Reynaldo Bignone

Reynaldo Bignone
45th President of Argentina
De facto
In office
July 1, 1982 – December 10, 1983
Preceded by Alfredo Oscar Saint Jean
Succeeded by Raul Alfonsín
Personal details
Born (1928-01-21) January 21, 1928
Morón, Buenos Aires
Nationality Argentine
Political party None
Spouse(s) Nilda Raquel Belén
Children Cristina Raquel
Mabel Beatriz
Carlos Daniel
Profession Military
Religion Roman Catholicism
Military service
Allegiance  Argentina
Service/branch Argentine Army
Years of service 1947–1981
Rank Major General
Battles/wars Internal War

Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone (born January 21, 1928) is a retired Argentine general who served as dictatorial President of Argentina from July 1, 1982 to December 10, 1983. In 2010, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the kidnappings, torture, and murders of persons suspected of opposing the government in the Dirty War. Along with Basilio Lami Dozo and Omar Graffigna, he is one of the last surviving members of the military dictatorship. He is the last surviving de facto president of Argentina.[1]

Early career

Reynaldo Benito Antonio Bignone Ramayón was born in Morón, Buenos Aires in 1928. Enlisting in the Argentine Army in 1947, he enrolled at the prestigious National War College, and was stationed in Spain. After numerous assignments, Bignone returned to Argentina to be named head of the "General Viamontes" (6th) Infantry Regiment in 1964, and later directed the National War College. An August 1975 reshuffling of the Armed Forces High Command by President Isabel Martínez de Perón resulted in the appointment of General Jorge Videla to the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. A quiet career military officer, Videla brought with him a number of protégés, among them Brigadier General Bignone, whom Videla named Secretary of the Joint Chiefs.

The military reacted to worsening economic and security conditions by conducting a March 24, 1976 coup d'état against Mrs. Perón. The coup was welcomed by most Argentines at the time, following a wave of terrorism and kidnappings by leftist guerrilla groups, as well as by the far-right death squads of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.[2] On March 28, Bignone led a regiment into the Alejandro Posadas Hospital in the western Buenos Aires suburb of Haedo. He converted a wing in the respected medical facility into his personal "Chalet" (one of 340 detention centers operated by Argentina's last dictatorship).

Two days after the military coup and under his instructions, 36 members of the hospital's staff were detained for presumably having links with the ultra-left, and three (Jacobo Chester, Jorge Roitman and Julio César Quiroga) disappeared and are presumed to have been killed.[3] Bignone's quiet administration of the facility earned him a promotion as head of "Area 480," a larger detention center in Argentina's most important military training base, the Campo de Mayo. Of the 4,000 prisoners detained at the facility during his 1976–78 tenure, 50 survived.[4] He was appointed as Director of Military Institutes by President Videla in 1980.[5]

Bignone retired from the Armed Forces following Videla's decision to transfer power to General Roberto Viola in March 1981. Presiding over the unraveling of the dictatorship's economic policies, the ailing Viola was replaced in December by General Leopoldo Galtieri, the Army Chief of Staff and the junta leader closest to the Reagan administration in the United States. Argentina's defeat by the United Kingdom in the Falklands War on June 16, 1982, led not only to President Galtieri's resignation, but also to a power vacuum. The Chiefs of Staff of all three services resigned. Bignone's association with Videla, and his low profile before and after retirement, helped secure him the Presidency on July 1, 1982.

Presidency

Damage control

Inheriting international isolation and an economy hobbled by speculative losses and foreign debt exceeding US$40 billion, Bignone replaced Galtieri's conservative economic team with a moderate academic, Dr. José María Dagnino Pastore, as Minister of the Economy. Dr. Domingo Cavallo, a young, relatively unknown former adviser, was appointed as head of the Argentine Central Bank. Dagnino Pastore canceled his predecessor's wage freeze (which had caused a 30% collapse in real wages). He attempted, with only partial success, to curb the growing wave of exports transacted outside official channels. This practice, designed to take full advantage of the rapidly plummeting peso, deprived national coffers of foreign exchange and tax revenue on around 90% of Argentina's soy harvest, for instance (the fourth-largest in the World at the time).

Central Bank President Cavallo inherited external and internal financial crises: the first owing to foreign debt installments twice Argentina's trade surplus in 1982 and the second the result of Central Bank Circular 1050. The policy, instituted in 1980, tied adjustable loan installment to the value of the US dollar in Argentina, which rose more than tenfold in the year after March 1981. It had forced Argentine banks to write off billions in domestic business and mortgage loans (shattering lenders' confidence for years), and forced thousands of homeowners out of their homes. Cavallo rescinded Circular 1050 days into his tenure.

Cavallo also inherited a foreign debt installment guarantee program that shielded billions of private debt from the collapse of the peso, costing the treasury billions. He instituted controls over the facility, such as the indexation of payments, but this move and the rescission of the Circular 1050 threw the banking sector against him; Cavallo and Dagnino Pastore were replaced in August. Bignone's new President of the Central Bank, Julio González del Solar, undid many of these controls, transferring billions more in private foreign debt to the Central Bank, though he stopped short of reinstating the hated "1050."[6][7]

Uncomfortable with the media, Bignone's press statements were halting and laconic, leaving doubts as to the most pressing issue of the day: the imminent call for elections. His loosening of certain free speech restrictions also put his regime's unpopularity in evidence and the newsstands brimmed with satirical publications. Perhaps the most memorable, Humór, had its January 1983 issue confiscated after Army Chief of Staff, General Cristino Nicolaides, objected to caricaturist Andrés Cascioli's irreverent portrayals of the stodgy junta.[8]

Six years of intermittent wage freezes had left real wages close to 40% lower than during Mrs. Perón's rocky tenure, leading to growing labor unrest. Bignone's decision to restore limited rights of speech and assembly, including the right to strike, led to increased strike activity. Saúl Ubaldini, the new leader of the reinstated CGT, Argentina's largest labor union, was particularly active. Bignone's new Economy Minister, Jorge Wehbe, a banking executive with previous experience in the post, reluctantly granted two large, mandatory wage increases in late 1982. Calls for immediate elections led, likewise, to frequent demonstrations at the President's executive offices, the Casa Rosada. One such protest, on December 16, led to the death of a demonstrator. The return to democracy began to seem inevitable.[7]

Democratic way out

Supportive of this solution, which he termed a "democratic way out," Bignone was opposed by the Army Chief, General Nicolaides, and other conservatives. Partly in response, Bignone decreed a blanket amnesty on April 28, 1983 for those involved in human rights abuses (including himself). In statements made during his dour press statements, he conditioned the return to democracy by imposing limits to any future investigations of human rights violations that had taken place during the 1976-83 military dictatorship, as well as into allegations of insider trading, numerous extortion kidnappings and other corruption. Rejected by the majority of society, this proposal met with thunderous opposition from Raúl Alfonsín, the head of the centrist UCR's progressive wing.

Drawing a contrast between his position and the lukewarm reproach by others in his own party and in other parties, Alfonsín, who had also opposed the Falklands War when few others in Argentina did, earned his party's nomination in July. The hastily organized convention was called only days after Bignone publicly announced the scheduling of elections (to be held on October 30, three months after the announcement). The UCR's only important opposition, the Justicialist (Peronist) Party, was hamstrung by voters' memories of President Isabel Perón's chaotic two years in office and by internal friction that dragged their nominating process on by nearly two months.[8]

The Argentine economy, which had recovered modestly following the July 1982 rescissions of prevailing wage freezes and the "Circular 1050," was saddled with foreign debt interest payments of over US$4 billion, capital flight, budget deficits around 10% of GDP and a resulting rise in inflation: rising to 200% in 1982, it approached 400% in 1983. The peso in tatters (trading at 90,000 per US dollar by mid-1983), Economy Minister Jorge Wehbe trotted out a new currency in June, the peso argentino, to replace the worthless peso ley at 10,000 to one. This move secured him concessions from international creditors, but did not slow inflation, and the economy slipped back into recession during the second half of 1983.[9]

Careful to avoid the appearance of endorsement of any one candidate (a mistake made by a previous dictator, Gen. Pedro Aramburu, in 1958), Bignone oversaw the marathon shredding of documents and other face-saving measures, such as generous new wage guidelines. The economy, which had contracted by around 12% in the eighteen months before he took office, managed a recovery of around 4% during Bignone's eighteen-month term.[10] Following a brief, though intense campaign and tight polls, election night resulted in a decisive 12-point margin for the UCR's Alfonsín over Justicialist nominee Ítalo Lúder. Tied to repressive measures he signed in 1975, he could not avoid suspicion of a gentlemen's agreement with Bignone for the sake of preventing future investigations.[8]

Epilogue

President Néstor Kirchner had Bignone's portrait removed in 2004 from the National War College, which the general had directed in the 1960s

Presiding over a difficult six years, President Raúl Alfonsín advanced the Trial of the Juntas in 1985, proceedings which acquitted Bignone of responsibility, but left open the possibility of civil trials against him. These, however, were precluded by decrees signed by Alfonsín himself in early 1987, the result of pressure from the Armed Forces.[11]

Bignone published a memoir about his brief tenure, El último de facto (2003).[12] It was condemned for his marginalizing of Dirty War abuses. In January 1999, the courts reopened trials related to the taking of children from disappeared women and placing them in families with ties to the government.[13]

In 2003 people in Argentina were outraged by comments of Bignone and two other generals defending their actions during the Dirty War, expressed in the film documentary, Escadrons de la mort: l'ecole francaise (2003); this was directed by French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin. President Nestor Kirchner "ordered the military to bring charges against the three for justifying the crimes of the dictatorship."[14]

Bignone was granted house arrest in October 2006, given his advanced age. He was arrested in March 2007 and taken into custody at a military base outside Buenos Aires as part of an investigation into past human rights abuses, including the atrocities at the Posadas Hospital and trafficking of infants born to and abducted from the roughly 500 pregnant women who were among the disappeared. These were ruled to have no statute of limitations owing their nature as crimes against humanity.[15][16]

On 20 April 2010, Bignone was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the kidnapping, torture and murder of 56 people, including guerrilla fighters,[17] at the extermination center operating in the Campo de Mayo military complex.[18][19] On April 14, 2011, Reynaldo Bignone was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.[20]

On 29 December 2011 Bignone received an additional 15-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity for setting up a secret torture center inside a hospital during the 1976 military coup.[21]

On July 5, 2012, Bignone was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his participation in a scheme to steal babies from parents detained by the military regime and place them with friends of the regime. According to the court decision, Bignone was an accomplice "in the crimes of theft, retention and hiding of minors, as well as replacing their identities."[22]

References

Political offices
Preceded by
Alfredo Saint-Jean		 President of Argentina
1982–1983 		Succeeded by
Raúl Alfonsín
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