2023-11-12 03:43:00
Carlos Menem in September 1988. Photograph taken by the Italian Manuela Fabbri – Source Tata Yofre Archive
A few months following taking office as President of the Nation, Mauricio Macri, during a speech before the members of the Christian Association of Business Leaders, said: “If I told you a year ago what I was going to do and all this is happening, happening, they were probably going to vote overwhelmingly to lock me up in the asylum. And now I am the president.” Almost immediately the press recalled that similar concepts had been uttered a few years earlier by Carlos Saúl Menem. In reality, “if he had said what he was going to do, no one would vote for me” was not said by the former Riojan president, although he remained silent when faced with the sentence. Historical truth teaches that this phrase was said by the tennis player Guillermo Vilas following 1990, during a conversation with the journalist Bernardo Neustadt as an example of the policy that Menem was developing. However, in response to the slogans of the 1988 and 1989 campaign, the candidate repeated to the exhaustion and irritation of the radical Raúl Alfonsín “follow me, I am not going to disappoint you” at the same time that he would implement “the productive revolution and the huge salary” .
Between what he said during the electoral contest and then implemented starting July 8, 1989, there was a big change. Economist Manuel Solanet would say that “the economic and social gravity prompted Menem as president-elect to seek the correct diagnosis and more serious proposals. Certainly, faced with the imminent responsibility of the position, the Menem of the electoral campaign or the script carried by the Peronist economists who negotiated with the radical government on May 15, 1989, changed rapidly. It was hoped that in the time remaining for constitutional solutions to allow the transfer of power.” It is worth remembering that Alfonsín left power six months before the end of his constitutional period. Given what was happening in Argentina at that time, Menem’s trip to Europe as a presidential candidate helped him make certain transcendental decisions. The radical candidate Eduardo Angeloz also imagines them, although without the possibility of implementing them because he was not the leader of his party. Menem listened to other voices that encouraged him to carry out another comprehensive plan far removed from what his personal collaborators and the “social democratic” ideas of the defeated Antonio Cafiero proposed. It should not be forgotten that Menemism carried within its folds countless contradictions. On July 8, 1988, the day of victory in the internal election, while Menem, Zulema and their followers were celebrating, Eduardo Bauza, a figure in the candidate’s circle, went to the President Hotel, Cafiero’s campaign headquarters, to greet on behalf of of the winner and there, between confidences and opinions, I slip in “I am ashamed of having triumphed” which as the months went by would be translated: “With Menemism you win and with Cafierismo you govern.” Menem opposed all this.
Carlos Menem in Paris, August 1988
On October 28, 1988, accompanied by Zulema Yoma, Zulemita and several leaders began his European tour. In Madrid the activity did not rest, between work meetings with the authorities, businessmen and journalists. His interviews with President Felipe González, former President Adolfo Suárez and businessman José María Cuevas, the head of the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations, were instructive. I spoke with González on November 2 between 9:07 and 9:53 in the morning. Among other issues, the Spanish leader observed that “the Argentine economic crisis is very hard, despite the affection one feels for Raúl Alfonsín.” Suarez told him the same day (at 4:30 p.m.) that “Europe always receives negative news from Latin America and it is a good idea that you have come here.” Regarding his vision of the Armed Forces. He spoke to Menem regarding the “lack of understanding” of the military and advised once morest “sitting the military permanently on the bench… silver bridge and choosing some and judging them. “He worries me that Argentina has so many problems of political understanding.” In other words, the Uruguayan president Luis María Sanguinetti would say something similar the following month. All Spaniards spoke to Menem regarding regularizing the relationship between Argentina and Great Britain to facilitate the entry of national exports into the European Economic Community.
During his stay in Madrid, Menem also visited the legendary Nicolás Redondo, general secretary of the General Union of Workers (UGT).
In France, Menem met with Francois Mitterrand and went to visit Jacques Chirac, then the Mayor of Paris, with Ambassador Mario Cámpora, Minister Juan Archibaldo Lanús and me. He had me sit next to her and listen to Chirac talk to her regarding the French position in the Falklands War while he outlined Margaret Thatcher’s personality and tried to give her some advice. He also met Giscard D’Estaing and discussed his concepts of “a modern economy.” After Paris came working visits to Bonn (alone dialogue with Chancellor Helmut Joseph Kohl, conference at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and meeting with Minister Hans Genscher), Rome (government, business world) and the Vatican.
Menem during his time in Rome with the Italian Vice Prime Minister Gianni De Michelis
Menem returned changed from his tour as a presidential candidate. In the midst of the presidential campaign, on March 17, 1989, for example, Domingo Felipe Cavallo summoned me to La Biela and his question was very direct: “Is Bauza going to be the Minister of Economy? I ask because the other days he told me that my ideas were not in line with Justicialism. What’s more, he said that in the first two years there would be a purely Peronist economic team that he would lead and that I would go to a large embassy. After that stage he might return because an opening stage would begin. What do you think?”. I only limited myself to telling him that Eduardo Bauzá was not going to be Minister of Economy because if he was, “following a month we are all in prison.” I remember that Menem found the anecdote very funny. “You lifted my spirits,” he told me over the phone. With so much hustle and bustle, excessive commitments and hugs, the candidate sometimes became a bit emotional and then his collaborators and friends called me. This is how I appeared in the Buenos Aires town of Junín with Alberto Blaquier Roca’s private plane. And we talked alone, and I asked him for patience: “It’s less than a month away and you’ve already won,” I told him.
A small part of my archive, the two agendas and my nine notebooks from the 1988 and 1989 campaigns.
Without publicly explaining it, Menem was giving small signs of what he thought intimately regarding his future presidential administration. He instructed Raúl Carignano from Santa Fe, in my presence, while he was eating some quail eggs in his kitchen on 240 Callao Avenue: “Prepare me a plan for the administration of the railways. I will not be able to support a million pesos a day of deficit” (something that reminded me of some ideas from engineer Álvaro Alsogaray). On Friday, May 12, he received the members of the Blue List of the Press Union in his office in Callao. The “boys” proposed a pro-government newspaper, in a professional manner. The candidate tells them that he does not like the idea and cites the failed examples of “Expreso” and “Democracia.” The “boys” then insist on carrying out a “cleanup” in the media under state administration and demand the heads of journalists Sergio Villarruel and Daniel Mendoza. “No one will lack work here,” he responded without further hesitation.
Menem with José Manuel De la Sota in the 1989 campaign
On Saturday morning, May 13, 1989, in the offices of Hugo Franco, he met with the Archbishop of Córdoba, Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, who advised him that on the night of the victory he should stay in La Rioja celebrating with his people and that speak on television and radio to the rest of the country. That is to say that he does not come to Buenos Aires. In a gesture of good will, the cardinal gave him a document with some “suggestions” for the victory speech. The next day he voted at the men’s table No. 43 of the Pedro I. Castro Barrios Normal School of Teachers and at 10:46 he left for Anillaco, his hometown, piloting a Piper, along with Ricardo Beale. Lorenzo Ortiz and I were behind. The control tower authorized him to take off and told him: “Position and takeoff, good luck. We look forward to seeing you next time with Tango 01.” As night fell, Carlos Menem was the elected president of Argentina.
Carlos Menem and Mrs. greet the people from the Government House on July 8, 1989. (TELAM)
Menem’s electoral victory was not a surprise; polling companies had been anticipating it for several weeks. Even those that were paid for by the radical ruling party. Now came the most difficult part, taking charge of a country in a catastrophic state. Only some indices reflect the state of prostration in which Argentina found itself: On July 8, 1989 (the day of the presidential inauguration) the government received a Central Bank with reserves of less than 100 million dollars; an accumulated inflation of 664,801% between December 10, 1983 and July 8, 1989; In the same period, the devaluation of the peso, measured by the relationship between the same currency and the value of the dollar, implied 1,627,429%, an inflation rate of 114.5% in June 1989 alone. “The Argentine people should know that the delay in public service rates was equivalent to a scorched earth policy,” said a report that with my signature was given to the media on July 14, 1989. Menem and his team economically they knew that very harsh measures would have to be taken and that is why they spoke of “major surgery without anesthesia.”
The engineer Alsogaray, William Estevez Boero, Eduardo Duhalde and Menem
Between the day of the presidential election and his inauguration on July 8, Menem received all kinds of suggestions and advice. Faced with what he had to face, he leaned toward a plan that businessman Néstor Rapanelli from the Bunge & Born group approached him and when he accepted it he only suggested: “Don’t stop talking regarding it with Alsogaray and we will continue talking next week.” Days later he would begin to talk regarding “popular market economy.” There was not much time for discussions, outside that room (where I was) the first booms of the social outbreak might be heard. On the day of his inaugural speech he began to reveal what he thought and what he found. He gave some signs of his future steps when he said: “The country of ‘all once morest all’ is over. The country of ‘everyone together’ begins.” “There is no other way to say it: the country is broken, devastated, destroyed, devastated.” “If Argentina is not where it should be, it is not the country’s fault but the responsibility of the Argentines. “Of our divisions, of our historical burdens, of our ideological prejudices, of our sectarianism.”
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