Francisco Manrique (February 10, 1919 – February 15, 1988) was an Argentine naval officer, journalist, policy maker and presidential candidate.
A native of Mendoza, in western Argentina, Francisco Manrique graduated from the Argentine Naval Academy in 1938 and from the Argentine Naval War College in 1949. After being jailed as an opponent of President Juan Domingo Perón, he became head of the presidential household in 1955 under the military leader, President Pedro Aramburu. Manrique resigned from the navy as a captain in the late 1950s to start a daily newspaper in opposition to President Arturo Frondizi, Correo de la Tarde, and in 1968 became a national television commentator.[1]
The head of a military junta at the time, President Alejandro Lanusse appointed him Minister of Social Policy in 1971. In that capacity, he organized a myriad of federal and provincial health insurance programs into the Integrated Medical Attention Plan (PAMI) and housing assistance programs into the National Housing Fund (FONAVI). The reforms helped lead to a marked reduction in infant mortality in Argentina during the 1970s. Manrique ran for President in 1973 as the candidate of the Popular Federalist Alliance, a grouping of small, moderately conservative parties. He won 15 percent of the vote in the March 11, 1973 election, the most received by a third-party candidate in Argentina, up to then. His first wife, Esther Canepa Devoto, whom he married in 1943 and had three sons and a daughter with, died in 1977, and he married the former Cristina Ruíz in 1985.[2]
Manrique actively supported the March 24, 1976 coup d'état and many of his Federalist Party colleagues were therein appointed to local government posts, including 78 mayors. Following seven years of ruinous military rule, however, elections were called for October 1983. Manrique again ran unsuccessfully for President as the candidate of the center-right Federal Alliance. The winner, the centrist Radical Civic Union's Raúl Alfonsín, appointed him Secretary of Tourism, a non-Cabinet position. He won election as a legislator in 1987 as a nonpartisan candidate on the Radical Civic Union ticket. Remaining editor-in chief of Correo de la Tarde, Francisco Manrique died in Buenos Aires from complications related to lymphoma, in 1988. He was 69 years old.[1]