Juan Perón suffered a series of
heart attacks on 28 June 1974; Isabel was summoned home from a European trade mission and secretly sworn in as acting president the next day. Although she lacked Evita Perón's charisma, the grieving widow at first attracted support from the nation. She pledged to uphold the
social market economy policies embodied in the 1973 "Social Pact" as well her husband's long-held
orthodox Peronism and
economic nationalism; her first significant economic policy decisions were the enactment of a new, pro-labor
employment contract law and the granting to
YPF a monopoly over
filling stations. Even leftist groups, having fallen out with Juan Perón in previous months, publicly offered support to her. However she cancelled meetings with various constituent and political groups, and the sympathy resulting from her husband's death soon dissipated. Her government purged most leftists from university posts and the administration, and (as her husband and other Argentine presidents had done) used
federal intervention powers to unseat leftist governors. Following a string of political murders and a break by the Montoneros with the government, on 30 September Perón signed the Anti-Terrorism Law. This was the first in a series of measures which eroded
constitutional rights, ostensibly for the sake of combating leftist violence. Aside from those State-sponsored atrocities, some violent acts were also being committed by left-wing civil extremists around the country. Organised in 1968, the anarchist
Montoneros kidnapped and killed former head of state
Pedro Aramburu, popular
CGT union Secretary General
José Ignacio Rucci, construction workers' union leader Rogelio Coria, former Interior Minister Arturo Mor Roig and U.S. Consul John Egan, among other murders and kidnappings. Throughout 1974, the rise of a new and nearly-as-violent
Trotskyist group, the
ERP, added to the cycle of violence. Having gained notoriety after the murder of
FIAT executive
Oberdan Sallustro, the ERP began the year with a violent assault on the
Azul barracks. It murdered, among others, a criminal court judge, Jorge Quiroga; the writer
Jordán Bruno Genta; and the publisher of
La Plata's centrist
El Día,
David Kraiselburd. The kidnapping of
Esso executive Victor Samuelson, freed for a ransom of US$12 million, ignited what would become a rash of such crimes. However, the government and paramilitaries used this environment to target and murder many legitimate opponents of the regime, as listed above. Following the murder of Buenos Aires Police Chief Alberto Villar (one of López Rega's closest collaborators in the Triple A) and his wife, as well as amid increasing activity by the ERP in the
Province of Tucumán, Perón was persuaded to declare a
state of siege on 6 November (suspending, among other rights,
habeas corpus). Censorship also increased markedly, culminating in the closure by decree of one of the leading news dailies in Latin America (
Crónica) and several other publications, as well as the banning of
Argentine television figures such as talk show host
Mirtha Legrand and comedian
Tato Bores.
Operation Independence began in Tucumán on 5 February 1975. This military campaign, though successful from a military standpoint, gained notoriety for its brutality; in addition to going after insurgents, it attacked elected officials, magistrates,
University of Tucumán faculty, and even secondary school teachers. The government turned on the labor movement, the mainstay of Peronism for the better part of a quarter-century, classifying it as "subversive" and subject to reprisals. The November 1974 election of a left-wing union shop steward at a
Villa Constitución steel mill and its disapproval by steelworkers' leader
Lorenzo Miguel (a leading figure in the paramount CGT), resulted in a brutal 20 March 1975 police assault on the facility. The raid, executed jointly with Triple A heavies, led to the "disappearances" of many of the 300 workers arrested. , while officially Minister of Social Welfare, broadly vetted Mrs. Perón's domestic and foreign policy until protests forced him to flee to Spain in July 1975. López Rega, meanwhile, arranged the dismissal of many of the most competent policy makers Perón had inherited from her husband's brief presidency; by May 1975, both Economy Minister
José Ber Gelbard and
Central Bank President Alfredo Gómez Morales had been replaced with right-wing López Rega loyalists. Isabel Perón initially maintained the Social Pact inherited from her husband, and succeeded in enhancing it with reforms such as the enactment in December 1974 of
payroll taxes to strengthen the
Public Retirement System. Yielding to pressure from
labor she ignored the
incomes policy aspect of the Social Pact, however, and while the economy remained otherwise stable, a
price/wage spiral ensued with inflation rising from a low of 12% a year at the height of the Social Pact in May 1974 to 80% a year later. The Social Pact also faced growing opposition by employers, particularly after conservative members of the General Economic Council (CGE) split from the conciliatory CGE in March 1975 to form the more combative APEGE; this group would later adopt the tactic of staging recurring
lockouts against the administration. Faced with record trade and budget deficits, the new Economy Minister, Celestino Rodrigo, proceeded to apply
economic shock therapy in June. These measures doubled rates and fares and ordered a surprise halving of the
peso's value, which, by forcing those who could to stampede towards the U.S. dollar, destroyed the fragile financial balance that had been maintained to that point.
Fall from power López Rega left the country on 19 July. Shortly afterward, Perón dismissed her protégés in the Economy Ministry, Celestino Rodrigo, and in the Armed Forces High Command, General Alberto Numa Laplane, whom she replaced in August with General
Jorge Videla, a quiet career officer with an uneventful military record. The Montoneros, moreover, began a series of audacious attacks on military installations, including August dynamiting of the nearly finished destroyer
Santísima Trinidad near the port of
La Plata and the
Operation Primicia, a terrorist attack on a military base in
Formosa Province on 5 October. Anxious to placate the exasperated public, the military, hard-line labor leaders (particularly the steelworkers'
Lorenzo Miguel), and most other Peronists, on 6 October she and Luder signed new measures giving blanket immunity for the
Armed Forces that they may (in her words) "annihilate subversive elements throughout the country" – in effect a nationwide extension of the state of siege that had been imposed in Tucumán. and with the resignation in January 1976 of Interior Minister Ángel Robledo, her chief legislative and military point man. Isabel Perón granted ever more significant policy concessions to the largely conservative military in the early months of 1976, from security matters to economic. The media were by then openly counting down the days to the expected coup d'état, and several newspapers published editorials calling for Perón's overthrow. Even as the joint chiefs professed loyalty to
La Presidente, the Armed Forces High Command had already given final approval to a coup, code-named 'Operation Aries', when the president returned from her leave of absence in October 1975. After working late into the evening of 23 March 1976, in the hope of averting a renewed business lockout, Perón celebrated her executive assistant's birthday with staff. Alerted to suspicious military exercises, she boarded the presidential helicopter shortly after midnight. It did not fly her to the
Quinta de Olivos presidential residence but to an Air Force base in nearby
Jorge Newbery International Airport, where she was formally
deposed and arrested.
Cabinet ==Detention and exile==