Most Argentines find it difficult to feel optimistic about their future. This should be a heady, hopeful time. After nearly eight years of military misrule — a contemptible era marked by the military’s murder of thousands of civilians and by its foolish and humiliating adventure in the Falklands — the country is returning to civilian government. Yet, though there were celebrations over the defeat of Peronism and the election of Raul Alfonsin as president, the mood is made sober by the intractability of Argentina’s problems. The feeling of transformation experienced by Spain as it moved step by step from Francoism to democracy does not exist in Argentina. The victory last October of Alfonsin, a fifty-seven-year-old former congressman from the leftist wing of the middle-class Radical Civic Union, marked the first time that the Peronists had lost a presidential election. Many analysts believe that the defeat marks the end of the Peronist movement in Argentine politics. The wonder is not that Peronism may disappear but that it has lingered so long...

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