Argentine Election Results
T he July/August issue of the
magazine contains a “news-
brief’ from Notisur on the May
1995 Argentine elections that un-
critically describes the first-round
victory of Carlos Satil Menem. This
account does nothing to dispute the
standard neoliberal interpretation
of Menem’s re-election as a demo-
cratic mandate for IMF-style eco-
nomic stabilization and reform
policies. It is surprising to see
NACLA inadequately contesting
such an interpretation.
Menem’s 49% of the vote hardly
translates into a popular ground-
swell for neoliberal austerity. Since
a record 20% of the electorate cast
implicit protest ballots by not ful-
filling their legal obligation to
vote, only 38% of eligible voters
cast ballots for Menem. Despite
outspending the center-left coali-
tion FREPASO by 50-to-1, Menem
found it necessary to reprise his
stealth campaigning tactics from
1989, when he ran as a nationalist-
populist and then became a servile
functionary of international fi-
nance capital after the election. In
the 1995 campaign, Menem post-
poned an increased value-added
tax until after the voting, and an-
nounced a massive new investment
program to “pulverize” unemploy-
ment. Unfortunately, responsibility
for financing the investment pro-
gram was thrust upon provincial
governments already experiencing
fiscal crises largely due to the
Menem Administration’s “fiscal
decentralization” efforts. Just three
months after the election-when
the official unemployment rate had
risen to a record 18%-the Menem
government admitted there was no
funding available for the invest-
ment scheme.
Readers are invited to address letters to The Editors, NACLA Report on the Americas, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 454, New York, NY 10115. Letters can be sent by e-mail to: NACLA @igc.apc.org.
As in other recent elections in the
region (such as Mexico and Brazil),
voters who had racked up con-
sumer debts were repeatedly
warned of the consequences of fail-
ing to return to power a regime that
continued to abide by the neoliber-
al agenda. Meanwhile, domestic
and foreign capital teamed up to
float the increasingly fragile
Argentine banking system past the
election with bail-out packages to-
taling $6.7 billion. This pre-elec-
tion rescue temporarily preempted
the need for a currency devaluation
and other Draconian austerity mea-
sures that the IMF would have de-
manded as a condition for further
debt-service rescheduling.
The most tragicomic element of
the newsbrief is the claim that “vot-
ers also credited Menem with re-
ducing the power of the military.” It
is difficult to see how Menem could
have “reined in the once-powerful
armed forces by signing a blanket
pardon for human rights abuses
committed during the 1970s.”
Menem has praised the military’s
efforts to “defeat subversion,” is-
sued veiled threats to student pro-
testers while Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo were publicly beaten by
the police, and recommended the
promotion of a known murderer/
torturer, Naval Officer Alfredo
Astiz. The style and substance of
Menem’s policies hardly represent
a clear departure from the authori-
tarian and anti-popular agenda of
the military during its rule from
1976 to 1983. Not only was
Menem’s success in ramming
through a pro-capital economic re-
form package underpinned by the
military’s prior repression of the
popular sectors, especially orga- nized labor, but these reforms
themselves go a long way towards
(Continued on page 46)
Erratum The picture of the anti-Castro rally in Miami on page 38 of the previous issue should have contained the following credit: Jack Kurtzllmpact Visuals.
consolidating the neoliberal policy
regime whose foundations were
laid by the dictatorship.
Paul Burkett and
Donald G. Richards
Department of Economics
Indiana State University
Terre Haute, Indiana
Brazilian Land Reform
Ricardo Tavares’ “Land and
Democracy: Reconsidering the
Agrarian Question” [May/June,
1995] is a brilliant overview of the
agrarian-reform debate in Brazil.
His focus on social movements
such as the Movement of Landless
Rural Workers gives insight into
the main grassroots players in the
agrarian debate.
It is also worth mentioning that
the struggle for land reform in Latin
America is now being waged on an
international level. In February,
1994, Latin American peasant orga-
nizations held the first Congress of
Latin American Rural Workers’
Organizations in Lima, Peru.
Organizations participating in the
Congress produced a document enti-
tled “The Final Declaration of the
Lima Congress,” which was a pow-
erful indictment of neoliberalism
and North American imperialism.
North American support for
grassroots agrarian-reform initia-
tives such as the Lima Congress
can help roll back the devastating
impact of neoliberal economic poli-
cies. To learn more about the grass-
roots struggle for land reform in
Brazil, contact: O Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra,
Rua Ministro Godoy 1484, CEP
95915-900 Sdio Paulo-SP, Brazil.
Marcelo Iraja de Araujo Hoffman
Richmond, Indiana
