Carlos Menem, 90, was elected to his first term as president of Argentina in 1989 on a platform of left-wing nationalism, which he immediately dropped in favor of a drastic program of neoliberalism. He performed this political magic so skilfully that he was able to achieve a second term through a constitutional amendment in 1995.
Argentina would start when he proposed a third in 1999. By that time, magic had long since wiped out. But Menem never stopped believing in his own ability to reinvent himself. Although he was prosecuted for corruption and illegal arms deals, and at one point placed under house arrest, he always seemed to be able to bounce back.
Menem was born in Anillaco, in the poor and backward northern province of La Rioja, to wealthy Syrian immigrant parents, Saúl and Mohibe Akil Menem, and from an early age he was attracted to politics and the law. While a student at Córdoba University, a decisive early moment came in 1951, when the university’s basketball team visited the capital, Buenos Aires. There he meets President Juan Perón and his wife, Evita. An inspired Menem became an immediate and lifelong Peronis.
Just six years later, he finds himself – for the first time, but by no means the last – on political charges. In the same year, 1955, when he graduated as a lawyer, Perón was overthrown in a coup and Menem began defending political prisoners. His detention, which lasted several months, was in support of an anti-coup.
In March 1976, when Perón’s widow, Isabelita, was expelled from the army, Menem was governor of La Rioja. He was picked up again and spent the next two years in custody before being released on parole. After the debacle of the Falklands War in 1982 and the fall of military rule, he was re-elected to the governorship.
The Peronist movement was divided between traditionalists and the ‘Renovadores’ of the reformist wing of which Menem was a leader. In July 1988, he defeated right-winger Antonio Cafiero in the very first internal by-elections held by the Peronist Justice Party, and became his presidential candidate. The following year, he defeated the ruling party (UCR) candidate and won nearly 50% of the vote.
The outgoing president, Raúl Alfonsín, had resigned five months earlier amid an economic crisis in which annual inflation had risen to almost 5,000%. His successor made an immediate political turn, similar to those made by Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela and Alberto Fujimori in Peru at about the same time.
Previously, Menem defended the role of the state and opposed privatization or anything that beats neoliberalism. But as president, he hacked away with so much flurry that by the time he left office he had privatized more than 400 state-owned enterprises. Transport, energy and telecommunications – even social security and pensions – all ended up in private hands. The labor market was deregulated and the welfare state instituted by its hero Perón was in fact dismantled.
Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo has begun crushing inflation through a policy of pegging the Argentine currency, the Australian, to the US dollar. This was followed by a much more drastic move: the government brought back the Argentine peso and made it completely convertible with the dollar. By the mid-1990s, it was so spectacular that annual price increases dropped to the lowest level in the world – only 0.1%. But the hidden cost of this policy, especially in the form of increased debt, was so severe that Menem’s successor, Fernando de la Rúa, would be forced out of office in 2001 amid the ensuing economic collapse.
Menem’s first term was also notable for controversial pardons favored by former military junta members, along with guerrilla leader Mario Firmenich, issued in response to uprisings by right-wing rebels in the armed forces known as the Carapintadas.
During the period, there were also two major terrorist attacks: the first in 1992 at the Israeli embassy, where 29 died; and the second, who killed 85, at the headquarters of the AMIA, a Jewish organization. After leaving power, Menem would be accused of distorting the course of justice by diverting the investigation of the alleged perpetrators, Hezbollah and the Iranian government.
The first family, meanwhile, began treating the Argentines to a long political soap opera in which Menem’s wife, Zulema Yoma, and her family members were prominent. The conspiracy involves not only a sloppy and very public divorce, but accusations of corruption and money laundering against family members of both the president and the president’s wife.
There was also tragedy. In 1995, the couple’s son, Carlos, known as Junior, died in a helicopter crash. Zulema never accepted that it was an accident, and insisted that the plane was brought by a gunfire, but despite the excavation of the body, the accusation was never proven.
On the international front, Menem was one of the architects of the Mercosur four-country trading group, consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, founded in 1991. Unlike the Brazilians, with whom he often clashed, the Argentine president eagerly. to move as quickly as possible after its inclusion within the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposed by US President George HW Bush. During Menem’s two terms, Buenos Aires gradually moved closer to Washington, to the extent that he defined the desired relationship as ‘carnal’ and even suggested the eclipse of the entire region. When Bill Clinton becomes US president, he is rewarded with membership of the elite club of important non-NATO allies. It did no harm that he also normalized relations with Britain and in 1998 became the first Argentine president to visit London since the Falklands War.
In the interior, however, Menem was so widely rejected by the time he left office that a further attempt to win a third term (in 2003, after the country’s financial crisis) ended in humiliation. His massive, and apparently poorly earned fortune, a scandal involving smuggling Argentine arms sales to Croatia and Ecuador (for which he was sentenced in 2013 to seven years in prison), and a widespread belief that he was ultimately responsible for the economic crisis all contributed to an irreversible decline in his political fortune.
Although he reached the end of the second round in 2003 against Néstor Kirchner, he retired after the polls suggested he would come under scrutiny. Bitter, he wanted to undermine Kirchner by arguing that his victory was somehow illegal. He became a senator for La Rioja from 2005 until his death.
His second marriage, in 2001, to the former Miss. Universe Cecilia Bolocco, ended in a divorce in 2011. He is survived by their son, Máximo; by a daughter, Zulema, from his first marriage, who divorced in 1991; and by a son, Carlos, from a relationship with Martha Meza.
• Carlos Saúl Menem, lawyer and politician, born July 2, 1930; died 14 February 2021