A Gaucho Rises in Argentina
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
CARLOS MENEM'S PRESIDENTIAL BID A Gaucho Rises in ?rgentina BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO La Rioja is a poor province in western Argentina where nothing much seems to happen. Although local...
...Herminio Iglesias, a disgraced party figure who had been forced out of the Buenos Aires leadership by Cafiero's Renovators, called the press' attention to this strategy...
...He wears his hair long and sports a trademark set of mutton-chop sideburns with just a touch of gray...
...Even his lapses into the gutter language of old-time Peronist politicos could not jolt his apathetic audience into anything resembling enthusiasm...
...Organized labor, stripped of much of its clout in party councils by the Renovators, had cast its lot with Menem...
...One of these was the fractured history of Peronism since the General's death...
...The Peronists and the military will join forces to bring him down," oneofthem assured me...
...Sitting near the southern terminus of the Inca road system, it was already an active, well-settled Indian center by the third century B.C...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...Menem carried thebattle to Cafiero's turf...
...The trouble with Menem, said Iglesias, was that he isn't a Peronist, he is a Menemist...
...But it rained, literally, on Cafiero' sparade and more than two-thirds of the expected crowd stayed away...
...He loves to be photographed with a bombilla of the traditional gaucho drink called mate (made from the leaves of a kind of wild holly), and often appears in blue jeans, cowboy boots and a black leather jacket at street fairs, rodeos and the like...
...Je ws have in general fared rather better under Perón than during the mpre or less overtly anti-Semitic regimes of General Juan Carlos Ongania in the 1960s and of General Jorge Rafael Videla and his successors in the '70s...
...The Cafiero forces, aware that their man could not compete with Menem when it came to inspiring the voters, hoped to exploit their superior organization in metropolitan Buenos Aires to turn out a large vote and salvage the race...
...together they should easily outweigh the wary middle class...
...His opponent, Buenos Aires Governor Antonio Cafiero, had started the campaign in a much stronger position...
...They succeeded in getting rid of many of the labor bosses and racketeers who had become synonymous with Peronism in greater Buenos Aires, but they made many enemies along the way, and those enemies turned out to be decisive in July...
...But Menem had begun running for president the day he was re-elected governor of La Rioja last year, and after a while it began to sink in at Cafiero headquarters that his candidacy was no trivial matter...
...In the mid-1600s it became partoftheJesuit state that was founded on the forced collectivized labor of the Indians, and then suppressed by the Spanish crown a little over a century later...
...Its actual title, Civilization y barbarie (Quiroga is equated with the latter), sums up what many historians see as Argentina's fundamentally dual character...
...In deciding that Cafiero was bound to capture the nomination, the conventional wisdom failed to take account of several factors...
...Both Firmenich and Rico are currently in prison...
...Still, his opponents have claimed that as president he would recognize the PLO and drag Argentina into Middle East intrigue...
...In the end he received only 43 per cent of the vote, to his opponent's 57 per cent...
...Throughout the 19th century, the conflict between the indigenous gaucho tradition, politically and militarily dominant in the interior, and the imported democratic and mercantile traditions, ascendant in the littoral, was the key theme in the evolution of the Argentine nation...
...The clash of styles between the two men could not have been greater...
...Ironically, a Peronist friend of mine commented, "At least it proves Cafiero isn't dead...
...Couples stroll through the plaza of the provincial capital, as old men nurse their beers in bars with wide-open fronts...
...Menem may be Peronism's first authentic leader since Peron, but his personal style is too strong for many Argentines...
...Even though by primary day (July 9) Menem's victory was nearly a foregone conclusion, it was a stunning upset in retrospect...
...As the primary day loomed, Cafiero's enemies within the Party returned to haunt him...
...Almost from the beginning of the primary campaign, it was rumored that he was receiving subsidies from Paraguay's General Alfredo Stroessner (whom he praises for having given Perón a place to live and operate politically while in exile), yet no proof of a financial connection has been brought forward so far...
...He will probably come out on top in next year's general election and succeed Raul Alfonsin as president of Argentina...
...At the local cinema the price of admission gets you a lottery ticket...
...He told audiences what they wanted to hear, titillating nationalists and xénophobes of all stripes with hints he would follow Peruvian President Alan Garcia's lead and negotiate a moratorium on the nation's foreign debt...
...While it has traditionally been associated with the Radical Party, a few prominent Jews have served in Peronist administrations...
...Before the primary he stated he was going to vote a blank ballot, adding that if General Perón were alive, he would too...
...Before the primary Menem met with the leaders of the Delegation deAsociaciones Israelitas A rgen Unas (DAIA), an umbrella organization of Argentine Jewry, and stated categorically that he was not an anti-Semite and had no interest in bringing Argentina into any Middle Eastern adventures...
...Personalist politicians in Argentina tend to make up their doctrine as they go along...
...During the primary campaign he traveled all over the country in a rented Menem-mobile, a microbus done up in the national colors of sky blue and white...
...Those who showed up stood, miserable, in the cold downpour while the Renovators orated...
...He was little known in Buenos Aires, where the avuncular Cafiero was a fixture, and Argentina— like most other Latin American countries—has an immense concentration of political power and people around its capital...
...They are put off by Menem's appeal to so many old nationalist shibboleths and by some of his backers, declared and reputed...
...Facundo Quiroga was given to "wining" titles to land by cheating at cards...
...The resulting publicity coup convinced many in the media that Menem might actually win...
...Such charges are particularly sensitive because Argentina has a large Jewish community that is very active politically...
...But it worked: By midMay Cafiero was obviously in trouble...
...To an American observer Menem's performance resembled nothing so much as Ronald Reagan's pandering to the evangelical Right—through it all one had the sense that the candidate intended to deliver only the absolute minimum on his vague pledges...
...Previously Argentine parties had chosen candidates in much the way ours traditionally have —by a complicated and incomprehensible process involving voting by the rank-and-file, regional caucuses, and wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms...
...Cafiero was titular head of "the Renovators," the modernizing faction that grappled its way to dominance after the Peronist party's humiliating defeat in 1983, seeking to purge the retrograde elements thought to be responsible for that setback...
...a couple of menacing retainers with very large knives would stand by to be sure the victim did not insult the boss' honor by objecting to his methods...
...He promised to strengthen the Armed Forces and to "rule with a strong hand, within the law...
...The DAIA professed to be satisfied, but the rumors persist...
...Menem has also been warmly embraced by Lorenzo Miguel, a Right-wing labor leader removed for a time by the Renovators, and by Saul Ubaldini, head of the General Confederation of Labor and probably the individual most responsible for Argentina's runaway inflation...
...Out of this gaggle of unsavory bedfellows, Menem has repudiated only Alerta National...
...Quiroga's career was immortalized by Argentina's "schoolmaster president," Domingo F. Sarmiento, in his 1845 book popularly known as Facundo...
...And everyone watches the lightning over the mountains, wishing that just once the storms would come down and cool things off...
...Menem, by contrast, won his shot at the presidency fair and square, in a primary contest whose openness has never been questioned...
...This summer Carlos Menem emerged victorious in the Peronist party's presidential primary...
...The bespectacled, triple-chinned Angeloz could then exploit misgivings about Menem to squeak through with the slimmest of victories...
...The Renovators promised a new style, one more appropriate to representative democracy than to the streets...
...With monthly inflation nearing 30 per cent, the Alfonsin government has introduced the " Spring Plan," intended to reduce it...
...Now, however, some observers think it is coming to the fore again with the phenomenal rise of La Rioja's governor, Carlos Saul Menem...
...What Menem will actually do as President nobody knows, least of all probably Menem himself...
...His electoral success has had little to do with his record as threeterm governor of La Rioja, where his much-questioned "economic miracle" elicits mostly yawns...
...For the Peronists, the decisions tended to be made by precisely the elements driven out by the Renovators...
...Another spate of rumors about Menem concerns his alleged pan-Islamic sympathies and his supposed friendliness with Libya's Colonel Muamar elQaddafi...
...On May 29 he staged a spaghetti feed for 7,000 people in the streets of a working-class neighborhood in the capital...
...Nevertheless, much of the Argentine middle class seems to detect the familiar odor of goons about him...
...La Rioja used to be important...
...In this century that conflict tended to disappear behind a mosaic of lesser social struggles, many of them sparked or exacerbated by Juan and Evita Perón...
...Indeed a sizable proportion of the middle class and of the newly reconstituted intelligentsia feel that he and they stand on opposite sides of Sarmiento's civilization-barbarism divide...
...Cafiero...
...In a country where every group traditionally sees itself as having a grievance against the system (even the Rural Society, made up of the country's richest snob landowners, recently hooted and jeered at a speech by President Alfonsin), Menem only has to continue to represent the aspirations of all the self-classified outsiders to win handily...
...Subsequently he received the endorsements of Mario Firmenich, head of the Montonero movement, a Trotskyite faction of the Peronist Youth that turned to terrorism in the 1970s, and Aldo Rico, a former colonel who has twice led attempted military insurrections against the government of Raul Alfonsin...
...Early on Menem was endorsed by the neo-Nazi orgamzaüon Alerta National, which has been implicated in terrorism and coup conspiracies...
...Menem is clearly well-positioned for next year's general election, now scheduled for May...
...About the time the Menem camp furnished the press with a photo that appeared to show Cafiero checking into a hotel with a young woman who was certainly not Mrs...
...Menem had no specific program either, but he didn't really need one—he just needed to be Menem...
...Nor have the the allegations of links to the cocaine trade been substantiated, although in a country where drug-related news is escalating dramatically on a daily basis they have definitely done some damage...
...The Argentine economy has lately beeninaverybad way...
...Menem's base, after all, was in the remote northwest...
...It was the home base, too, of the infamous Caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, who with his personal army of knife-wielding gauchos terrorized and subjugated most of the Northwest Frontier in the chaotic 1820s and 1830s...
...In 1988, for the first time, simultaneous national primaries were held by the two "major" parties, the Peronists and the ruling Radicals, and by the Union of the Democratic Center, a coalition of minor Right-of-center parties...
...Although local politicians boast of an economic boom, it scarcely shows on a sultry summer evening...
...On the Peronist side, Cafiero was initially considered a shoo-in, especially after having trounced the Radical candidate in Buenos Aires Province's gubernatorial election the year before...
...Without the union chiefs, Cafiero had no organizational advantage...
...Young men tool around in Jeeps, raising clouds of red dust...
...The Radical primary was considered a joke: President Alfonsin had anointed his successor, Cordoba Governor Eduardo Angeloz, and there was no effective challenge...
...He then added: " I am terrified of Menem, but he has one thing going for him: He isn't a general...
...Cafiero attempted to counter with a rally in Buenos Aires on June 17 planned for 200,000 people...
...Doubts have been raised about Menem's international ties as well...
...Calculations were further upset by the introduction of a new method of selecting presidential nominees...
...Then they went home...
...Cynics say they had no choice, given an almost complete lack of charismatic figures...
...As for the old brassknuckles Peronist gang, Herminio Iglesias alone has disassociated himself from Menem...
...Menem, of Syrian extraction, is a practicing Catholic—as the president of the Republic must be under the Argentine Constitution—and has no taint of anti-Semitism in his record (one of his campaign managers, Alberto Kohan, is known as the "Jewish gaucho...
...If this works, even for a short time, Alfonsin is likely to advance the date of the balloting, as he is entitled to do, in order to capitalize on any sense of economic relief...
...He looks younger than his 55 years and has a strikingly attractive wife and daughter (exotically named Zulema and Zulemita), plus a reputation as a playboy...
...Cafiero looked every day of his 65 years and had no particular rhetorical skills to mask his dearth of concrete ideas...
...There is even talk of Quiroga having returned from the grave...
...His body language is deft, as are his media skills...
...Rather, it has been based on his dashing style and his ability to ignite the disgruntled...
...The trouble with this scenario is that I have yet to find an Argentine who believes Angeloz could govern under those circumstances...
Vol. 71 • September 1988 • No. 16
