Former Argentine president Carlos Saul Menem, 90, has passed away. The study by Livio Zanotti, author of ildiavolononmuoremai.it
It was in all probability the personification that most projected Argentina into the European imagination in the nineties of the last century. Not the best, despite the folkloric effect of the thick hair of a nineteenth-century caudillo and the exuberant high-speed protagonism between Ferrari and motorboats. Carlos Saul Menem, the now 90-year-old former head of state from 1989 to 1999, died yesterday in the Buenos Aires clinic where he had recently been hospitalized for various diseases. However, although he holds a seat in the Senate, whose immunity has spared him further legal hassles, in recent years the political weight he exercised has been waning with the increasing age. However, without ceasing to represent the most dramatic socio-economic shipwreck of the great South American country, which ultimately resulted in the bankruptcy of 2001.
I interviewed him on the day of his first entrance to the Casa Rosada. During the investiture ceremony I had her within walking distance. I had previously met Jose Luis Manzano, today one of the great actors of Argentine finance, then a young and brilliant deputy of the Peronist renovador who was fighting for the democratization of the movement. Upon returning from the balcony from which he had greeted the crowd gathered in the plaza de Mayo, the presidential baton received by his predecessor Raul Alfonsin still in his hand, the new president therefore willingly accepted to briefly tell me about his project for the privatization of the state (already agreed in the previous weeks with the major economic groups in the country): “I’ll do what I said!”
He kept his word even beyond the predictions. He almost furiously dismantles the many and often unproductive public properties. Selling or ceding in ten-year managements, at auction or in suspiciously hasty auctions, production companies, services and goods: roads, highways, gas, oil, ports, airports, post offices, telephones, radio and television frequencies, properties and state-owned land. It was almost impossible to cross a street without paying a toll to the private operator. Driven by the urgency to curb inflation and devaluation that overwhelmed the previous government; but even more from the strategic idea (which has become obsessive) of abandoning the historic pursuit of the industrialization of Argentina initiated by Peron, to instead make his agriculture the ram of exports and the capital, Buenos Aires,
The total opening of the economy to internal and foreign investments, also attracted by a generous tax regime, destroyed tens of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises along with hundreds of thousands of jobs. Required by the logic of market liberalization, the introduction of parity between the then national currency – Australia – and the US dollar accelerated the speculative nature of too many investments and public debt. To conceal the toxic effects of this mechanism until the great crash of 2001, were the very large and casual donations of Menem: wage equalization, compensation and pardon to the victims of the military dictatorship, but also to the condemned generals and the guerrillas who had fought each other. Even if you want to leave out the issues of principle, pax cost millions of dollars.
“Follow me, I will not defraud you” was Menem’s watchword. Whose personal life, overloaded with glamor, touched the disorder of the public finances. Coinciding with tragedies, suspicions and accusations that do not cease to pursue him even beyond the courtrooms and his very existence in life. In July 1994, a car bomb destroys the building of the Jewish mutual society AMIA in the center of Buenos Aires: it leaves 85 dead under piles of rubble. It is an anti-Semitic attack. A little more than a year later, in November, the town of Rio Tercero, in the province of Cordoba, is shaken by a series of explosions: 5 dead. They would have served to erase the traces of arms trafficking involving the government and the Armed Forces. Menen is accused of complicity in both episodes. Acquitted in the courts,ildiavolononmuoremai.it
