Two Cheers (and a Prayer) for Argentine Democracy

Over the past 30 years, Argentina has gone through four political phases in a downward spiral. Between Perón’s ouster in 1955 and 1966 it had an unstable and exclusionary democracy, interrupted by military coups. The Perónists were proscribed; elections were devious; and the governments had largely fictitious mandates. In 1966 the military suspended politics indefinitely, supposedly to spur development. The ensuing social tensions brought down the regime in 1972. The task of defusing ...