The domestic and international esteem President Raúl Alfonsín earned for advancing the Trial of the Juntas suffered in December 1986, when on his initiative, Congress passed the Full Stop Law, which limited the civil trials against roughly 300 officers implicated in the 1976-79 Dirty War against dissidents to those indicted within 60 days of the law's passage, a tall order given the reluctance of many victims and witnesses to testify.

These concessions did not placate hard-liners in the Argentine military who, though in a minority, put Argentina's hard-earned Democracy at risk in April 1987, when a group identified as Carapintadas ("painted faces," from their use of camouflage paint) loyal to Army Major Aldo Rico staged a mutiny of the important Army training base of Campo de Mayo during the Easter weekend.

Armendáriz had been a key supporter of the President's Project Patagonia, which envisaged the transfer of the nation's capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma for the sake of decentralization.

The first to benefit in Congress was the conservative Union of the Democratic Centre (UCeDé), which ran on a free market platform calling for privatizations of an array of State enterprises, responsible for nearly half the nation's goods and services.

These companies' losses, led by the Argentine Railways', were blamed by the UCeDé's leader, Alvaro Alsogaray, for the public sector cash flow problem and resulting financial instability (while disregarding the role of foreign debt interest payments).