Argentina's history: sixty-eight years of constitutional rule, then six coups

Who lived in Argentina before the Spanish

The first human settlements in the territory reached the southern tip of Patagonia around 13,000 years ago. Large areas of the interior and the Andean piedmont appear to have been emptied during a long dry period between 4000 and 2000 BC, and the population stayed thin until Europeans arrived.

The Uruguayan archaeologist Raúl Campá Soler sorted the peoples of the territory into three broad groups: hunters and gatherers without pottery, more advanced hunters and gatherers, and farmers who made pottery. The first group lived on the Pampas and in Patagonia. Farming reached as far south as southern Mendoza, and by the 1550s no farming was recorded in northern Patagonia, where the grasslands and their guanaco herds favoured hunting.

The north-west was different. In the late 15th century the Inca Empire under Topa Inca Yupanqui conquered the peoples of the Quebrada de Humahuaca to secure silver, zinc and copper. That rule lasted about half a century and ended when the Spanish arrived in 1536.

How Buenos Aires rose from a smuggling port

A Spanish expedition under Juan Díaz de Solís reached the Río de la Plata in 1516, and Pedro de Mendoza set up a settlement on the site of Buenos Aires in 1536 that was abandoned in 1541. The colony was built from the north, out of Peru. Córdoba was founded in 1573, and Juan de Garay refounded Buenos Aires in 1580.

For two centuries the interior mattered more than the coast. San Miguel de Tucumán led the region from the late 16th century through the 17th, supplying the silver district of Upper Peru with food and livestock in exchange for European goods. Córdoba took over in the 17th and 18th centuries, helped by its central position and by its university, founded in 1613.

Buenos Aires had no precious metals and no legal trade. Shipments were supposed to pass through Callao near Lima, so contraband became the normal way of doing business in Buenos Aires, Asunción and Montevideo. That changed in 1776, when Spain created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata out of lands taken from Peru: modern Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, with much of present-day Bolivia. Buenos Aires became its capital and, for the first time, its port was opened to transatlantic trade through Spain. Legal trade and smuggling both grew.

British forces attacked Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806 and 1807 and were repelled both times, without help from Spain. Britannica dates the independence movement from those two defeats.

Why independence came in two steps

Napoleon's intervention in Spain from 1808 and the capture of Ferdinand VII left the empire without a lawful king. Creoles in Buenos Aires argued that under old Spanish law the king's American dominions could govern themselves until he returned. In the week of 18 to 25 May 1810 an open meeting of the municipal council was called, Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros resigned under pressure, and the Primera Junta took his place.

The junta governed in the name of Ferdinand VII. It declared nothing. The formal break came six years later, when a congress meeting at San Miguel de Tucumán declared independence on 9 July 1816 under the name of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.

The old viceroyalty did not hold together. Paraguay was lost in 1814. Bolivia declared itself independent in 1825, and Uruguay was created in 1828 after the Cisplatine War. José de San Martín raised the Army of the Andes in Mendoza, crossed into Chile and then moved on Peru, the royalist base, which he and Simón Bolívar liberated between 1820 and 1824. The United Kingdom recognised Argentine independence in a treaty signed on 2 February 1825.

Why the provinces fought Buenos Aires for decades

The Argentine Civil Wars ran from 1814 to 1853 and turned on one question: whether the country would be governed from Buenos Aires or as a federation of autonomous provinces. Unitarians wanted a strong central government led by the port city. Federalists wanted provincial autonomy.

Money sat underneath the constitutional argument. Buenos Aires held the customs house of the only port, and the other provinces expected a share of its revenue. Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, kept the customs receipts for the city, arguing that Buenos Aires alone was paying the foreign debt. He ruled with extraordinary powers and a secret police, the Mazorca, and he refused to call a constitutional assembly.

Historians have not settled on him. Liberal historiography has generally treated Rosas as a dictator. Revisionist historians defend him for his defence of national sovereignty, in years when France blockaded Buenos Aires in 1838 and an Anglo-French fleet did so again in 1845. The catalogue records both readings.

Justo José de Urquiza, governor of Entre Ríos, allied with Brazil and Uruguay in 1851 and defeated Rosas at Caseros on 3 February 1852. A constitutional assembly followed. The Constitution of 1853 is, with amendments, the one still in force. Buenos Aires refused it and seceded, then won the next civil war, and Bartolomé Mitre was elected president of a unified country in 1862. The status of the city itself stayed open until 1880, when a rebellion in Buenos Aires was put down, the city was made federal territory and national capital, and the province moved its own capital to La Plata.

How immigrants and railways remade the country

The decades after unification changed who lived in Argentina and what it sold. Foreign capital and European immigrants arrived through the 1860s and 1870s; railways were built, and alfalfa, barbed wire, new breeds of cattle and sheep and finally refrigerated meat were introduced. British capital paid for a rail network running from the upriver provinces to Buenos Aires and the sea.

The population grew from under two million in 1869 to nearly eight million in 1914, by Britannica's figures. Between 1861 and 1920 about 1.5 million Spaniards and 3.8 million Italians settled, though not all stayed, and in 1914 almost 30% of the population had been born abroad. Law 1420 of 1884 made primary education free, universal and secular, and the Catholic Church's opposition led the Holy See to break off relations for several years.

The land those settlers and cattle went onto had been taken by force. The Conquest of the Desert, directed by Julio Argentino Roca, brought the wars with the Indigenous peoples of the southern Pampas and northern Patagonia to a close. In the 1879 campaign 6,000 soldiers armed with breech-loading rifles reached Choele Choel in two months, killing 1,313 people and capturing more than 15,000. The last battle was fought on 18 October 1884. The campaign's apologists describe it as a civilising mission and a defence against raids; revisionists call it a genocide.

Politics stayed closed. Roca's National Autonomist Party governed from 1880 to 1916 through presidents chosen by their predecessors. The Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 made voting compulsory and secret for all male citizens, and the first election under it in 1916 brought the Radical leader Hipólito Yrigoyen to power. He owed his victory to the popular vote, where his predecessors had been selected by the incumbent from a ruling circle.

Why the army kept removing Argentine governments

Yrigoyen was re-elected in 1928 by a margin of two to one. His government could not cope with the Great Depression, and in September 1930 the army expelled him from office. Britannica marks that as the end of 68 years of constitutional continuity and of a long expansion built on exporting raw materials.

The pattern that followed is the core of the country's 20th century. Six times in 46 years the armed forces removed a government:

What connects most of them is Peronism. Perón built a following in the unions from the labour department after 1943, and when he was arrested in October 1945 a strike and mass demonstration freed him on 17 October. He won the presidency in 1946, expanded labour rights, introduced the thirteenth-month bonus, nationalised the railways and the central bank, and purged schools and courts. Eva Perón ran a vast distribution of money, housing and jobs until her death in July 1952.

After his fall in 1955 Peronism was banned, and every civilian government for the next eighteen years was elected with Peronism excluded from the ballot. Frondizi won in 1958 with Peronist votes and fell in 1962 after Peronists won provincial elections, the province of Buenos Aires among them. Illia fell in 1966. Onganía's regime cleared five faculties of the University of Buenos Aires on 29 July 1966, and 301 professors went into exile. The Cordobazo of May 1969, a revolt of students and workers in Córdoba, decisively changed the political climate, and by 1973 the military had to let Peronism stand again. Perón returned, won 61.85% of the vote in September 1973 and died on 1 July 1974.

What the last dictatorship and the Falklands War left

On 24 March 1976 the armed forces deposed Isabel Perón. A junta closed Congress, banned unions and imposed censorship, and began what it called the National Reorganization Process. Security forces kidnapped, tortured and killed people they considered subversive, and hid the bodies. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons documented 8,961 disappeared people and noted that the true number must be higher. Estimates of all those killed run from 10,000 to 30,000. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo held weekly Thursday vigils in front of the presidential palace to demand news of their children.

The regime also brought Argentina to the edge of war with Chile. An arbitration court awarded three islands in the Beagle Channel to Chile on 2 May 1977, the junta declared the award void, and in December 1978 papal mediation stopped a military operation already under way. The Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984 ended the dispute.

In early April 1982 Argentine troops landed on the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. Britain sent a naval force, and the Argentine governor surrendered the islands on 14 June 1982. The war killed 649 Argentine and 255 British military personnel and three islanders. Leopoldo Galtieri resigned three days later, the regime lifted its ban on political parties, and Raúl Alfonsín won the election of 30 October 1983 with 52% of the vote.

Alfonsín created the investigating commission within a week of taking office, and in the Trial of the Juntas of 1985 five of nine former junta members were convicted. The Full Stop Law of 24 December 1986 granted an amnesty for acts committed before civilian rule returned, a military rebellion broke out in 1987, and Carlos Menem pardoned those accused, Galtieri among them, after taking office in 1989. The Supreme Court declared the amnesty laws unconstitutional in 2005, and prosecutions resumed.

How civilian rule held through repeated crises

Since 1983 no government has been removed by force, and the crises have been economic. Inflation reached almost 388% a year at the end of 1988, and Alfonsín handed over power five months early. Menem's economy minister Domingo Cavallo pegged a new peso to the United States dollar in 1991, and by August that year annual inflation had fallen to 1.5%. The Olivos Pact with the Radicals produced the constitutional reform of 1994, which allowed the president a second consecutive term.

The peg ended in collapse. In late 2001 depositors ran on the banks, the government froze withdrawals in the measure known as the corralito, and riots left dozens dead. Fernando de la Rúa resigned on 20 December 2001, and four more people held the presidency in the two weeks that followed. The country defaulted on its foreign debt, the peso was devalued, and by July 2002 it had lost three quarters of its value.

Néstor Kirchner took office on 25 May 2003 and restructured the debt in 2005; with a second swap in 2010 more than 90% of the original bondholders had accepted terms. Congress legalised same-sex marriage in July 2010. The holdout creditors who refused both swaps won in the courts of the United States, and in 2014 the country was in technical default again. Inflation returned as the chronic problem and stood at 143% a year in December 2023, when a new government took office promising deep cuts in state spending.

No coup has followed any of these crises. The anniversary of the 1976 coup, 24 March, is kept each year as a public holiday of remembrance.