul Alfonsin won with 53 percent of the vote. This was the first time the Perónists had lost a presidential contest in which they were allowed to participate, although of course it was also the first time they had run for the Casa Rosada without Juan Perón. Throughout his career, Alfonsin had been committed to democratic rights, institutions, and procedure. He not only defied the expectations of most by staying in office through the scheduled 1989 elections, but he overcame a number of military disturbances
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