WikipediaExtracts:Infamous Decade
Extracted from Wikipedia --
The Infamous Decade (Spanish: Década Infame) was a period in Argentine history that began with the 1930 coup d'état against President Hipólito Yrigoyen. This decade was marked on one hand by significant rural exodus, with many small rural landowners ruined by the Great Depression, which in turn pushed the country towards import substitution industrialization, and on the other hand, conservative governments stayed in power perpetually by electoral fraud. The poor results of economic policies and popular discontent led to another coup in 1943, the Revolution of 1943, by the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (GOU), a nationalist faction of the Armed Forces, which triggered the rise to power of Juan Perón.
Besides electoral fraud, this period was characterized by the persecution of the political opposition (mainly against the UCR) and generalized government corruption, against the background of the Great Depression. The impact of the economic crisis forced many farmers and other rural workers to relocate to the outskirts of the larger cities, resulting in the creation of the first villas miseria (shanty towns). Thus, the population of Buenos Aires jumped from 1.5 million inhabitants in 1914 to 3.5 million in 1935. Lacking in political experience, in contrast with the European immigrants who brought with them socialist and anarchist ideas, these new city dwellers would provide the social base, in the next decade, for Peronism.
The democratic liberal senator Lisandro de la Torre (founder in 1914 of the Democratic Progressive Party) denounced various scandals, directing an investigation on the meat trade starting in 1935. In the midst of the investigation, de la Torre's disciple, senator-elect Enzo Bordabehere, was murdered by Ramón Valdez Cora on the Senate floor, and the province of Santa Fe was intervened. The murder was depicted by Juan José Jusid's 1984 film, Asesinato en el Senado de la Nación. CHADE (Compañía Hispano Argentina de Electricidad, an offshoot of the Sofina multinational conglomerate) was also at the heart of an important political and financial scandal. The CHADE scandal, symbol of the Infamous Decade, led to investigations following the revolution of 1943 that deposed Ramón Castillo's government in a military coup, and to the subsequent Rodríguez Conde report on concessions given to the electrical companies.
In 1931, a year after the execution of the Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni and his comrade Paulino Scarfó—who had implemented a propaganda of the deed campaign aimed both at international support of the Sacco and Vanzetti case and at attacking Fascist Italy's interests in Argentina—three anarchists were given life sentences during a show trial in which they were tortured, on the charges of having assassinated family members of conservative politician José M. Blanch. Known as the "prisoners of Bragado" (presos de Bragado), the case raised international public indignation. Anarchists, who had created a solidarity network with comrades expelled under the 1902 Law on Residency which legalised the expulsion of immigrants who "compromise national security or disturb public order", were considered as public enemies by Uriburu's dictatorship. Prior to their execution, three anarchist bombs had detonated at three strategic places on the Buenos Aires railway network on January 20 1931, killing three and wounding 17. In 1942, Minister Solano Lima signed the prisoners' releases; their names were cleared by a 1993 law upheld by Socialist deputy Guillermo Estévez Boero. In 2003, a law granted a pension to the daughter of one of the anarchist victims of this show trial.
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