Argentina’s Cycle of Military Coups May Be Over : Next Year Should See First Transition From One Civilian to Another Since 1938

Nearly five years after the restoration of democratic rule, Argentina’s political system is maturing, and its leaders believe they have finally broken the cycle of military coups over the past half-century.

Despite manifold economic miseries and occasional military grumbling, President Raul Alfonsin is virtually certain to hand over power next year in the nation’s first transition from one elected civilian leader to another since 1938.

The opposition Peronists, contending that they have shed the authoritarian ways of their founder, Gen. Juan D. Peron, are campaigning toward a June 26 party primary whose victor stands a strong chance of winning the presidency in the election scheduled for May, 1989. Alfonsin’s left-of-center party, the Radical Civic Union, is likely to nominate Eduardo Angeloz, a fiscal conservative who seeks to distance himself from the incumbent’s inflationary ways.

Whoever wins next year, Argentines agree that the nation will mark the consolidation of a system built around two political movements that are relatively balanced in strength and equally committed to democracy.

The mere holding of the election will underscore a change that was little anticipated in the 1970s. In that era, an elected Peronist administration fell to a military coup less than two years after Peron’s death in 1974. Left-wing guerrillas were active in pursuit of revolution and the armed forces--acting initially at the direction of Maria Estela Peron, who had succeeded her husband as president--ordered roundups in the night.

“Many people may criticize us, but they are not asking the generals to come in and take over. And the military never intervened in Argentina without being asked to do so by significant sectors of society,” said Aldo Carlos Neri, a former Cabinet member and now secretary of the Radical party’s congressional caucus.

‘Symbol of Maturing’

“To hand the presidency to another candidate will be a symbol of the maturing of democracy,” he said. “It is an indispensable element for our future.”

With annual inflation of about 270%, declining real income and a plunging national currency, Argentines are morose, and such crises have provoked military intervention in the past. But memories of the last seven-year military regime remain strong and not only because of its brutal repression. Few have forgotten that military administrations did most of the borrowing that gave Argentina its current $55-billion foreign debt.

Most Argentines also recognize that repeated coups and periodic instability since 1930 have frightened away foreign investors and sped the flight abroad of Argentine capital, estimated to total $25 billion to $35 billion in recent decades. Not since Roberto M. Ortiz succeeded Agustin P. Justo in 1938 has an elected president finished his six-year term and turned the office over to an elected successor.

The awareness of the cost of discontinuity has given all sides reason to make the system work this time.

Changing Peronist Stance

While critical of their policies, Neri described the Peronists as solidly committed to a democratic future and said that they also have broadened and democratized their grass-roots internal structures since 1983.

“This is one of the most important recent achievements because it means our institutions are maturing,” he said in an interview. “And we won’t have growth without stability. There won’t be any investment without confidence in the stability and continuity of our institutions and our constitution.”

Alfonsin has helped ensure national respect for utterly free expression, even though that has exposed him to excoriating criticism for the Radicals’ economic failings. Protesters frequently disrupt downtown traffic with marches, courteously escorted by police. In a nation of chronic complainers who customarily focus their ire on the government itself, the government has erected no barriers to inhibit this national pastime.

Antonio Troccoli, a former interior minister in Alfonsin’s government and a Radical party leader, acknowledged that the government has failed to live up to some of its promises, particularly on freeing up the bureaucracy-laden government. Nevertheless, Troccoli said, Alfonsin “set the direction, and took the country with him. He sowed the ideas of modernization. Now, if we don’t follow through and reform the national government, the people will lynch us.”

Troccoli said that Alfonsin took a crucial step toward protecting democracy by curtailing prosecutions for human rights abuses committed by the 1976-83 military government. After a barracks uprising by junior officers in April, 1986, Alfonsin agreed to restrict prosecutions to the highest officers who made policy during the “dirty war” against left-wing subversion, in which at least 9,000 people disappeared.

The decision cost Alfonsin considerable support among human rights proponents and spurred conflict within his own party. But Troccoli said the benefits became clear when the army itself put down a similar rebellion in January, demonstrating its loyalty to the constitution.

Some dissent persists in the military. Army Lt. Col. Aldo Rico, the leader of the two uprisings, issues periodic public statements from his jail cell attacking what he calls the “idle armed bureaucracy” heading the armed forces and lamenting that the nation’s “political authority is non-existent.” But the military leaders regularly profess their commitment to the democratic system, and Rico is believed to have few followers.

“The most important change in the past five years is that democracy has been ingrained in the conscience of the people,” Troccoli added. “The system is fortifying itself and is in much better shape to withstand any threats.”

Italo Luder, the Peronist candidate who lost to Alfonsin in the 1983 election, said the reincorporation of the Peronist party in the national political scene has been the key to Argentina’s renewed faith in democracy.

Championed Working Class

The Justicialist Party, as it is formally called, governed from 1946 to 1955 and again from 1973 to 1976, championing the working class, but it also was banned for a total of 18 of the past 33 years. Luder, a constitutional law professor, said that by denying the voters a choice, successive civilian and military governments provoked an inherent instability that ended only when Peronism was allowed to compete again in 1983.

Since then, younger members--the renovadores or renovators, as they call themselves--have “institutionalized Peronism, building a party structure that has won public confidence,” Luder said.

Troccoli said: “There is something new in the country--two balanced parties. Peronism was always hegemonistic, so democracy was frozen. Today, either party can win, there can be a change.”

Indeed, there are four political forces. In addition to the democratized Peronists and the nearly century-old Radical Civic Union, one of Latin America’s oldest mass-based parties, voters can opt for the free market-oriented Union of the Democratic Center or any of several small leftist parties, including the Communists. As frustration with the intractable and inefficient state bureaucracy has grown, the conservative UDC has attracted increasing support.

The universal accord in favor of democracy by no means translates into political harmony. The Peronists are fiercely critical of the Radicals, and internally they are seriously divided.

Gov. Antonio Cafiero of Buenos Aires province, the Peronist party president, is waging a bitter primary campaign against Carlos Saul Menem, governor of the small province of La Rioja and Peronism’s No. 2 official, for the Justicialist Party’s presidential nomination.

Low Key, Polished

Cafiero, a former economy minister in the last Peron government, is low-key and polished and has the backing of many of Peronism’s bright young activists. Menem, with his long hair and bushy sideburns, harks back to the days of the Latin American caudillo, or political boss, with a strong dose of Peron-style populism. Although a renovador himself, Menem has a disparate following.

Some political observers fear Menem’s supporters could foster a split in the party if Menem loses the primary, which would severely hurt the party’s chances against the Radicals’ Angeloz next year.

The Peronist party favors a moratorium on Argentina’s foreign debt, but it also endorses measures to open up the economy to controlled foreign investment, reversing a legacy of Peronist protection for inefficient industries dating from the 1940s that has been nurtured by subsequent governments.

Angeloz, the governor of influential Cordoba province, seeks drastic reductions in the inflationary budget deficit and wants the state to sell off many of its enterprises.

Reducing Inflation

Troccoli and Neri say structural reforms that are belatedly under way now will reduce inflation from 18% a month to below 10% by the end of the year. Confidence will grow, they contend, giving Angeloz a chance to surmount the Peronists’ lead in recent polls.

Luder counters that either Peronist candidate will prevail over Angeloz because the public is so fed up with the Radicals’ inability to forge a coherent economic policy that lasts more than a few months.

“In any case, there is no possibility of a coup or an institutional break. There is wide agreement that the focal point must be compliance with the constitution,” Luder said. “Now, if the people are unhappy with their government, they have alternatives. They can vote for someone else.”