Argentina:
Has Menemismo Run Its Course?
Politics in Argentina have been
so thoroughly dominated by
the neoliberal economic poli-
cies of President Carlos Menem that
the upset victory of the opposition
Alliance for Jobs, Justice and
Education in last October’s legisla-
tive election was celebrated by
many observers as the first crack to
appear in the Peronist government.
Indeed, this is the first electoral
defeat for Menem and his Justi-
cialista Party (PJ) since taking office
in 1989. The results have been read
as a marker for the 1999 elections–
a Peronist victory no longer seems
inevitable, and the Alliance seems to
have gained enough strength to put
up a good fight.
The Alliance, a coalition of the
Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the
center-left National Solidarity Front
(FREPASO), gained several seats in
the Chamber of Deputies, effec-
tively breaking the Peronists’
absolute majority in the lower house
of Congress. The Alliance also won
the mayoral elections in Buenos
Aires, capturing 66% of the vote in
the capital, compared with 16% for
the PJ. UCR mayor-elect Fernando
de la Rda will govern with an
Alliance majority in capital’s first
elected legislature.
The Alliance hit the Menem gov-
ernment where it was most vulnera-
ble. It criticized measures like pri-
vatization and labor flexibilization,
which Menem has pushed through
despite popular protests. The Al-
liance also promised to fight gov-
ernment corruption and to improve
health and education, both of which
have been decimated by cutbacks in
state spending.
The Alliance, and especially
FREPASO, have also been strident
critics of state-sanctioned impunity.
Many members of FREPASO, like
Graciela Fernandez Meijide, who in
October was elected national repre-
sentative from Buenos Aires
province to the Chamber of
Deputies, have their roots in the
human rights movement. A symbol
of the ongoing fight against
impunity hung from the micro-
phone as Fernindez delivered her
victory speech: a photograph of
Jos6 Luis Cabezas, a photojournal-
ist who was killed last January
while investigating police corrup-
tion. The consecration of impunity
for past crimes-through pardons,
like the one Menem bestowed on
the generals of Argentina’s “dirty
war,” and amnesty laws elsewhere
in the region–has given de facto
license to Latin American military
and police forces to continue
killing, disappearing and torturing
today. The victims include journal-
ists-with over 200 killed over the
past decade-as well as political
activists and so-called “undesir-
ables” like alleged criminals, homo-
sexuals, prostitutes and street chil-
dren. In Argentina, where Menem is
reportedly proposing to pardon the
carapintadas, members of the
armed forces who rose up against
the government in 1990, voices like
that of Femrnndez Meijide are more
important than ever.
at the Alliance did not
challenge was Menem’s
neoliberal economic poli-
cies. The group’s chief economist,
Jos6 Luis Machinea, said the coali-
tion would “close ranks” to defend
“convertibility,” the cornerstone of
Menem’s economic plan that pegs
the peso to the U.S. dollar. Like the
victory last July of Cuauht6moc
Cirdenas in the mayoral elections in
Mexico City, in which the Party of
the Democratic Revolution (PRD)
backed off from its more anti-
neoliberal positions in order not to
alienate national and foreign capi-
tal, the Alliance platform is based
on criticisms of government poli-
cies that violate democratic liberties
and that undermine living stan-
dards, but it does not directly chal-
lenge neoliberalism or offer an eco-
nomic alternative. The victories of
the PRD in Mexico and the Alliance
in Argentina are a step forward for
progressive forces in Latin Ame-
rica, but they also are a sobering
reminder of how little progress the
left has made in terms of building
economic alternatives to neoliberal-
ism. It is not enough to criticize cor-
ruption and state cutbacks in health
and education if the economic and
philosophical foundations of such
policies are not challenged as well.
For the bottom half of Latin
America’s increasingly unequal
societies, it is this fight that must be
waged head on. Former President
Ratil Alfonsin of the UCR seems to
have understood this better than his
FREPASO allies. After the October
elections, in which he maintained a
low profile, Alfonsin entered the
ring of 1999 presidential hopefuls
swinging, and Menem’s neoliberal
policies were his principal target.
Unless the Alliance develops a
stronger anti-neoliberal platform, it
risks alienating its support among
Argentine workers, whose living
standards have been decimated by
neoliberal economics. If mene-
mismo has indeed run its course, as
Fernandez Meijide told NACLA in
its thirtieth anniversary issue last
July, then the Alliance should affirm
its support for a more egalitarian
economic policy and a stronger
redistributive role for the state. In
FernAndez’s own words: “If there is
no state, then who regulates the
relationship between the powerful
and the dispossessed?”
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