The Argentine military either held power or set the political rules for decades after it deposed populist Juan Perón in 1955 (see “Populism in Argentina and Brazil” in Chapter 31). By 1973 the armed forces conceded that their efforts to “de-Perónize” the country had failed. They allowed Perón to return, and he was again elected president, with his third wife, María Estela, known as Isabelita, as vice president. Soon after the election, Juan Perón died. Isabelita Perón, the first woman to become president in Latin America, faced daunting circumstances: Marxist groups such as the Montoneros waged a guerrilla war against the regime, while the armed forces and death squads waged war on them.

In March 1976 a military junta took power and announced a Process of National Reorganization. Influenced by French military theorists who had been stung by their defeats in guerrilla wars in Vietnam and Algeria, the generals waged a “dirty war,” seeking to kill and “disappear” people whom they considered a destructive “cancer” on the nation. As one general declared, “First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then . . . those who remain indifferent, and finally we will kill the timid.”3 Argentine military forces killed between fourteen thousand and thirty thousand of their fellow citizens during the dirty war.

A handful of mothers whose children had disappeared began appearing in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace holding pictures of their missing children and carrying signs reading “Where are they?” A growing organization of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was soon joined by the Grandmothers, who demanded the whereabouts of children born to women who were detained and disappeared while pregnant. These mothers were only kept alive until they gave birth. Their children were placed with adoptive families tied to the police or armed forces. Unlike in Chile and Brazil, in Argentina senior Catholic clergy did not advocate for human rights or the protection of dissidents. Instead Argentine bishops praised the coup and defended the military regime until it ended in 1983.

In 1982, emboldened by its success in eradicating its opposition, the Argentine junta occupied a set of islands off its southern coast that were claimed by Britain. Known in Britain as the Falklands and in Argentina as the Malvinas, the islands were home to a small British settlement. Britain resisted the invasion and the Falklands/Malvinas War resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Argentine junta. After the war the junta abruptly called for elections, and a civilian president took office in 1983.

The new president, Raúl Alfonsín, faced a debt crisis similar to Mexico’s that resulted from the junta’s failed effort to implement Chilean-style free-market reforms. He also had to figure out how to mete out justice for the crimes committed by the junta, whose members were tried and convicted. Their convictions created a backlash in the armed forces: mid-ranking officers revolted out of fear that they, too, would be prosecuted, and they forced the government to halt prosecutions. Alfonsín could not find a way out of the debt crisis and struggled to establish the rule of law in the aftermath of the dictatorship. He was succeeded by Carlos Menem, who tried a different approach. Menem pardoned the junta members and embarked on free-market reforms, privatizing businesses and utilities and reducing trade barriers. Investment flooded in, and Argentina seemingly put the past to rest.

As the capacity to attract foreign investment through privatization ran out by the end of the century, Argentina faced economic crisis again. In 2001, amid a run on banks and a collapse of the Argentine peso, the country had five different presidents in a single month. Eventually, the economy stabilized during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner, succeeded by his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Néstor Kirchner, who died in 2010 while Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was president, prosecuted those responsible for violence during the dirty war again. The Kirchners’ governments retried and convicted members of the junta and also prosecuted people further down the ranks of the police and the armed forces.