Word: alfonsin
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...upheaval began two weeks ago, with isolated outbreaks of looting in several provincial capitals. Widespread food riots broke out in Rosario (pop. 957,000) early last week, after lame-duck President Raul Alfonsin announced his fourth emergency economic plan of the year. Roving crowds, described by police as a mixture of the hungry, the criminal and the opportunistic, overwhelmed poorly prepared local police. Stores not gutted by looters closed their doors, creating widespread food shortages. The unrest then spread to the volatile working-class suburbs of Buenos Aires...
...Alfonsin responded by declaring a 30-day state of siege, which entitles police to detain suspected looters without charging them. The President, following the lead of provincial leaders, also ordered the creation of hundreds of soup kitchens and the free distribution of food. Some measure of order was restored after four days, but many citizens were calling for Alfonsin, whose Radical Civic Union party was convincingly defeated by Peronist Carlos Saul Menem in May 14 elections, to step down before his term ends on Dec. 10. When the two men met last week, however, they apparently agreed that an early...
Food riots in a country considered to be one of the world's breadbaskets amounted to a devastating indictment of the Alfonsin government, which failed to act quickly enough to put Argentina's fiscal house back in order in 1983, when Alfonsin became the first civilian President in nearly eight years. The former human-rights activist valued political stability at the expense of wrenching but necessary economic changes to correct the country's low productivity, over-regulation, bloated public payroll and money-losing state- owned companies. By the time Alfonsin began pushing for economic reforms in 1985, his popularity...
...Alfonsin's warning reflected the jitters of ordinary Argentines, who now add + the threat of political extremism to their litany of dissatisfactions. Faced with a collapsing economy, a strong Peronist revival and a restive military, Argentines will soon go to the polls in search of democratic solutions. Daily life in the once proud nation has been crippled by a 400% inflation rate, 12% unemployment or underemployment and, since 1981, a 40% drop in real wages. A crumbling infrastructure and labor strikes have curtailed mail delivery, disrupted phone service and left an energy shortage so severe that electricity is rationed...
...nothing in the past decade has troubled Argentina so much as the struggle to come to terms with the wanton brutality of the "dirty war," when an unchecked military visited a barbaric brand of justice on thousands of leftist rebels and their presumed sympathizers. Since 1983, when Alfonsin assumed power, his main political challenge has been to reconcile the populace's demand for justice against military excesses with the army's own demand for respect and recognition of its role in putting down a Communist insurgency. Over the past 22 months, disgruntled colonels have staged three uprisings, demanding pay raises...