Hipolito Yrigoyen

Hipolito Yrigoyen was the first Argentine president elected by secret universal male suffrage, and his second term ended in the coup that began sixty years of military intervention. He built the Radical Civic Union through decades of abstention and three failed risings, refusing to contest elections he considered fraudulent, until the Saenz Pena law of 1912 made the ballot secret and compulsory. He won in 1916. His presidency extended labour arbitration, created a state oil company, and reformed the universities after the Cordoba movement of 1918, which spread across Latin America. It also included the Tragic Week of 1919, when the army and civilian bands killed hundreds of striking metalworkers and carried out a pogrom in the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, and the killing of striking farm workers in Patagonia in 1921. He kept Argentina neutral in the First World War. Re-elected by a large margin in 1928 at seventy-six, he was by then remote and slow, the Depression cut export prices in half, and General Uriburu removed him in September 1930 in the first military coup in Argentina since the constitution. He died three years later and the crowd at his funeral was enormous. He lived austerely, gave away his salary, and never married, and the combination of personal asceticism and impenetrable vagueness in public was part of his appeal; opponents called him the Armadillo. The 1930 coup was endorsed by the supreme court in a decision that supplied a legal formula for every coup that followed. Argentina had eleven more before 1983.

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