Former Argentine President Carlos Menem, who died Sunday at the age of 90, was buried Monday with military honors and according to the Muslim rite, while Argentina observed three days of national mourning.
The funeral of the politician, head of the South American country from 1989 to 1999, took place in the Muslim cemetery in Buenos Aires, where his son Carlos is buried, who died in 1995 in a helicopter crash that did not has never been elucidated.
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"He will rest in the Muslim cemetery with my brother, although he was of the Catholic religion,"
his daughter, Zulemita, said on Sunday.
The remains of the former head of state were watched on Sunday evening in the Argentinian Parliament, where he had occupied a senator's seat since 2005. Carlos Menem had been hospitalized several times in recent months due to various health problems.
He died of a heart attack.
The death of the former president, who left a deep mark on Argentina during his two terms of office, due to his neoliberal policies opposed to the classic doctrine of Peronism, provoked mixed reactions in the country.
"We must recognize its value and its lifelong support for democracy,"
left Peronist president Alberto Fernandez said on Sunday.
His right-wing predecessor Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) hailed a
"good person".
"The most serious thing he did was to pardon the murderers of our children"
reacted for his part Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Association of Mothers of the Place de Mai, with reference to the presidential amnesty. granted to the criminals of the dictatorship (1976-1983).
The NGO is trying to find children abducted by soldiers during this period.
The amnesty had been canceled by President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), leading to the conviction by the courts of a thousand people.
"He died as he lived: unpunished,"
said the active memory association, which brings together the families of the victims of the attack against the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) in 1994 in Buenos Aires, which had killed 85 people.
Carlos Menem, accused of covering up the attack, was finally acquitted in this case.
In 2013, the ex-president was sentenced to seven years in prison for smuggling weapons to Croatia and Ecuador, before being discharged because of the delays in justice.
Five years later, he was sentenced to three years in prison for embezzlement, but his parliamentary immunity protected him from imprisonment.
