Ignacio Zuleta
02/14/2021 8:24 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 02/14/2021 8:34 PM
Menem, another round for the unity of Peronism
The death of Carlos Menem enabled another round of Peronism unity.
If the Rioja understood something, it was power, and that exercising it is distributing it.
There is no leader who has lived with him - among them those who exercise the government today - and who has not received a portion of the power that Menem distributed when he had it.
The
immediate reaction of the ruling party to greet him as a hero
is explained
, when not so long ago Néstor Kirchner was touching wood, and Cristina was rehearsing little horns on him
.
The decision to watch over him in the Blue Room of the Senate
–where Cristina is
in charge–
points to the
symbolic dimension
: there Juan Perón and Raúl Alfonsín were watched over there.
Pasos Perdidos, in Deputies, did not have the same obituary hierarchy (they watched over Fernando de la Rúa there).
The Peronism of this time lived with him with admiration and rejection, but
dismisses him as their own
.
Even for electoral convenience.
A launch of Zulemita Menem as a candidate for national deputy for the albertista ruling party was delayed, given the news that circulated in recent days that Menem's life was hopelessly extinguished.
A Creole Icarus who understood power, but dissipated it
In reality,
his cycle had ended two decades ago, and the years that followed his departure from power were to live off the rents of those '90s.
Like Argentina, which still lives on the income of that period
, which implied a
modernization
that sowed benefits that last over time.
For the Menemists, he did.
Although in those years there were governments in several countries with the same agenda: the West was adapting to the end of the analogical and regulated world that had emerged from the post-war period and that had exploded with the end of the Cold War.
Here it was Menem's turn, who certified the death of that world.
Like a Creole Icarus, that ability to understand power did not serve him to save himself from the against wave.
Between 1997 and 1999 he encrypted the demolition of his political construction with the project of a third reelection.
The attempt, which some attribute to entornistas more than to him, crumbled the very power that it tried to preserve.
That power marred him in anger with his own - Duhalde, the adversaries (Alianza) and the independents - who plunged him into disrepute.
He believed that when he left the presidency, he was taking power home.
It was diluted in his hands
by the resistance to occupying an institutional function since that year - governor of La Rioja, legislator, some international position such as the OAS.
He also dissolved the power of Peronism, the party of which he was president when he was arrested in 2001 for the arms cause.
It is difficult to imagine such a great dissipation of power in such a short time.
It affected his person - detained -, his party - defeated in national elections - and also the then ruling party.
One of the components of the De la Rúa government's crisis was that it did not have an opposition to leverage the crisis.
How was a PJ whose national council got to meet in the house of
Armando Gostanián
in Don Torcuato do it?
It was an unviable country, which did not offer confidence either inward or outward.
Government in crisis, opposition in crisis.
Understandable that everything exploded in 2001.
A token for Charro and Maradonian Peronism
The new geopolitics forced the cancellation of the trip that Alberto Fernández had promised to the governors of the Norte Grande on February 25 in Corrientes.
He changed it for a visit that he believes is a better investment: accompanying Mexico in the first act of the year of celebration in installments of the 200th anniversary of that country's independence.
It will be on February 24, as
Andrés López Obrador
formalized
Carlos Tomada in the meeting they had last Thursday.
It was in the presentation, extremely delayed, of the roles of ambassador, that the laborista has played since last September.
Things of the plague, which hits there more than here.
In that meeting they exchanged jokes about the health of the sick.
"This country was in detention,"
Tomada joked as he greeted AMLO.
In the same days, the president of Mexico, Tomada and also Carlos Slim - the richest man in that country, and one of the top in the world - suffered from Covid-19, as if the bug were cruel to that country.
The president of Mexico pondered the meaning of the invitation, because Alberto is the only guest to this first of many events throughout 2021: 200 years of Independence, anniversary of the founding of Tenochtitlán and another of the "meeting of cultures."
On the trip to Mexico there are two meetings with businessmen with interests in the two countries.
Also a visit to the laboratory where the Astra-Zeneca vaccine that is manufactured in Pilar de Argentina is packaged.
If the times give, there will be an invitation to visit the Azteca stadium.
In this sanctuary of the hand of God an immense mural will be built - a specialty of the Mexicans - that reproduces a photograph of Diego Maradona with the Argentine shirt and an ostentatious charro hat.
Taken cuts nails so that it is ready for Alberto's visit, but at least there will be a tour of the stadium.
The Mexican debt with Trump
In Buenos Aires they fantasized that
Joe Biden
could attend this event
, but the American president, if he goes to Mexico, will do so near the end of the year.
AMLO also adjusts to the new geopolitics.
His administration benefited greatly in the Trump era, which signed a new agreement that explains Mexico's labor reforms.
"We owe it to Trump," AMLO explained to Tomada, an expert on these issues.
Trump wanted the United States not to lose more jobs and pressured Mexico with reforms to improve local wages, disarm the outsourcing system and promote democracy in Mexican unions.
Taken diagnoses, when explaining that reform, that Mexico has made a Peronist labor reform - now it would be necessary to discuss what Peronism is, if Menem's neoconservatism or Carlos Heller's gourmet communism.
This experience with the Trump administration raises
questions about the course of relations with Biden, who has already set a course for the region with the recognition of Juan Guaidó
.
That signal to Venezuela is an avenue that puts light on the new stage.
Also the slow approach of the AMLO cabinet to the Puebla group, that PAMI of the Third Party, whose last summit was opened by its chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard.
Regional polyamores
At that meeting there was a new rejection of the "lawfare", whose effects Olivos reviews in the light of information that comes to them from outside.
From Brazil, for example, on the judicial review of the Lula da Silva process, and even an eventual recovery of his civil rights.
This explains why Alberto has promised to participate with him in a panel for the tribute to the 41 years of the PT (Lula's party) next week.
Alberto regulates his relations with other countries on the basis of that intelligence about the future: he
hardened the gesture with Jair Bolsonaro and Sebastián Piñera when he was convinced by the "intelligent" who surround him, who abound in Olivos, that those two presidents were destined for dismissal
.
When they regained prestige, he
turned in the deal and complimented them with friendly hats,
which were bustled, respectively, by Daniel Scioli and Rafael Bielsa.
Now that the Lava Jato revision can give Lula new oxygen, it gets the president of Brazil wet.
He has an appointment with him on March 26 in the celebrations of the 30 years of Mercosur in Puerto Iguazú.
The ball is on the other side.
Corrientes, first electoral trench
The governors who were waiting for Alberto on February 25 in Corrientes will still meet under the seal of the Norte Grande.
The argument is to remember the 243rd birthday of General San Martín.
Although there are radicals in that league, it is an opportunity for the Peronists to manage their party's candidates in local elections.
Peronists and radicals do date chess in that province, which is also elected governor this year.
Everything in that region is always different from the rest of the country.
The national ruling party made Wado de Pedro disembark there to audit the ability to subject her to new experiments.
A radical governs, Gustavo Valdés, with a vice Peronist, Gustavo Canteros, who cannot re-elect because he is in his second term after being vice-president of Ricardo Colombi.
Will they repeat the bipartisan scheme?
The local PJ is intervened, to regulate this relationship, in the person of
Julio Sotelo
, a Chaco who reports to
Gildo Insfrán
, president of the National PJ Congress.
Valdés is up for re-election, like Senator
Pedro Braillard Poccard
(partner of the Pro in the Senate), whose position will be disputed by provincial legislator
Noel Breard
, a radical who could be governor, if the radical elector Tabaré Bruzzo had not broken the agreement for his designation.
It happened in January 1993, when the Minister of the Interior was Gustavo Béliz.
There were echoes of suitcases that still resonate in the memory of some.
Also bunker opponent
The elections to governor are in October and Valdés is the host of some radical clubs in the house of Corrientes de Buenos Aires.
This Wednesday it will host another meeting with national leaders of his party, including Governor
Gerardo Morales
and heads of congressional benches, such as
Mario Negri and Luis Naidenhoff
(they are not expecting Ernesto Sanz, quarantined).
It will be the second meeting to define positions in the event of a touch of the primaries.
First of all, some consensus to define internal candidates if the PASO are disabled in any way, something that is increasingly under pressure from the ruling party.
That group has supported
Maxi Abad
in the party's internal elections in the province of Buenos Aires.
The bid with
Gustavo Posse
and the radical sector of Nosiglia-Lousteau is the axis of movements that are becoming nationalized.
The critical core of the group is the Olimpia seal, which produced the document "Manifesto for Democratic Hope", which bears more than 2,000 signatures of leaders of all colors (of the radical party, it is understood).
This Saturday
Jesús Rodríguez,
mentor of the group, coordinated a national debate by zoom with hundreds of leaders.
The document is the opportunity for debate, and the most combative clauses may coincide: 1) Peronism has become the administrator of the state's diminishing resources in order, while it governs, to contain those who express its policy and, when it is opposition, mobilizing them to obstruct the changes;
2) the rejection of the conservative matrix -which is expressed in imagining prosperity as a retropia, which sees in the return to the past the way forward-, is generating personal disenchantments that are becoming a barrier to development;
3) the confrontation is privileged over the call for effective work and joint effort: the apothegm that Ricardo Balbín taught "he who wins rules, he who loses help", became a terrible one, "he who wins does not rule, because he who loses obstructs ”.
Peronism has a huge debt to pay in this regard;
4) a sufficiently broad, stable and visionary pole of republican power must be formed, which disputes the leadership of the State with chances of success and with clear proposals, but is also willing to guarantee pluralism, and to recover the meaning of political language , distorted by demagogic despotism in its most authoritarian manifestations.
Larreta approaches Lavagnist Peronism
They all imagine 2023 as the dead line of any political movement.
And the signals launched by some shed light on that date.
For example, the meeting this week, in the open-plan offices of the palace on Uspallata Street - the seat of his government -
between Larreta and the national deputy Graciela Camaño.
The legislator is one of the Peronists with the best furnished head in the movement.
That is why he lives fighting with the party.
She has been the mentor, almost the inventor, of Sergio Massa, and in the functions she occupies, she quickly becomes a referee.
An example is his role in the Council of the Magistracy.
There he took advantage of the weaknesses of others to become the hinge of great decisions about justice, a territory that Peronism has controlled since 1983: that is why those who repeat that Cristina "seizes justice" are wrong.
Justice, we must not forget, is governed by Peronism from that date of the transition, with the tribe that has represented it: Saadism (of Vicente Leonides), Menemism, Duhaldism-Kirchnerism and Christianity.
Camano is a healthy carrier of lagnism, although he does not frequent Roberto's treatment - as he calls him - and in these times weaves some plot with
Juan Manuel Urtubey from
Salta
.
To uncheck, Larreta was accompanied on that appointment by
Adrián Pérez,
who returned to lilismo after his Massista dream.
Now he serves as an advisor to Bruno Screnzi, Larreta's government minister.
Bullrich and the security vote
The product of the meeting with Larreta is subtle:
Camano told him that his party will go to this year's elections with its own lists.
Alone or with alliances in the districts where you can.
Larreta and Juntos por el Cambio find this information convenient, because it drives away the fantasy that he could ally himself with other fractions of Peronism.
Also because it enables the future of Camaño in the face of other products, which can generate noise on the line to the Buenos Aires chief in the construction of his presidential candidacy.
He has clung to the radicalism of the CABA in an alliance that pays with positions that the Pro claims for himself, who feels marginalized.
But what happens if the chance of Patricia Bullrich, deputy 2021 and head of government 2023, advances in the Pro internal?
The vote of the former Macri Security Minister - who was the one with the most prestige in the polls of her cabinet until 2019 -
summons sectors that ask for order, and in that register Camano snores loudly.
She was the author of the initiative to collect signatures in 2013 against Cristina's guarantee criminal code project, which exalted Massa, which has been a dream of her, who lost weight when she woke up - she cornered the government of that time and precipitated it into the defeat.
Bullrich campaigns with his books: he talks about safety and is reason to show friends.
The week before he was with Negri in Carlos Paz.
This Thursday he was in Mendoza with authorities from the Pro and the local government.
Alfredo Cornejo, president of the UCR and candidate for national senator, and the vice president of Deputies, Omar De Marchi preferred to travel to that province to accompany her to “Pato” rather than participate in the Chamber session.
In this chapter of the well-founded visits, it is necessary to note the neighborhood pilgrimage of
Miguel Pichetto
to the offices of Jorge Macri - mayor of Vicente López, where the former senator lives.
The product of that diplomatic gesture was
to make it clear to the cousin that he is not planning to be a candidate for governor of Buenos Aires.
Our paths do not cross, let's move forward, they celebrated.
He spoke with Patricia and Hernán Lombardi about these and other things.
Patricia praises Posse's management in San Isidro, but wants to stay away from the internal UCR fight.
Lombardi is today a qualified pillow of Mauricio Macri, with whom he talks every day and coordinates the strategic table of the Pro, which meets on Tuesdays in the offices of the former president (who returns this Monday from Carnival from the trip to Qatar).
It also organizes banners like the pro-education batucada on Tuesday, which Pichetto would have liked to go to, but they forgot to warn him.