07/07/2021 14:02
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 07/07/2021 2:02 PM
The late senator
Carlos Alberto "Lole" Reutemann
(79) was in charge of turning his reserved profile into his political imprint.
So much so, that for more than two decades in the upper house he barely spoke a few words and most of the time it was to clarify the meaning of his vote.
In 1995, just finished his first term as governor of Santa Fe, a position that came from the hand of the late former president Carlos Menem, Reutemann entered the upper house.
But he did not get to complete the full term in office (which should have been extended until 2001) because in 1999 he won again in the elections and returned to head the Executive of his province.
In 2003 he returned to the upper house and remained in office until his last days, despite the political ups and downs in Argentina.
His time of greatest prominence in the Legislative Power dates back to 2008
, when the crisis broke out between the government of Cristina Kirchner and the countryside due to the frustrated mobile withholdings on agricultural exports.
The Peronist referent tried to promote his own project as an alternative to Resolution 125 that was promoted by the then Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, and which unleashed the extreme conflict with rural sectors.
His initiative was not discussed and the "Lole" accompanied the proclamation of the field, a determining sector in Santa Fe, because he finally voted against the 125.
Committed to agricultural producers, Reutemann put aside his measured profile and in that session of absolute tension he opted for a long speech in which he quoted Juan Domingo Perón.
"I want to close with something that General Juan Domingo Perón said in 1973", he said and then read: "Only the great reserve areas of the world still have in their hands the possibilities of getting from the earth the necessary food for this overpopulated world and the raw material for this super-industrialized world. We constitute one of those great reserves. They are the rich of the past, and if we know how to proceed, we will be the rich of the future, because we have the essentials in our reserves, while they have consumed a large part of what they have. Faced with this picture, we must dedicate ourselves to the great production of grains and proteins, which is what the world is most hungry for today. "
Since 2003, Reutemann has been reelected as a national senator four times, but since 2015 he did so through the Cambiemos alliance and its updated format known as Together for Change, today the opposition coalition.
The parliamentary records indicate that in recent years Reutemann strengthened his low profile: in
2016 he
only spoke
76 words,
and in
2017
only
36 words
and all in the session of November 1, on the occasion of the tribute that the Santa Fe senators paid to the people of Rosario killed in the attack in New York.
According to the surveys of the specialized site Parlamentaria.com in
2018
the "Lole"
did not say anything
and in
2019
he was heard saying
76 words.
And the latest report indicates that in
2020,
Reutemann said
83 words
to specify the meaning of his vote and for other limited clarifications about his position on some of the projects that were discussed.
“Yes, President.
In the previous vote, on the citrus part, the Internet had been cut off for an hour or so.
The Internet came back to my house half an hour ago.
Thank you ”, was one of his biggest expositions during the virtual sessions that were launched in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Sumapolítica site even calculated that in his more than two decades as a national senator, the former Formula 1 racer "spoke in the venue half a dozen times, no more than 10 minutes in total"
"He also read short speeches, for another 20 minutes about 12 times. That was all, in 21 years," they remarked.
A "timekeeper"
Attentive to that profile, former president
Eduardo Duhalde
defined him as a "timekeeper" back in 2014 when he tried unsuccessfully to make the former Formula 1 runner decide to approach Sergio Massa's Renovador Front instead of collaborating with the expansion of Peronism, which at that time he was trying to challenge Cristina Kirchner for power.
"He
is a timekeeper
and a man who basically thinks about him.
When he is not on the lists or has an opinion
. And I don't like that in politics," Duhalde complained, which earned him a cross with the senator.