Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Thus was born the age of neoliberalism, so-named because its eco-
nomic principles paralleled those that had held sway a century before
during the liberal age. The hallmarks of neoliberalism were open mar-
kets, foreign investment, sales of state industries, lowering of trade bar-
riers, labor flexibility, emphasis on exports, reduction of bureaucracy,
relaxation of government regulation, and absorption of new technolo-
gies. Politicians swore allegiance to these principles, as the IMF looked
on approvingly. But neoliberalism had its enemies in a society as frac-
tured and discriminatory as Argentina's, and the civilian politicians
would prove themselves just as inept at pursuing the neoliberal agenda
as they had been at the populist one.
The Attack on Impunity
Argentines of all classes viewed the immunity of the military as the
number one national problem in 1983. The weekly march of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued into the period of electoral
governments, and the public demanded accountability for the victims
and perpetrators of the Dirty War. President Alfonsín, therefore, cre-
ated the National Commission on Disappeared Persons. The novelist
Ernesto Sábato
(OnHeroesandTombs)
presided over the commission,
whose 120 employees traveled the country collecting documents and
taking depositions from victims of torture and from the families of
desa-
parecidos.
Exiled former prisoners of the military government returned
to give testimony.
Alfonsín had envisioned that the National Commission on Disappeared
Persons would conclude its investigation within six months and turn
over its findings to the civilian courts for the quick prosecution of the
top officers in the Dirty War. If he wished to deal with the problem of
the disappeared expeditiously without provoking an armed response
from the military, the president had miscalculated.
From the beginning, Alfonsín's policy met resistance on all sides.
Right-wing critics suggested that the process discounted the grave dan-
ger that the armed guerrillas had posed to the nation. Military officers
now viewed the Radical Party as a group of communists, notwithstand-
ing prior Radical support for the military's de-Peronization. On the left
stood the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Nobel laureate Adolfo
Pérez Esquivel. They refused to endorse the commission because they
suspected that the president really intended to limit the search for the
missing and restrict the prosecution to those officers who gave the
orders and not the thousands more who carried out the torturing and
