With a deft narrative hand, Jennifer Adair immerses readers in ten eventful years of Argentine history, beginning with the fall of General Jorge Videla and ending with the election of Carlos Menem in 1989. In succession appear General Leopoldo Galtieri's ill-conceived Malvinas War, the slow military departure from power, the stunning victory of Raúl Alfonsín in October 1983, the trial of the Juntas, the run-ins with the International Monetary Fund, and the financial crisis of 1989.
These milestones punctuate Adair's narrative without defining it. Instead, the author follows an analytical plot line centered on the quest for food security amid the global crisis of state-centered welfare capitalism. The global crisis carried consequences in places such as Quilmes, a working-class municipality in the southern industrial belt of Buenos Aires. In August 1981, Bishop Jorge Novak confronted the military by organizing the March for Hunger in Quilmes. The police canceled the march, but the bishop still officiated a mass in which he shamed the state for the paradox of a country that prided itself as the breadbasket of the world while failing to feed its own citizens. As other neighborhoods followed Quilmes's example by opening soup kitchens and organizing protests, the civilian and labor opposition to the dictatorship seized the movement, demanding “bread, peace and jobs” of a regime unwilling and unable to provide any of them.
As Adair reminds us, Radical Party presidential candidate Raúl Alfonsín made of the fight against hunger a central tenet of his campaign. Studies on the post-dictatorship period tend to focus on the policy of redressing human right abuses, but Adair emphasizes that Alfonsín's agenda of bolstering democratic institutions while uncovering the crimes of the dictatorship was sustained with a plan to bring the benefits of democracy to everyone by literally putting food on poor people's tables. Alfonsín's National Alimentary Program (PAN) distributed boxes of non-perishables that covered about a quarter of a family's nutritional intake. Even though this sort of policy initiative can be easily overlooked, Adair convincingly places it at the center of Alfonsín's government push to create a rights-based popular democracy and, by the same token, erode the Peronist monopoly as advocate for social justice.
In an attempt to keep the market supplied and inflation in check, the Alfonsín administration applied a panoply of heterodox tools, some pretty standard such as price controls, others more extravagant such as purchasing frozen chickens from Yugoslavia. Those attempts proved unable to beat the stubborn stagflation that accompanied Alfonsín for most of his term, and the exhilaration brought by the end of dictatorship was quickly curbed. Furthermore, as Adair shrewdly observes, the failure of heterodox economics lent credence to a growing chorus of anti-welfarist commentators who prepared the public for the incoming onslaught of neoliberal reforms. For six years, Alfonsín resisted the bitter reforms prescribed by the International Monetary Fund in exchange for debt-relief loans. When he finally caved in, it was already too late.
In 1989, the multilateral lenders left Argentina to its own financial devices, prompting an unprecedented bout of hyperinflation. In May 1989, when Argentina held the first presidential elections under democracy in 40 years, the country should have been celebrating the consolidation of democratic institutions. Instead, food prices jumped at the rate of 750 percent a month, prompting poor people to riot and loot supermarkets. Democracy proved resilient, but the quest for food security had emphatically failed. These events facilitated Menem's task of imposing the reforms demanded by the IMF, and the rest is neoliberal history.
Centering her analysis on the politics of food, Adair makes an exciting contribution to Argentine history that weds public policy with social history. Eminently readable and analytically deep, this book is highly recommendable for undergraduate and graduate Latin American history courses.
