Buenos Aires - Argentina is set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its return to democracy on Thursday - a difficult process that has evolved gradually since the end of the military dictatorship in 1983.

Social democrat Raul Alfonsin, of the Radical Civic Union, won the election on October 30, 1983 to become president. It was clear at the time that he had been entrusted with a huge challenge. But even skeptics could not have guessed just how hard it was going to be to govern the South American country.

While the military, which ruled from 1976 to 1983, made the going tough for Alfonsin with numerous uprisings, the Peronist trade unions declared one strike after another. Massive foreign debt inherited from the earlier regime started to throttle the country and inflation soared to more than 800 per cent per year.

But, 25 years later the country has made great progress. It has decisively left the dictatorship behind and democracy is now more firmly anchored than it was in the past, said Ruth Fuchs, a political researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies in Hamburg, Germany.

The growth of democracy was neither linear nor easy, Fuchs said, but rather, came in waves, with phases of an intensive examination of the past intertwined with years of social suppression of issues such as repression and torture.

The fact that Argentina's return to democracy proved so hard in the beginning had a lot to do with the military dictatorship's terrible heritage. According to human rights organizations, up to 30,000 people disappeared - they were presumably killed by pro- government forces, although most of the bodies were never found - because of the regime's pathological fear of anyone who appeared to be on the political left.

Alfonsin first tackled investigations into these crimes and next imposed sanctions on leaders of the military regime. The generals were not, however, brought down and sent back to their barracks by a people's movement. They decided to go of their accord, amid the criticism that followed the country's defeat to Britain in the Falklands War of 1982.

In 1985, several high-ranking members of the military junta were brought to justice. In the initial push to uncover the brutality and unjust acts of the regime, courts also started to seek out middle- ranking officers involved in crimes, which added to the growing tension between the military and the political establishment.

To protect his government from repeated military rebellions, Alfonsin issued an amnesty against the courts' ongoing investigations. Years of silence followed - the issue of human rights violations and the crimes of the dictatorship were struck from the political scene in 1986, as the state of the economy worsened.

In the 1990s, few things changed under right-wing Peronist president Carlos Menem.

A new cycle of public remembrance began in March 1995 after startling revelations by retired naval officer Adolfo Francisco Scilingo. He described the so-called "flights of death" of the dictatorship - a brutal practice where prisoners were anaesthetized and thrown from airplanes into the sea.

Scilingo's testimony was to have definitive consequences for the final break with the military regime. "(The comments) launched a new wave of public discussion on the heritage of the dictatorship and on the fate of the 'disappeared'," Fuchs said.

It took several years, until the presidency of Nestor Kirchner in 2003, for the amnesty laws to be scrapped and for courts to again be permitted to pursue investigations into the military's wrongdoings.

According to researcher Fuchs, the Argentine justice system is handling the largest number of pending cases of human rights violations in the world.

In July 2008, public prosecutors were investigating at least 1,088 suspects, of whom 403 were charged. Another 28 former henchmen of the regime received jail terms - those more than 70 years old were usually sentenced to house arrest.

Even through the economic and social crises that shook up the country from 2001 to 2002, the fears of the military re-emerging to "save the homeland" were unfounded. Argentina's last bloody dictatorship was dead, and the country's tryst with democracy was paying off. (dpa)