The Argentine ambassador to Spain, Ricardo Alfonsín, recalled the carapintada uprising that in Holy Week in 1987 challenged the authority of his father, former president Raúl Alfonsín, and put Argentine democracy on edge, while he considered that this situation it was resolved thanks to the “support of the entire political force and society as a whole”.
“We were afraid that democracy would be interrupted like on other occasions and that the military coups would return,” Alfonsín said in statements to Destape Radio and said that “thank God things were resolved with the support of the entire political force and the society as a whole; and we continue today with the longest period in history from the point of view of democratic institutions”.
He also recalled the phrase, now historic, that his father pronounced when the rebellion was over and said: “The house is in order, happy Easter.”
He argued that “it was not to say ‘Happy Easter'” and affirmed that Argentina ran the risk that “the institutions of democracy would be interrupted, that we would return to military coups, that the President of the Republic would be assassinated or kidnapped, that one sector of the army will clash with the other”.
Recalling his father’s phrase, he warned that “the house is never in order” because “things are never definitively solved economically, politically, or socially.”
Asked about current affairs, the ambassador considered “the government is suffering from a great misunderstanding” and highlighted “the terrible economic difficulties” that it had to face “before the pandemic” and stressed that after the health crisis “things got very complicated plus”.
Along these lines, he stated that “decisions do not give results immediately, a great effort must be made to inform people, so that public opinion is not confused and does not believe that (the government) is going to solve a difficult situation inherited, plus the pandemic and the war, with policies like the ones that were applied from 2015 to 2019.”
“What does the opposition want? That the economy would have grown in this context, that investments would have grown?”
Likewise, he recalled that he does not belong to the “government party” and that he continues to “maintain radical convictions” beyond the “many differences” that distance him “from what the leaders” of the UCR are doing.
“Radicalism has allied itself in 2015 with a right-wing, neoliberal force. From my point of view, the alliance with the PRO is against nature,” he said and assured that Raúl “Alfonsín would never have worked for that alliance.”
