Thousands of Argentines yesterday attended the Former president's funeral, whose coffin was carried in a gun carrier from the Senate to the Recoleta Cemetery. People lined the streets to watch the procession, throwing flowers and chanting his name, saying goodbye to the Radical leader.
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Friends, former officials and politicians addressed the mourners gathered in the Cemetery amid an emotional, historical farewell to the man to be remembered as a symbol of Argentina's return to democracy and a human rights activist
Alfonsín was president from 1983 to 1989 and won international admiration for putting on trial and jailing the former military leaders who tortured and killed thousands during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. In 1989 he completed Argentina's first transfer of power from one elected president to another in decades.
Married and with six children, he was born on March 12, 1927, in Chascomús, a town 75 miles south of Buenos Aires, Alfonsín was the son of an affluent Spanish immigrant shopkeeper and his British wife. He went to military academy but then chose to study law.
An eloquent orator, he rose through the ranks of the Radical Party - the traditional opposition to the powerful Peronists - and was elected to the lower house of Congress in 1963.
