Ignacio Miri
02/14/2021 21:53
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 02/14/2021 9:53 PM
Carlos Menem, owner of a name that became a
historical hinge
from his early years in the Casa Rosada, died this Sunday.
His daughter Zulema said that Menem died at the hands of his ex-wife, Zulema Yoma, with whom he had lived again in recent years.
In recent months he had been hospitalized several times for pneumonia and other respiratory conditions, and now he was in a bed at the Los Arcos sanatorium with a urinary infection that had become complicated.
The President of the Nation, Alberto Fernández, one of the many officials today who were previously his officials, decreed a
three-day duel in his honor
.
"With deep regret I learned of the death of Carlos Saúl Menem. Always elected in a democracy, he was Governor of La Rioja, President of the Nation and National Senator. During the dictatorship he was persecuted and imprisoned. All my love goes to Zulema, Zulemita and everyone those who mourn him today, "he wrote on his Twitter account.
Vice President Cristina Kirchner issued, also on twitter, some regulatory condolences.
Former president Mauricio Macri played a little more: "He leaves us above all a good person, whom I will remember with great affection," he said.
Perhaps the most affectionate was Eduardo Duhalde, who was his vice president and who then faced him for years.
Duhalde, also a former president, called him "a friend."
Lawyer, former governor of La Rioja, former president of the Nation and former national senator, Menem was born 90 years ago in Anillaco, a small town in the foothills of Rioja to which he returned whenever he could.
The 1976 military dictatorship came when he was governor of La Rioja.
The military
kept him imprisoned
for years in different destinations and under different regimes, all illegal.
With the return of democracy, he won the Riojan government again and was a privileged interlocutor for the new president, Raúl Alfonsín, when the radical dreamed of synthesizing the dichotomy between the PJ and the UCR with the birth of a third historical movement.
He was the man who
rehabilitated a Peronism that had not had
consolidated
leaderships
since the death of Juan Perón.
Already in power - he came to the presidency in 1989 after the economic collapse of the Alfonsín government - he incorporated into his alliance not only figures from the center-right such as
María Julia Alsogaray
but also a good part of the most powerful business leaders of those years.
He managed to stabilize the economy with the new decade installed, with the Convertibility Plan of
Domingo Cavallo
.
He proposed and partly implemented a reform of the State unknown until then and promoted the privatization of a good part of the public companies.
He opened the economy
with the idea that Argentine companies could join a world market that was rapidly globalizing with the fall of the socialist universe.
It forged a highly touted alliance with the United States, but it opened the Argentine economy to European capital, basically Spanish, Italian and French, whose companies invested in the public services sector and built an infrastructure that still exists today.
During his government
the economy grew and inequality also escalated
to levels unknown at that time.
Allied with the majority sector of unionism, it
multiplied the informal economy
and dismantled the national health and education systems.
He proposed an agreement with the military - which included economic asphyxia combined with the conclusion of investigations for human rights violations - and
managed to banish the influence of the
political life
barracks
.
Many of those changes he implemented were reversed by the governments that succeeded him, but others became permanent.
He was the owner of an extraordinary charisma - in the '90s the posters with his face could be seen posted in thousands of Argentine kitchens - but his speeches repeated slogans and promises that changed and contradicted each other from time to time.
Before him, no politician had dared to
exploit
his closeness to show business
with such carelessness
.
Menem used these characteristics to enhance a way of exercising power that his officials explained by making use of the linear reading of authors such as Nicolás Machiavelli.
The paragraphs that in El Príncipe served to defend the autonomy of politics against other spheres in Menemism were cited to justify the voracity of the chief.
Always open to negotiation with adversaries, his agreement with Alfonsín
allowed him to legitimize a constitutional reform
with which he won the authorization for a new mandate and blocked the way to his internal rival Eduardo Duhalde.
After his departure from the Government, he was investigated in
resounding causes of corruption
and ended up imprisoned for his actions in the sale of arms to Ecuador and Croatia.
He fought again at the polls and it was Duhalde himself who managed to run him out of big politics when he supported Néstor Kirchner in the race for the presidency in 2003. Menem won in the first round but declined to run in the second round and Kirchner, a A former admirer of his policies, he ended up being
his successor as the undisputed head of Peronism
.
The inexhaustible popularity of his figure in La Rioja allowed him to take refuge in the Senate, where he obtained the protective privileges.
There he became an ally of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner.
His surname, which in the years of splendor served to order the entire political spectrum, ended up designating an aesthetic.
This Sunday night, his body was veiled in the Blue Room of
the last political institution that he joined
.
Cristina Kirchner was there to receive the funeral procession.
At that same moment, Zulema Yoma, Zulemita Menem and Carlos Nair Menem -another of their children- entered the burning chapel along with Eduardo, the senator's brother and one of its main props throughout their political career.
Shortly after 9 pm the President of the Nation arrived at the scene.
This Monday afternoon Menem will be buried in the Islamic cemetery of La Tablada.
