Word: alfonsin
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...same time, Alfonsin's victory brings to an end the military regime that ruled the country for almost eight turbulent years. Argentina is burdened with nearly 1,000% inflation, an unemployment rate of 15% and a $40 billion foreign debt, the world's third largest (after Brazil's $94 billion and Mexico's $91 billion). Moreover, the new President must bolster a nation demoralized by its ignominious defeat in the Falklands war last year and traumatized by the "dirty war" against leftists in which more than 6,000 people disappeared in the 1970s. So pressing...
Those problems were temporarily forgotten in the euphoria of election night. As the early Radical lead held, supporters chanting "Alfonsin! Alfonsin!" filled plazas across the nation. In Buenos Aires, caravans of celebrators sped through the streets honking horns and waving the party's red-and-white flags. At 3:15 a.m., Alfonsin addressed his backers from the balcony of the Radical party headquarters downtown in the capital. Abandoning the rhetoric of the campaign, Alfonsin sounded the notes of national unity. "We have won, but we have defeated no one," he proclaimed. "This is the triumph of all Argentina...
...nation's two major parties differed little on the issues, so the outcome depended on strategy and style. Alfonsin, who lost a bid for his party's nomination when elections were last held in 1973, concentrated on wooing the nation's 5 million first-time voters and persuading the working class that the Peronists were violence-prone and manipulated by corrupt union leaders. He also profited from divisions within the Peronist camp. After a brawling convention last September, the union leaders won the nod for Luder, a constitutional lawyer and former Senate president. Already perceived...
...Alfonsin crisscrossed the country, delivering as many as three rousing speeches a day and plunging into crowds with gusto. Luder, by contrast, seemed reserved and drab, an uninspiring speaker who rarely raised his voice or waved his arms. Toward the end of the campaign, nervous Peronists resorted to pairing Luder with the visage and recorded speeches of Juan Peron in television spots...
...defeat set off a fresh power struggle within the Peronist party. Several members urged that Isabel Peron, now 52 and self-exiled in Spain, return to take the party's helm. She dispatched a bizarre telegram to Alfonsin, misspelling his name and congratulating him in the name of the Peronist party, "over which I preside." Some demanded that Miguel and the other labor bosses be tossed out and the party cleansed of unsavory union influences...