Raul Alfonsin

Raul Alfonsin was the president who returned Argentina to democracy in 1983 and put the men who had run the dictatorship on trial, which almost nobody expected any successor government to do. He was a provincial lawyer of the Radical party who had spent the years of the junta defending the relatives of the disappeared through a human rights assembly he helped found, at considerable personal risk, and who had opposed the Falklands war while it was popular. He won the first election after the military collapse. Within days he created the CONADEP commission under the novelist Ernesto Sabato, whose report Nunca Mas documented some 8,960 disappearances and sold enormously, and he put the nine members of the first three juntas before a civilian court in 1985. Videla and Massera received life. The trial is the reason Argentina is the reference case for prosecuting a dictatorship rather than amnestying it. Then the army mutinied three times, and he passed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws that halted prosecutions of junior officers - the compromise that shadows his reputation, and which was annulled in 2003. Hyperinflation reached some three thousand per cent in 1989 and he left office five months early. He was widely mourned in 2009. The Full Stop and Due Obedience laws were annulled by Congress in 2003 and ruled unconstitutional in 2005, after which the trials resumed and have continued since. Whether he could have gone further in 1987 with three army mutinies running is the question his defenders and critics still divide on. He negotiated the Beagle Channel settlement with Chile by referendum, avoiding a war the junta had nearly started.

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