On October 12, 1916, Hipólito Yrigoyen assumed the presidency of Argentina. It was an exceptional day. A multitude of people filled the Plaza del Congreso and adjacent streets, cheering for a president who for the first time had been chosen in elections with universal adult male suffrage, a secret ballot, and a compulsory vote, as stipulated in the new electoral law passed in 1912, thanks to the efforts of President Roque Sáenz Peña. Following the inauguration ceremony, the crowd unleashed the horses of the presidential carriage and dragged it triumphantly to the Casa Rosada, the presidential residence and seat of...

Hipólito Yrigoyen served as president from 1916 to 1922, the year that Marcelo T. de Alvear succeeded him in the presidency. In 1928, Yrigoyen was reelected, only to be deposed by a military revolt on September 6, 1930. It would be another sixty-one years before an elected president would peacefully transfer power to his successor. Thus, these twelve years in which democratic institutions began to function normally turned out to be an exceptional period in the long run.

Even though both Yrigoyen and Alvear were Radicals and had shared in the party’s many struggles, the two presidents were very different;...

On September 6, 1930, General José Félix Uriburu assumed power as provisional president, transferring the office on February 20, 1932, to General Agustín P. Justo, who had been elected, together with the vice president Julio A. Roca, in November of the previous year. In the interim, the provisional government had presided over elections for governor in the province of Buenos Aires on April 5, 1931, in which the Radical candidate, Honorio Pueyrredón, had won, only to have the election annulled. This episode shows the uncertainty with which the government struggled, wavering between “national regeneration” and constitutional restoration.

Uncertainty was common...

The military government that assumed power on June 4, 1943, was headed in succession by General Pedro Pablo Ramírez and General Edelmiro J. Farrell. But Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, one of the government’s leading members, was successful in rallying a vast political movement around his persona, permitting him to win the February 1946 elections shortly after his popular support was demonstrated in a watershed day, October 17, 1945. Perón completed his first six-year administration and was reelected in 1951, only to be overthrown by a military coup in September 1955. In these twelve years when he was the country’s central...

The day after the coup—if not before—the heterogeneity of the front that had conspired to overthrow Perón could be seen. General Eduardo Lonardi headed the new government and declared himself provisional president, thereby indicating his resolve to restore constitutional order. Surrounded by Catholic groups—the most active but also newcomers to the opposition—and by nationalist military figures, the leader of theRevolución Libertadora(Liberating Revolution) proclaimed that there would be “neither victors nor vanquished” and sought to find common ground among the principal forces that had backed Perón, particularly the unions. In his opinion, the nationalist and...

A broad consensus surrounded the coup d’état of June 28, 1966. Both big and small business, the majority of the political parties—with the exception of the Radicals, Socialists, and Communists—and even many groups on the far left were content with the end of “bourgeois” democracy. Perón gave it qualified support, though he recommended a wait-and-see attitude to his followers, “to get off the saddle until the weather clears,” as he put it. The Peronist politicians were less equivocal and the union leaders downright elated, attending the new president’s inauguration while contemplating the continuance of the traditional space for...

On March 24, 1976, the Junta commanders-in-chief, General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Air Force Brigadier Orlando Ramón Agosti, assumed power. They immediately issued the legal instruments of the so-called Process of National Reorganization and designated General Videla president of the nation; he also continued as army commander until 1978.

The economic crisis of 1975, the crisis in leadership, the factional struggles and the daily presence of death, the spectacular actions of the guerrilla organizations—which had failed in two major operations against military installations in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Formosa—the terror sown by...

The new president, Raúl Alfonsín, assumed the presidency on December 10, 1983, and a crowd gathered in the Plaza de Mayo for his inauguration. To signal both the continuities and the break with the country’s previous political tradition, he jettisoned the practice of speaking from the “historic balconies” of the presidential palace. Instead, he chose to speak from the nearbyCabildo, the historic seat of municipal government and since independence a symbol of Argentine democracy. As in 1916, the multitude that spilled into the streets during the presidential inauguration believed that the citizenry had attained power. It was soon evident,...

On July 9, 1989, President Alfonsín handed over power to the president-elect, Carlos Saúl Menem. This occasion was the first peaceful transfer by one democratically elected president to another since 1928 and the first since 1916 in which a president ceded power to the candidate of an opposition party. These facts spoke well of the consolidation of the democratic regime reestablished in 1983, but the significance of the transfer was clouded by a serious crisis. The hyperinflation unleashed in April continued until August. In July, inflation reached 200 percent, and in December it was still 40 percent. While some converted...

TheAlianzagovernment was forced to deal with a complex economic situation centered on the maintenance or abandonment of the Convertibility Plan. President de la Rúa resigned in December 2001 when a deep economic, political, and social crisis erupted, and Eduardo Duhalde was chosen by the Congress to complete his term. The crisis fully unfolded throughout 2002, but by early 2003 the government had managed to get a handle on the principal problems. In May of that year Néstor Kirchner was elected president. Kirchner initially continued with the policies begun by Duhalde, with the collaboration of the minister of economy,...

Late 2005 marked the beginning of the period dominated by Néstor Kirchner; it would conclude with his death in October 2010. In December 2007, he completed his presidential term and was succeeded by his wife, Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who took office with Julio Cobos of the UCR as her vice president. Thus began a singular and unprecedented political period, in which former president Kirchner maintained an important role in directing the government’s affairs.

In 2008, the intense conflict with the organizations representing rural interests ended with a severe defeat for the government and the resurgence of an opposition....

It is not easy to end a book when, as in our case, a political cycle is still under way and full of unknowns for its contemporaries. Nonetheless, I believe that something has ended with the death of Néstor Kirchner—kirchnerismo—and that we are in the first act of a new period ofcristinismo. It is too soon to assess the magnitude of their differences and to determine whether they are only differences of style and emphasis, or also of direction. Nevertheless, it does not seem likely that the structural conditions upon whichkirchnerismowas based will return—above...