Humor had its January 1983 issue confiscated after Army Chief of Staff General Cristino Nicolaides, objected to caricaturist Andrés Cascioli's portrayals of the junta.

He instituted controls over the facility, such as the indexation of payments, but this move and the rescission of Circular 1050 threw the banking sector against him; Cavallo and Dagnino Pastore were replaced in August.

Bignone's new Economy Minister, Jorge Wehbe, a banking executive with previous experience in the post, reluctantly granted two large, mandatory wage increases in late 1982.

The UCR's only important opposition, the Justicialist (Peronist) Party, was hamstrung by voters' memories of President Isabel Perón's two years in office and by internal friction that dragged their nominating process on by nearly two months.

[8] Careful to avoid the appearance of endorsement of any one candidate (a mistake made by a previous dictator, General Pedro Aramburu, in 1958), Bignone oversaw the shredding of documents and other face-saving measures, such as generous new wage guidelines.

[12] In 2003 people in Argentina were outraged by comments of Bignone and two other generals defending their actions during the Dirty War, expressed in the film documentary, Escadrons de la mort: l'ecole francaise (2003); this was directed by French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin.

He was arrested in March 2007 and taken into custody at a military base outside Buenos Aires as part of an investigation into past human rights abuses, including the atrocities at the Posadas Hospital and trafficking of infants born to and abducted from the roughly 500 pregnant women who were among the disappeared.

[14] On 20 April 2010, Bignone was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the kidnapping, torture and murder of 56 people, including guerrilla fighters,[15] at the extermination center operating in the Campo de Mayo military complex.

[17][18] On 29 December 2011 Bignone received an additional 15-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity for setting up a secret torture center inside a hospital during the 1976 military coup.

[21][22] Bignone died of congestive heart failure in Buenos Aires on the morning of 7 March 2018 at the age of 90; he had recently been admitted to the military hospital with a hip fracture.