Alfonsin's Experiment

...Argentine sociologist Fernando Cue-villas, a Peron sycophant prone to countless rationalizations, nonetheless captured the essence of the phenomena in a 1953 essay...

...Predictably, the far Right therefore often snarls at what it has dubbed his "Radical synagogue...

...oil company's subsidiary that brought mounting unhappiness with his rule to a head and led to his 1955 ouster...

...Sourrouille's five-year plan, which he now finds himself empowered to implement, would encourage exports, high-tech industries plus associated services, and development-oriented domestic investment...

...In retrospect, his stunning victory at the polls should not have been the surprise that it was to the Peronists, to his own Radical Civic Union Party, possibly even to him...

...There were 678 homicides in greater Buenos Aires in 1984, not excessive for a city of 9 million...

...He has assembled a high-powered Cabinet and an inner circle of advisers that includes several Jews...

...Shapiro, a zoology professor at the University of California, Davis, who for a decade has traveled widely in Latin America...

...Now perhaps there is a fourth," my friend added, "Raul Alfonsin...

...In letters to editors of conservative newspapers, an alleged crime wave has been blamed on the softening of the penal code and the gradual "demilitarization" of the police...

...it has been at least comparable to that of the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr...

...Shades of history...

...Moreover, claims that law enforcement has grown lax ignore the statistics for the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, who last year killed more miscreants than they wounded (160 vs...

...Perhaps they were influenced by a remarkable, widely disseminated Radical poster showing a "pineapple" type hand grenade: Each facet bore the face of a villain of the dirty war—General Leo-poldo Galtieri, Admiral Emilio Mas-sera, General Luciano Menendez, General Jorge Videla—with the old-line Peronist leader of Buenos Aires Province, Herminio Iglesias, thrown in for good measure...

...the average for the post is 445...

...Neither, one might add, was Grinspun...

...Consequently, Alfonsin's luck has thus far held up on the economic front...

...He put his prestige on the line, but by then the mutual longing of President and country for peace and stability was so complete that normally nationalistic Argentines rushed to give Chile the three little islands it wanted on the Atlantic side of the channel—even though this compromised the "bioceanic principle" governing relations between the two neighbors for a century...

...The new Economics Minister, Juan Vital Sourrouille, is not a Radical Party member...

...assassinations, Vietnam and Watergate in the United States...

...Peron, ousted by the military in 1955, returned old and inept 18 years later, to die soon afterward as president...

...A similar debate is under way concerning crime...

...It is difficult to separate fact from press sensationalism, adroitly manipulated by the Right...

...The bankers have been less complacent, particularly since it is clear Sourrouille cannot implement austerity on the scale they desire: That would trigger social discord in this volatile, conflict-ridden land...

...As cofounder of the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights and a well-known opponent of the " process" (the Armed Forces' word for the "dirty war" against Leftist terrorism), he had made himself synonymous in the public mind with democratization and social reconstruction...

...Sourrouille must simultaneously hold the International Monetary Fund at bay and try to ease the inflation rate down to an "acceptable" level, perhaps 100 per cent annually...

...The curious thing about Argentina's economic lunacy is that the public seems resigned to it...

...Leftists did the same in underlining their repudiation of the past...

...Peronist leaders instructed their followers to boycott the balloting— "patriotic abstention" they called it— and thereby leave a future Justicialist government "morally" free to repudiate the agreement...

...Nevertheless, as the figures make plain, Peronists defected in droves to vote "yes...

...Ambassador Spruille Braden, and ask the people to choose " Braden or Peron...

...The general reaction to his admission in early February that all efforts to curb inflation up to that point had failed was, "What is else is new...

...A." stand for both "Republi-ca Argentina" and "Raul Alfonsin...

...These blind men sealed the electoral doom of their Jus-ticialist Party when their goons burned acoffin representing Alfonsin at amass rally...

...If recognizing the central role played by the amount of money in the current scheme of economic relationships means being a monetarist," he says, "we are monetarists...

...There is much resentment, though, of the currency speculators who have made huge sums thanks to the policies of Martinez de Hoz and Grinspun...

...A fiery speech by Arturo Frondizi of the old Intransigent Radical Party mobilized public opinion against Peron's vende-patrismo...

...Yet the Right-wing propaganda has come to nothing, suggesting that Argentina's seemingly persistent anti-Semitism is not deeply ingrained in the national consciousness...

...Interestingly, many have conveniently forgotten that its roots are actually the full-employment-through-public-works policies Peron learned watching Mussolini...

...a rough gesture of disapproval, a shout of indignation, an opportune speech, a hug for the faithful, a special ceremony for the learned, a show of manliness for the assembled military....' And in a sense, he rightly continued, caudillismo is a genuinely representative form of rule: "The roots of the cau-dillo's moral leadership and the ethical adherence of his people, which is the formal basis of his regime, are undoubtedly based in psychology...

...This has led the Left to describe the police as trigger-happy...

...Raul Alfonsin surely recalled these events before taking his desperate gamble...

...Indeed, a government proposal to outlaw the deliberate promotion of racial or religious hatred has failed to diminish Alfonsin's popularity with the man in the street: The public as a whole recognized the hand of the agent provocateur in a subsequent rash of wall scribbles proclaiming, among other things, "Argentina must be Jewish...

...Everyone remembers that the triple-digit disaster is a legacy of Jose Martinez de Hoz, the generals' economics minister...

...131...

...It was Juan Per-on's granting of a contract to aU.S...

...He lasted 436 days...

...Four years later, as President, Frondizi himself granted concessions to American oil companies—and his step was a factor, albeit not a major one, in his own removal by the military in 1962...

...Buenos Aires / ^ ^t^ here have been three I caudillos in Argentine JL history," an intellectual friend observed over dinner: "Juan Manual de Rosas, Hipolito Yrigoyen, Juan Peron...

...If anything, more sympathy is aroused by the Left's charge that the prosecutions are moving too slowly...

...The Right has not had success, either, in criticizing the government for insisting on civilian trials of high military figures accused of murder, torture and "unlawful deprivation of liberty" during Ihe dirty war...

...Especially remarkable was the inability of the opposition to limit the turnout...

...A much-reproduced cartoon showing a puppet Alfonsin dangling from a Star of David asks in the caption, "Who runs the President...

...Hence, Alfonsin's decision to drop a bombshell during his March visit to the United States: Speaking to the Center for International Business at the Heritage Club in Houston, he offered American oil corporations contracts to exploit Argentine reserves, a move that could help the national balance of payments problem without a grueling period of retrenchment...

...Before leaving for India and Greece, Alfonsin set in motion a round of jawboning aimed at holding February wage and price increases to 14 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively...

...Countless voters—especially women, including quite a few Peronists —wereoutraged: TorevileAlfonsinwas to defile democracy itself...

...I have asked Argentines of all classes and stations how long they thought it would take to control inflation...

...Should he be chosen the next head of the Movement of Nonaligned Nations, as seems likely, that would further ratify the growing respect for Argentina in the international community...

...On a different level, nationalists have criticized the President for leaving the country too often—on official visits to Fran?ois Mitterrand, Rajiv Gandhi, Felipe Gonzalez, Andreas Papandreou, and Ronald Reagan...

...Everything is necessarily tied to stabilizing Argentina's $45.6 billion foreign debt and relations with its creditors...

...The President of the Central Bank also quit...

...There is disaffection with the corrupt Peronist leadership, uncertainty about what the split in the Justicialist Party will mean, and reluctance to strike promiscuously for fear of provoking disorder that could produce anarchy...

...Meanwhile, the official exchange rate has slipped catastrophically—from 26.3 pesos to the dollar in January '84 to 322 in March '85, with much higher rates available on the street...

...Radicals like to trade on the coincidence that the initials "R...

...Caudillaje, Cuevillas noted, is a style: "A soft word of understanding...

...Administration optimists hailed the resulting "social truce" as a major triumph, even as one union after another openly resolved to defy it...

...By contrast, the Peronist leadership, consisting mostly of labor bosses, had played small-time power games...

...But if being a monetarist entails trusting strictly in the administration of the amount of money as the unique instrument of economic policy we definitely are not monetarists...

...Following the revelation that Argentina had an en-riched-uranium plant in Patagonia, j ok-ers said the uranium must be a friend of the former...

...Alfonsin probably can continue recalling bitter memories of the "process" to get his way indefinitely—but only if the economy improves...

...Almost every literate citizen has read Nunca M6s ("Never Again"), the490-pagereportoftheNa-tional Commission on the Disappearance of Persons that ran through four editions last year, and few lament the generals' fate...

...The government is banking on the unions' overall weakness...

...To vote for him was to repudiate militarism, cant and corruption in the strongest possible terms...

...Sourrouille does not like to be called a monetarist...

...One early casualty of the economic distress was Bernardo Grinspun, who on February 18 resigned as the nation's 106th economics minister in 131 years...

...In today's Argentina a caudillo would have to embody the concept of democracy, andAlfonsinfillsthebill...

...If not...

...He must always represent the incarnation of the dominant cultural principles of his society and his times...

...Yrigoyen was deposed in 1930, a victim of the country's first modern military coup...

...Previously the Secretary for Planning, he drew up a five-year economic development plan that was widely praised when it was unveiled last January...

...Rosas was driven into exile in 1852 at the end of a bloody civil war...

...Peron in his climb to power used to invoke the name of then U.S...

...But in the cafes others point with pride to his restoring the nation's credibility overseas after a decade of foreign pity, derision and bad jokes...

...One result has been the destape, the opening up of mores...

...Another has been the embracing of Alfonsin...

...Some commentators would have the nation believe it must choose between repression and criminal anarchy...

...Most said something like "Ten or 20 years...

...Whatever may happen to the man chosen president in October 1983, cau-dillismo, intensely personalistic government, and caudillaje, the natural leadership characteristic of its practitioners, have been recurrent features of Latin American politics...

...The challenging headline across the top read, "Disarm it...

...A temporary understanding in force toward the end of Grinspun's tenure has eroded as inflation tightened its grip...

...The far Left urged abstention or outright rejection of the deal with "the butcher Pinochet...

...In reality most dictators are not caudillos, nor are all caudillos dictators .Raul Alfonsin, among the most democratic of his countrymen, could not conceivably be a dictator, although it increasingly appears that he may become a cau-dillo...

...The country is still going through an orgy of soul-searching—"looking for our true values" is a commonly heard phrase...

...Alfonsin's greatest triumph to date came in a referendum held last November 25, when 81 per cent of those voting approved a peace treaty ending the Beagle Channel dispute with Chile...

...Cynics noted that February is the best time for a social truce because both labor and management are at the beach enjoying the austral summer...

...Yet despite the many words written about them, they remain poorly understood in the English-speaking world, where caudillismo tends to be equated with dictatorship...

...His very impressive curriculum vitae includes service in the United Nations, the Secretariat of the Latin American Free Trade Association and several Argentine regimes...

...the second, "Peronism Without Perons," was published in the issue of February 11-25...

...He paused for a moment, and I thought to myself about their fates...

...He is a former director of the National Census and Statistical Institute as well, and is coauthor (with economist R. D. Mal-lon) of Economic Policymaking in a Conflict Society: The Argentine Case, published by Harvard...

...Theim-pact of a decade of turmoil on the national psyche here cannot be overestimated...

...Of course, the present government inherited runaway inflation and has " merely" been unable to stop it...

...In 1984 the consumer price index rose an incredible 688 per cent...

...the cure for inflation and the debt crisis would kill democracy...

...Since taking office, Alfonsin has sought to maintain a Presidential posture by leaving purely political utterances to subordinates...

...Normally these feelings would redound to the benefit of Peronism, but its image is so clouded that it reaps little political reward these days from anything...

...The first article, "Rumblings on the Right," appeared in The New Leader of January 14-28...

...The former military regime had very nearly gone to war over the disputed specks of real estate...

...Much of the public saw in Peronism a willing accomplice of the military's violent excesses, and regarded the gangsterism of Peronist chiefs as a continuation of the same sort of thing...

...The average monthly increment was 18.8 per cent, and January 1985, at 25.1 per cent, was worse than all except a single month last year...

...If his personal popularity can put down the traditional nationalistic shibboleths on this issue, he will rightfully be called the fourth caudillo...

...The referendum was won "waving the bloody shirt," a time-honored technique in Axgentina...