The dictatorship headed by General José Félix Uriburu and his vice president, the rancher Enrique Santamarina, who after the civic-military coup of September 6, 1930, had imposed the death penalty, torture on political opponents through the “Social Order Section”, directed by Commissioner Leopoldo “Polito” Lugones (son of the poet), was plagued by acts of corruption that did not come to light due to the censorship imposed on all press media.
The social crisis unleashed after the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and extended to the entire world, It caused misery and unemployment in many Argentine homes.
The main opposition party, the Radical Civic Union, was banned and its main leaders, including the ousted president, Hipólito Yrigoyen, were detained or in exile.
Faced with this bleak panorama, Lisandro De la Torre decided to regain contact with his old ideas companions and with the leadership of the Socialist Party.
From these meetings emerged the Democratic Socialist Alliance, which will lead to the national elections of November 8, 1931. the Lisandro De la Torre – Nicolás Repetto formula, which will confront the ruling party represented by the duo composed of General Agustín P. Justo and Julio A. Roca (son).
The program of the opposition Alliance contemplated the aspirations of the middle and working classes in a time of global crisis and growing unemployment and He was ahead of his New Deal postulates carried out starting in 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States, the basis of the welfare state.
The position of the Church
The Argentine Catholic Church prohibited its parishioners from voting for parties that in their platform contained programs of school secularism, binding divorce and separation of the Church from the State, in obvious allusion to the Democratic Socialist Alliance.
It did not escape Lisandro that the regime was preparing a scandalous fraud and warned: “The election will say the last word. With the triumph of fraud, a time of unrest will open, capable of leading the Republic to anarchy. The provisional government is not unaware of this, and it will be their fault for the tremendous misfortunes that may occur.” (1)
As expected, the old practices of electoral fraud returned, which they now called “patriotic,” because According to its executors, it was practiced to save the country from the government of the radical “rabble.”
Thus a scandalous fraud was consummated throughout the country. As in the times prior to the Sáenz Peña Law, The dead voted again, ballot boxes were burned and thugs were placed at the voting stations. With these methods, the regime’s formula, Justo-Roca (son) obtained 606,526 votes and the Alliance 487,955.
Federico Pinedo himself, a future elected government official, describes those “civic days” like this:
“Rather than fraudulent elections It is worth saying that on those occasions there were no electionsbecause no one tried to make us believe that there were normal electoral events in which the people had expressed their opinion. “More than a parody of elections, there was an ostensible and confessed denial of the electoral right of the Argentine people or a part of it.” (2)
Lisandro, pressured by his friends, agreed to occupy a seat in the Senate of the Nation representing the Democratic Progressive Party that, despite the fraud, had managed to prevail in Santa Fe and Luciano F. Molinas was elected as governor and Isidro Carreras, as vice president.
Also in the Capital it was more difficult for the regime to carry out such a notable fraud. In this way socialism achieved the district’s two senators: Alfredo Palacios and Mario Bravo.
1. In Raúl Larra, Lisandro de la Torre, Life and drama of the solitary of Pinas, Buenos Aires, 1942.
2. Federico Pinedo, Argentina in the vortex, Buenos Aires, Mundo Forense, 1946.
