In 1976 the military announced a coup d'état against President Isabel Perón with problems of financial instability, inflation, endemic corruption, international isolation and violence that typified her last year in office.

Argentina's wide array of political parties, jointly pressing for elections through a "Multiparty" convened by centrist UCR leader Ricardo Balbín in 1981, geared for the imminent return to democracy.

Fanning antagonism on the part of hard-liners in the regime, this led Admiral Jorge Anaya (later court-martialed for gross malfeasance in the 1982 Falklands War) to announce his candidacy for President in August, becoming the first to do so; he proved to be highly unpopular and Bignone immediately thwarted the move.

Devoting themselves to damage control, the regime began preparing for the transition by shredding evidence of their murder of between 15,000 and 30,000 dissidents (most of which were students, academics and labor union personnel uninvolved in the violence Argentina suffered from 1973 to 1976).

Hoping to quiet demands that their whereabouts be known, in February 1983 Buenos Aires Police Chief Ramón Camps publicly recognized the crime and asserted that the "disappeared" were, in fact, dead.

A few days for the elections (which a record turnout), the Justicialist candidate for Governor of Buenos Aires Province, Herminio Iglesias, threw a (premature) "victory rally" in which a coffin draped in the UCR colors was burned before the television cameras.