Alejandro Armendáriz
| Alejandro Armendáriz | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Governor of Buenos Aires Province | |
|
In office December 11, 1983 – December 11, 1987 |
|
| Lieutenant | Elva Roulet |
| Preceded by | Jorge Aguado |
| Succeeded by | Antonio Cafiero |
| Personal details | |
| Born | June 5, 1923 Saladillo, Argentina |
| Died | August 7, 2005 (aged 82) |
| Political party | Radical Civic Union |
| Profession | Physician |
Alejandro Armendáriz (June 5, 1923 – August 7, 2005) was an Argentine physician and politician.
Armendáriz was born in Saladillo, a pampas town in the Province of Buenos Aires, in 1923. His family relocated to the city of Buenos Aires in 1940, where he graduated from the Marist College of San José (a college preparatory school), the following year. Enrolling at the prestigious University of Buenos Aires, he received a medical degree in 1949 and returned to Saladillo. He married Olga Guillermina Gaddi, with whom he had two children.
Practicing medicine, he became affiliated to the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) and was elected Vice-President of their local chapter in 1951 and city councilman in 1954. The increasingly autocratic President Juan Perón, the UCR's chief rival, had Peronist Governor Carlos Aloe annul the Saladillo elections within days, however. Armendáriz was returned to the City Council in 1963 and was elected in 1965 to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies (the Lower House of Congress). Known for his quiet, tenacious nature and stoic approach to adversity, Armendáriz became affectionately known as "the titan" to those around him.
The 1966 deposal of President Arturo Illia (of the UCR) by General Juan Carlos Onganía dissolved the Argentine Congress and forced Armendáriz to return to his medical practice. The imminence of new elections in 1972 led him to join fellow former UCR Congressman Raúl Alfonsín in founding the "Movement for Renewal and Change," a center-left faction opposed to the party's longtime leader, Ricardo Balbín, who defeated Alfonsín in their party's primary ahead of the March 1973 elections. Armendáriz's friendship with Alfonsín continued during the turbulent 1970s, when the latter practiced law in defense of victims of the wave of human rights abuses in Argentina, later in the decade. Following Alfonsín's daring and timely opposition of the ill-considered Falklands War in 1982, he became the frontrunner within the UCR on the eve of elections agreed to by the discredited dictatorship, in 1983. Securing the nomination in July, Alfonsín advanced Armendáriz as the UCR candidate for Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, home to 38% of Argentines.
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