THE CHAINSAW MASSACRES OF ARGENTINA AND THE US

Argentine President Javier Milei with signature chainsaw

 Many Argentines cringed in shame this past week as they watched their president make a clownish spectacle of himself by showing up in the US, to obsequiously and gratuitously pander to his personal heroes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This time, he made the pilgrimage to Washington—where he was also courting the IMF to see if he can land an eleven-billion-dollar credit to shore up his faltering economic program—to present Musk with the signature symbol of his own populist regime. Namely, a custom-designed chainsaw.

Musk, who is basically a filthy rich, unelected appointee, with no real political standing—a sort of high-end bureaucrat, if you will—magnanimously granted Javier “Baby Trump” Milei, a head of State, a forty-five-minute audience, in which the visibly excited Argentine president, giddy as a kid at Christmastime, presented Elonius Rex with the prize saw, a gleaming red and chrome machine with Milei’s favorite slogan emblazoned on the blade: ¡Viva la Libertad, carajo! (Which roughly translates as “Long live liberty, damn it!”).

Musk with his new saw, Milei with his bro-crush

It’s a motto with which the far-right libertarian ends even his most formal of speeches,  and which he utters in a guttural, if reedy growl. It is the Mileian equivalent of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. And, when it comes down to what both those phrases mean to those they are inflicted on, they are rendered Orwellian in terms of their consequences.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of making George Orwell’s acquaintance, an example of what I mean is that, for instance, in his dystopian novel 1984—which is far more relevant today than it was when it was written—the author’s fictitious country boasts four main ministries: the Ministry of Truth is ostensibly in charge of media, entertainment, education, and the arts, but is actually the creator and purveyor of political lies, propaganda and spin. The Ministry of Peace’s apparent mission is to broker and keep the peace, but it is actually devoted to sparking and incrementing violence. The Ministry of Love is supposedly charged with justice and order, and creating a pleasant climate for all, but its true main mission is torture, punishment and “re-education”. And the Ministry of Plenty is officially at the center of the regime’s allegedly plentiful economy, but is actually the entity in charge of supply rationing and distribution.

Similarly, while both Trump and Milei’s favorite slogans might sound inspiring and rosy, the actions behind them are having contrary effects for just about everyone but the rich and powerful. The actions Donald Trump took during his first term from 2016 to 2020, bolstered the power of the presidency and initiated a sharp decline in the influence of the other two branches of government. His economic policies provided tax breaks to the already vastly undertaxed wealthy, and put additional economic pressures on the middle and lower classes—as reflected in the estimated seven trillion dollars that his administration added to the deficit. He showed contempt for democratic institutions and disdain for the rule of law, but was, in the end, held in final check by the other two branches when he sought to, basically, overthrow democracy and remain in office after losing an election. His legacy was division and chaos, and now, after a four-year hiatus, he is back to finish the job, this time with the indispensable help of the richest man in the world. Fitting, since he was and is the president of the wealthy, who, in Orwellian style, bills himself as “the president of the people.”

Milei has made no bones about being an avid admirer of Donald Trump’s. But he had the initial disadvantage over Trump of following, not a highly popular and highly democratic administration like Barack Obama’s, but rather, the weak, corrupt presidency of Alberto Fernández, which was consumed with party infighting and crippling economic woes.

Like Trump, Milei is fond of puerile displays of showy bravado. Hence, his choice of the chainsaw during his campaign and beyond, as the symbol of his promise to “destroy the government from within”—which, without saying it in so many words, is what Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, depending on your point of view) are bent on doing as well.

Milei at one of his Trump-like rallies

The Argentine president is every bit as disdaining of anyone who opposes his most extreme measures, and of those he perceives as his political enemies, referring consistently and publicly to anyone left of the center right as “zurdos de mierda” (fucking leftists). And when numerous governors from Argentina’s twenty-three provinces opposed cuts in federal aid at the beginning of his term, he angrily vowed that he was going to “piss on the governors”.

He also suddenly turns on those who dare criticize him, very much in the dismissive style of Trump, who has dissed his former political allies that have failed to accompany him to some of the extremes to which he has taken his policies and personal misdeeds: Generals John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, as well as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former Vice President Mike Pence spring to mind, but there are countless other examples. In Milei’s case, for example, early on he expressed praise and admiration for former Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of the late President Carlos Menem’s convertibility and privatization policies, which marked a ten-year neo-conservative era in Argentina. When he was first elected, Milei touted Cavallo as “the best Economy Minister in Argentine history.” Until just a few months ago, he was still referring to Cavallo as “a hero” and saying he hoped to emulate him.

But in his personal blog, Cavallo recently issued a warning to Milei about the dangers of a falsely appreciating peso. The Harvard-educated economist said that since Milei took office, a little more than a year ago, his economic policies had caused the peso to appreciate by twenty percent in real terms. Cavallo said that this was a similar trend to the one witnessed in the last three years of convertibility, leading to the crash of 2001 (the Corralito Crisis).

The former economy minister pointed out that real appreciation had led to “a very costly deflation, because it transformed the recession that had begun in 1998 into a true economic depression.” Cavallo counseled Milei to lift exchange rate restrictions within the next three months before the effects of a (falsely) “strong peso” started affecting domestic industries and discouraging export investment.

Echoing the sort of capricious flipflops Americans have come to expect from Trump, Milei suddenly referred to Cavallo as “a disgrace”, and as “unpresentable”. And in another Trumpesque move, within hours of reacting to Cavallo’s blog, the Argentine president fired the economist’s daughter, Sonia Cavallo, who, until then, had been posted as Argentina’s delegate to the Organization of American States. He justified the vengeance move by saying “Her father is constantly sabotaging the economic program, and you can’t have your cake and eat it. You’re either on one side or the other.”

The grotesque posturing of Milei and Musk on the far-right CPAC stage with a shiny new chainsaw this past week was chillingly symbolic. Tens of thousands of federal workers turned out into the street in Argentina, and thousands so far given the axe by Musk in just one month of the new Trump regime speaks to just how chilling. Milei is fond of crowing to his far-right supporters that the US “is taking its cue from Argentina.” And his presentation of the fashion-designer saw to Musk is an apparent attempt to underscore that exaggeration. But Trump’s first term precedes Milei, so it’s pretty clear who is taking his cue from whom.

The parallel he strikes, however, is worthy of consideration. What I mean by that is, if Americans want a preview of what the Musk-Trump duo’s policies will likely lead to, they need only look to the almost caricaturesque example of Argentina. For one thing, while Milei boasts about his policies reining in hyperinflation, peso inflation in his first year in office has still soared at 117 percent in 2024. But worse still, the consequences of his crawling peg exchange rate policy have also caused prices to explode in dollar terms.

When Milei came to office, it was, in part, on a promise to “dollarize” the economy, since he described the peso as a “shit” currency. But since taking office in December of 2023, he has only “dollarized” in the sense that Argentina has become the most expensive country in dollars in all of Latin America, while he has at the same time “revalued” the peso by removing a lot of local currency from the market, artificially driving its value upward.

No example could be better than my own experience, living here in Argentina’s Patagonian region, to illustrate the consequences to middle and lower class residents of these and other policies imposed under the Milei government. For instance, until December of 2023, my wife and I were paying about two hundred fifty dollars a month for excellent private health care—uphill for two retirees in Argentina, where the standard of living is nowhere near as high as in the US—but doable. Furthermore, it kept us independent from the pensioners’ health care plan paid for, in large part, by the State, since the amount paid into the health plan by pensioners is minimal.

One of the first things Milei did on taking office was completely deregulate private health insurance—and just about every other commercial activity in the country. The result was that, within his first three months in office, our health insurance costs had gone from two hundred fifty dollars a month to six hundred fifty-eight. It became impossible for us to continue to pay, and we ended up on the State retirement health care rolls.

Milei’s own brand of “moving fast and breaking things” also removed all restrictions on price gouging—an even more common practice here in Argentina—especially in remote Patagonia—than in the US, while de-subsidizing all services. Between the artificially bolstered peso and the removal of all restrictions, then, our grocery bills here in Argentina have doubled in dollars, going from between seventy and ninety dollars a week when he took office, to about one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty dollars after his first year in office. And the prices of just about everything else have risen accordingly, especially in areas like clothing, new car sales and electronics, in which local industry is heavily protected.

A noonday luncheon special in downtown Buenos Aires now runs an average of eighteen dollars—more than a minimum wage worker makes in a day—while in other major Latin American capitals, research shows a comparative average of seven dollars. A cup of coffee averages thirty percent more there than in São Paulo (Brazil) or Santiago (Chile) and more than twice as much as in Bogotá (Colombia). Meanwhile, Argentina’s minimum wage is higher than on Brazil’s depressed job market, but considerably lower than minimum wage levels for either Chile or Mexico.  Moreover, forty-five percent of Argentina’s workforce works off the books, with no minimum wage guarantees or benefits of any kind.  

As with the Trump administration, Milei’s regime is doing nothing to address these inequalities. On the contrary, he is, like the Musk-Trump duo, slashing social services wherever he can get away with it, and seeking to break the country’s once powerful Peronist labor unions. He is also, like Trump in his first term, jockeying to try and get himself a more malleable Supreme Court.  

Nor have vital services been spared: fuel prices rose one hundred eighteen percent in Milei’s first year in office, while de-subsidized natural gas services rose by more than five hundred percent. Water was up more than three hundred percent for the year, and electric power services increased more than two hundred sixty percent.

Milei, like Trump, promotes himself as a political outsider, bent on dismantling the “political caste”, which, according to him, has led to the country’s economic decline. Also like Trump, however, he is seeking to replace that “political caste” (i.e., elected representatives of the people), with a corporate elite, seeking a country where a place at the international business table is sought using the average Argentina’s impoverishment as a stepping stone.

While Trump and Milei’s ideologies strongly overlap—Milei was a guest at Trump’s latest victory celebration and got a shout-out from the then president-elect as “a true MAGA guy”—the political and economic contexts in which they govern differ substantially. The US economy under Trump was the world’s largest and still relatively stable, despite challenges, mostly of Trump’s own making. In Argentina, however, Milei came to office already struggling with high inflation, widespread poverty, and significant public debt. This fundamental difference in starting conditions means that while Trump’s policies could often be masked or justified by a booming economy, Milei faces the much more immediate consequences of severe economic disarray.

Both Trump and Milei’s governments have been criticized for their exacerbation of social polarization. Trump’s rise has been  marked by deep divisions within American society, particularly on issues of race, immigration, and cultural identity. His inflammatory rhetoric and policies have often targeted minority groups, including immigrants and African Americans. His current campaign to forcibly eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion by decree in the US is only deepening the divide.

Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has similarly highlighted the nation’s profound political divide. While he has framed himself as a defender of individual liberty and economic freedom, his rhetoric, like Trump’s, often smacks of authoritarianism, with frequent attacks on the media, the judiciary, and his political opponents. His presidency has already seen increased protests from various sectors of society, particularly labor unions and public sector workers who fear the consequences of his austerity measures. Milei’s confrontational approach to governance, much like Trump’s, risks further fracturing of the social fabric of Argentina, deepening divisions between those who support his vision and those who see his policies as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

While Milei has managed to get fairly good international press from business media and multi-lateral organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, none of these are known for being concerned about the social devastation wreaked by the kind of cruelly radical  neo-conservative programs being implemented by Milei and his Economy Minister Luis Caputo to wipe out a decades-long deficit overnight. All these sectors care about is hammering developing nations into good credit customers who pay their debts in timely fashion—unlike major economies like the US which, despite admonishing the developing world to be good citizens and keep their debts in check  if they want aid, are the world’s biggest debtors (as of last year the US had eight trillion dollars in foreign debt, or a little more than a fifth of the country’s entire federal debt).

Multiple studies have shown over the decades that IMF and World Bank ultra-conservative economic prescriptions in regions like Latin America have bolstered the international profiles of neo-conservative governments at the expense of the common people’s well-being. This was true of the military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist and at the point of a gun from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, and that is certainly the current case of Milei’s Argentina.

Despite being the darling of the MAGA crowd in Washington, however, Milei may find his forward momentum stalled on his quest “to move fast and break things.” Back from his meetings with the IMF and Trump in Washington, and his clown show with Musk at the CPAC extravaganza, the Argentine president begins work Monday in the face of a scandal sparked—also not unlike Trump—by a blunder on social media that cost local investors big-time. It’s being called “Cryptogate”, and it promises to haunt the president’s government.

A week ago in his social media feed, Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, touted a cryptocurrency meme coin known as $LIBRA. Sharing information about its launching on his feed, the president wrote, “This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of Argentina’s economy.” The local currency market reaction to the post was immediate, with the coin’s value surging to five dollars almost immediately, only to plummet by ninety percent two hours later.

The practical result of the meme coin fiasco was that Argentine investors lost approximately two hundred fifty million dollars in the blink of an eye.  Milei immediately took his post down and claimed he really hadn’t had all the details of the deal. Worse still, he tried to foist blame off on the investors who had followed his cue, saying that they knew the risks, just as they would if they went to a casino to gamble.

Investors aren’t buying it. Both at home and abroad, he is facing accusations of crypto-fraud, and lawsuits are being filed against him in both Argentina and the US. Opposition members of Congress, meanwhile, are calling for his impeachment, and although they don’t yet have the votes necessary, the fact that Milei has consistently referred to Congress as “a rat’s nest” is unlikely to garner a lot of sympathy.

At best, Milei will have to try and convince people that he was duped by some of his acquaintances involved in the scheme, in which case he will look like a guileless fool. At worst, he will face multiple legal actions, and the possibility of more opponents climbing onto the impeachment train.

Time will tell.

 

THE COMPLEX LEGACY OF CARLOS MENEM

When former Argentine President Carlos Saúl Menem died on Valentine’s Day, it marked the departure of one of the most controversial figures in contemporary Argentine politics. Just after the news of his death broke, an American friend asked me on Facebook what I thought of him, since, although born in the American Midwest, I’ve lived most of my adult life in Argentina. Her question made me realize that there was no easy answer, so I said, “It’s complicated. Let me think about it.”

Menem - provincial caudillo

I’ve thought about it. It would be easy for me to say I’m no fan of Carlos Menem’s. To state that his presidency and personal life were fraught with controversy and charges of corruption and criminal behavior would be accurate. But it would also be true to say that for almost a decade he provided the common citizens of his country with a kind of on-the-street economic stability like many had never known in their lifetime. And he did so while inserting Argentina briefly back into “the concert of nations”—where it had once figured among the world’s top ten trading countries—if at tremendous future cost to the economy and to political stability. 

It would also be accurate to say that while he wrapped himself in the flag of Peronism and frequently invoked the person and political philosophy of Argentina’s mid-twentieth-century strongman General Juan Domingo Perón—who, although dead since 1974, still today casts a long and enduring shadow on Argentine politics—he turned that movement on its head. Indeed, he basically did exactly the opposite, politically and economically speaking, of everything Perón had ostensibly stood for. Instead of championing state control of the economy, nationalization of foreign assets and a position of non-alignment with the bipolar world powers of the Cold War era as Perón had done, Menem embraced the neoliberal bent of Reaganism, firmly aligned the country with the US, sent troops to be part of Coalition and UN peace-keeping forces in the Gulf and Kosovo, and introduced a wave of privatizations that stripped Argentina of practically every state enterprise that it had ever owned—an enormous state military-industrial complex that had been built over the course of the previous century and that had been expanded in the half-century from the days when Perón was in his heyday. And instead of prioritizing the Argentine worker and the labor unions that Perón had adopted as his own, he gave almost pandering priority to big business and its anti-labor whims.

Fair too, however, would be to say that what Menem most had in common with Perón was political pragmatism. Both were capable of agile shifts in party dogma in accordance with political expediency at any given time. Clearly, in the case of Perón, it was that kind of cynical pragmatism that created a pan-Argentine political movement that spanned the ideological spectrum from the far right to the far left and that fostered sometimes violent in-fighting between the two in the process of using one as a political tool only then to purge it when it had served its purpose.

The last time Perón did this was when, in 1973, he returned to power, after almost eighteen years in Spanish exile. He was able to do so thanks in large measure to armed insurgent pressure brought to bear on the then-military regime by the Montoneros neo-Peronist urban guerrilla organization and the Marxist-Leninist People’s Revolutionary Army. Once reinstalled in the presidency, Perón spurned Montonero demands for the share of political power they felt they had earned and sicked the old ultra-right-wing Peronist “Iron Guard” on them, which would soon morph into the paramilitary Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance after Perón’s death a year later—giving rise to a cycle of tit for tat left and right-wing violence that would eventually be known to historians as “The Dirty War”, and which devolved into a military coup in 1976.

Argentine strongman Juan D. Perón

Perhaps this is why, even today, analysts and historians are hard-put to define what “a real Peronist is”, since that political figure can be whatever the movement’s leadership (which is almost always the product of vicious in-fighting) wants it to be at any given moment in time. As such, Carlos Menem was a Peronist by definition as much as he was not a Peronist at all, although, in his day, he was the unquestionable leader of the movement and therefore defined the meaning of the word according to his own convenience.

The nineties were the era of Menem. He was in office from 1989 through 1999, thanks to a Constitutional reform sponsored by his administration. When he took office, there were no consecutive elections for Argentine presidents, who served a single six-year term, and could only run again after a six-year absence from power. Under the Constitutional reform, the presidential term was shortened to four years, but, as under the US Constitution, with the possibility of re-election for another four years.

It was argued at the time by opposition analysts that while the reform introduced popular and highly accepted measures, such as an anti-discrimination clause and eleven articles specifically safeguarding human rights, these had been employed as a ruse to facilitate Menem’s own reelection aspirations and to provide him with an entire decade in power. As such, it was also argued that this aspect of the new Constitutional reform shouldn’t be applicable to the president who had promoted it or who had been elected under the terms of the former Constitution. He should, then, have to leave office after his original six-year term. But Menem was at the peak of his power at the time and his camp won out.

Not content with that, Menem’s legal eagles tried to make a case for his mounting another run for the presidency in 1999, the argument being that his second term of four years had been served under the norms of a new Constitution and that this gave him the right to run for a second four-year term (a stance that became known as the “re-reelection” scheme), but his Justicialist (Peronist) Party’s loss of the 1997 mid-term elections to an opposition coalition rendered the attempt at remaining in office for a third term untenable.

Throughout his time as president and for several years beyond, he was the head of the Justicialist Party and dictated, to a large extent, its policies. Identifying himself unabashedly as a Peronist, his approach to government nevertheless became known as “Menemism”.

His religion was, first and foremost, politics. Of Syrian-Lebanese descent, Menem was brought up as a Sunni Muslim, but on entering politics converted to Catholicism. His motives for this seem clear, since the second article of the National Constitution (both the original and reformed versions) states that the official religion of the Federal Government is Roman Catholic. His first wife, Zulema Yoma, remained Islamic throughout their twenty-five-year marriage (which ended in divorce during the early part of Menem’s presidency), despite her husband’s conversion.

As I mentioned before, Menem’s claim to fame was his handling of the long recalcitrant Argentine economy. One much-heralded plan after another had failed over the years since the nineteen-sixties when Argentina had first started suffering rampant inflation and currency devaluation followed by one “reset” after another.

When I first arrived in Argentina in 1973, two currencies—new pesos (or pesos ley) and old pesos—circulated simultaneously and prices were often exhibited in both. I recall that, at the time, the cost of a newspaper or a cup of coffee was one peso ley, or a thousand old pesos. In other words, the devaluation had clipped three zeros off of the currency. More surreal still, however, was the fact that under the last Peronist administration headed by Perón himself, which took office practically on my arrival in Buenos Aires, my pay at the newspaper where I was a reporter was equivalent to under fifty dollars a month, but my wife and I could live modestly well on that.

I think the managing editor only made a little over a hundred dollars a month at that time. But it was like Monopoly money. As long as you remained on the game board in Argentina, your pesos had real-economy value. So we all moonlighted as free-lance correspondents for international publications to make some real-world money because, if not, we were basically held hostage by the Argentine economy and couldn’t afford to travel outside of the country’s borders.

Perón’s most eloquent response to criticism about this state of affairs came at a rally where he said everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the dollar-peso parity. Who cared, he asked the crowd, what the dollar-peso parity was? This was Argentina, where people earned and spent pesos. Then pointing to a laborer in the crowd, he said, “How about you, pal, when was the last time you saw a dollar?”

Martínez de Hoz (left) with dictator Jorge R. Videla

This period was followed by a new economic revamp under the military junta that replaced the Peronist government, following a coup d’état and the introduction of the “peso fuerte” with which several zeros were again knocked off of the currency. This time it was pegged to a floating exchange system created by conservative “Chicago school”, Cambridge-educated economist José Martínez de Hoz who served as the regime’s first economy minister. But that system also had disastrous results. I recall that after making the equivalent of less than six hundred dollars a year less than five years earlier, I was now making over forty thousand dollars a year working at the same newspaper, at a time when, in the US, a new Chevy Impala cost under five thousand dollars, and a good dress shirt ran eight dollars. Only problem was, in Argentina an equivalent car cost forty thousand and a similar dress shirt one hundred. This was when Argentines traveled the world, feeling flush and bringing back everything imaginable from abroad that they couldn’t afford to buy at home. Their shopaholic battle cry on these foreign purchase expeditions was “dame dos” (give me two).

With the return of democracy in 1983 and the overwhelming vote to elect Radical Party candidate Dr. Raúl Alfonsín, whose win, for the next five years, managed to push both the Peronists and the military into the background, yet another attempt was made to bring the economy to heel. Once again, several zeros were lopped off of the currency and the government even changed its name entirely, now calling it the austral. The new currency opened at an exchange parity of more than a dollar eighty per austral to which my contacts in the business section of the American Embassy rolled their eyes as if to say, “Yeah, right, like that’s gonna work.”

But Alfonsín created the economic reform in combination with an incipient opening of the economy to foreign investment and expanded foreign trade. Areas like oil and fishing that had long been very limited for foreign investors were suddenly being tendered on the international market and this seemed like a good sign to Western observers. But Alfonsín’s negotiation of the enormous foreign debt that he inherited did not go well and the economy soon went south. President Alfonsín’s legacy to Argentina was new-found observance of the sanctity of human and civil rights and the rule of law, and one of its most democratic administrations in history, which gained ethical respect for the nation in foreign diplomatic circles. But that made no real difference where the rubber met the road, once the bottom fell out of the economy.

Alfonsín and Menem - peaceful transfer

In its final days the Alfonsín government was confronted with mass supermarket lootings and Peronist-led general strikes. After meeting at the Presidential Residence at Olivos with Peronist presidential candidate Carlos Menem, then-governor of his native La Rioja Province, Alfonsín agreed to early elections, which Menem won handily against the Radical Party candidate Eduardo Angelóz. And with hyper-inflation soaring out of control, Alfonsín handed over power to Menem five months before the end of his six-year term. It was the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in Argentina since the nineteen-thirties, and marked the end of constant pendulum swings between civilian and military rule in the country.

At that time, however, I remember standing in line to take a bus and thinking that the bill I was holding in my hand to pay the fare, and from which I would get scant change in return, had been worth a thousand dollars at the outset of the Alfonsín administration. It was not clear to anyone what Menem planned to do to get the country back on track. It wasn’t even clear who he was, other than a mutton-chopped Peronist populist caudillo from a province with a population of only about three hundred-fifty thousand.

But he quickly proved himself capable of shaking things up. Pragmatic as Perón himself, Menem swiftly moved to strike a pact with the most diverse sectors of Argentine society, drawing strongly on support from the most iconic of Argentine businessmen who had long been enemies of Perón, former Montoneros guerrilla organization members, who had once kidnapped business leaders for ransom, military leaders who, after the 1976 coup had held Menem himself prisoner for several years, members of the clergy and members of a stubbornly undemocratic group of field-grade officers in the military who had threatened to overthrow Alfonsín’s government and remained a threat to his successor.

With this broad consensus, Menem struck while the iron was hot and immediately began opening up the economy to foreign investment, vastly expanded imports and foreign trade, initiated negotiations with international creditors and then tackled hyperinflation. He did this by returning to the peso (yet another new peso) which his economy minister, Harvard-educated economist Domingo Cavallo, pegged to the dollar at a constant parity of one peso equals one dollar. This parity was maintained through a policy of so-called “convertibility”, by which pesos and dollars could be transacted, paid, saved and spent interchangeably, thus taking all pressure off of the exchange rate, and off of inflation as well.

What this meant was that, for the first time in at least a quarter-century, Argentines knew what things cost, because the economy was dollarized in terms of both prices and wages. It was a tremendous relief to a population long accustomed to expecting bad surprises with every purchase and terrified of what could happen to loans, mortgages and other types of credit that they might take out for longer than a month at a time. Suddenly, credit was viable in Argentina, and the government moved to quickly “bankerize” the economy with the introduction of bank accounts in both pesos and dollars and the widespread use of credit and debit cards.

The one to one convertibility measure remained in effect for the entire time that Menem was in office and created a kind of domestic confidence in the economy that young to middle-aged Argentines had never known before. And while the unemployment rate tended to run higher than historic levels, there was new demand for highly qualified skills which even brought back Argentine professionals from abroad who had been previously lost to the “brain drain” of earlier decades.

Menem’s government financed all of this by selling off vast government business assets, reducing state employment rolls to bare-bones levels, slashing subsidies and opening the economy to private competition. Over the course of his presidency the state divested interests in oil, insurance, shipping, aviation, electric power, natural gas distribution, telecommunications, steel, tourism, real estate, postal services, health care, meat-packing and a variety of other areas of interest. Many of these divestitures ended up in the hands of foreign multinationals, some of which were also the country’s creditors.

In some cases these privatizations were highly successful, as in the case of the telecommunications system which, prior to its sale to Telefónica of Spain and Telecom of France, was one of the semi-industrialized world’s worst. Phone lines were so scarce in Buenos Aires that people were on waiting lists for literally decades to get one, and the price of an apartment or house could vary by thousands of dollars on the basis of whether or not it came with a telephone line. Ancient exchanges and connections made the phone system completely unreliable, especially for long-distance or international services, which were strictly operator-assisted. The privatization contracts included strict infrastructure and technology goals which took Argentina’s land line system from being obsolete and highly limited to being a modern, well-functioning, ever more available service. And the new cellphone technology that was introduced was state of the art and very widely distributed.

Menem - second term, a decade in power

But many if not most of the other privatizations were plagued by errors, corruption and scant responsibilities for the private investors that took them over and that, all too frequently, held ironclad concessions for decades into the future. The results of these failed transactions only started to become obvious toward the end of Menem’s decade in power and were then passed on to future administrations that have been suffering the consequences ever since.

Of Menem’s highly uneven first and second terms in office, La Nación, a major Argentine mass circulation daily, wrote in its editorial section: “The results of (his) economic policy were reflected in an anticipated entry into the globalized world that was built after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a rapid modernization of the country's productive infrastructure, and stability, which is the basis of long-term growth. Unfortunately, Menem's reformist drive collapsed when his second administration began. His program of structural transformation for the country was interrupted and many strategic changes that were essential in order for the reforms of the previous period to produce the expected results were not executed.”

But the controversies surrounding his presidency expanded far beyond policy. For instance, he was accused during his tenure and later tried for illegal arms trafficking. This involved the clandestine sale in 1991 of Argentine-made military-grade weapons to Croatia, which, at the time, was at war with Yugoslavia, and in 1996 to Ecuador, which the year before had been involved in the brief Alta Cenepa War with its neighbor, Peru.  He was held under house arrest from June to November of 2001, on charges surrounding these arms sales but later fled with his second wife, Cecilia Bolocco, and their infant son to her native Chile. The Chilean government, through it's Supreme Court, refused requests for his extradition.

Photo-journalist José Luis Cabezas

When in 2004, Argentina’s new Peronist President Néstor Kirchner had warrants for Menem’s arrest canceled, the former president returned to the country, where he faced new charges of embezzlement and failing to declare funds that he had in a Swiss bank account. It wasn’t until 2013, under the administration of Kirchner’s widow, Cristina Fernández, that he was acquitted of those charges. He was, however, previously sentenced to seven years in prison for the arms trafficking charge, and eventually to four and a half years for embezzlement and bribery but was immune to incarceration on either sentence due to his status as a member of the Senate. 

Yabrán - the pic that killed Cabezas

Menem was also the subject of a probe into the 1995 explosion of a munitions factory in Río Tercero, Córdoba Province, which killed seven people, injured three hundred others and flattened part of the town. The explosion was suspected of being intentional as part of an attempt to cover up the illegal arms sales for which Menem was under investigation. This incident has continued to haunt him for life. Menem was scheduled to attend a trial this week in which he was to be indicted on a charge of “indirect responsibility”, but died before his court date.

A shadowy figure called Alfredo Yabrán who worked closely with Menem’s government and operated international airport warehousing, was suspected of involvement in the arms trafficking operations as well. After a news magazine photographer called José Luis Cabezas snapped a picture of the elusive businessman at a beach resort on 1997, the reporter was kidnapped, tortured and murdered, and his body incinerated in his rented car. The ensuing scandal embarrassed Menem’s administration and Yabrán was suddenly a marked man. During a police raid on his home, Yabrán subsequently died of a shotgun blast to the face. His death was ruled “suicide”.

Israeli Embassy bombing

Perhaps the broadest international coverage was garnered by accusations that Menem had covered up the conspiracy that led to two infamous terrorist attacks on Argentina’s Jewish Community. On March 17, 1992, the Israeli Embassy in downtown Buenos Aires was the target of a suicide bomb attack that demolished the building and left twenty-nine dead and two hundred forty-two injured.  Two years later, on July 18, 1994, a suicide car bomb attack destroyed the Argentine Mutual Israelite Association (AMIA) in mid-town Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people and injuring hundreds more. Although no one has ever been brought to justice for the two incidents—the two worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated in Argentina and among some of the worst worldwide—there has been persistent evidence of direct involvement by agents of the Iranian government. Just as persistently, Menem has been accused of involvement in the cover-up surrounding both bombings.

Decades later, during the last year of the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Federal Prosecutor Alberto Nisman leveled formal charges at Menem for the cover-up, but the case simply went away after Nisman was found dead in the bathroom of his apartment, with a gunshot wound to the head. The Kirchner government portrayed Nisman’s death as “a suicide”, but Nisman’s family and independent investigators suspected homicide.

AMIA bombing

Obviously, it was of utmost importance to the former president to remain politically relevant, less because of his leadership vocation than as a means of surviving beyond prison walls. Ever the provincial caudillo, Carlos Menem managed to hold onto his senatorial seat—and his legal immunity—for two decades, until his death earlier this month at the age of ninety, when everything he ever was or had been left the realm of the present and passed into the pages of Argentine history.

 

HOSTAGES TO THE G20

Argentine President Mauricio Macri was very obviously elated at being the master of ceremonies and center of attention at the start of the G20 summit of major industrialized nations, which this year was being held in Argentina’s capital city on November 30 and December 1. After a decade of isolationism and “bad company” under the populist Kirchner regime that preceded his government, Macri has, in all fairness, bent over backwards to lift Argentina out of its former pariah status on the Western stage, and this G20 meeting is clearly a crowning moment for the country’s president—though not so much for many of his people.

Trump fumbles with the earpiece then throws it to the floor.

Macri’s first meeting on the opening day of the conference was with US President Donald Trump, slated for 7 a.m. As per Trump’s custom —dramatic planned late entrances—the US president didn’t arrive at Government House from his hotel until 7:23 a.m., thus making a show of his disregard for everyone else’s schedule at a conference attended by practically all major world leaders. He showed further disdain for the host country by only reluctantly accepting an earpiece so that he could hear the simultaneous English interpretation of Macri’s welcoming speech, and only then merely holding it up to one ear instead of putting it on. When Macri had finished speaking, Trump said, “I think I understood you better in your language than I did on this, but that’s OK,” and then tossed the earpiece to the floor.

Macri made reference to the long relationship that his own multi-millionaire family has had with billionaire Trump and his family for decades. Trump, meanwhile, recalled how he had told the Argentine president’s father, businessman Franco Macri, that he was sure Mauricio would one day be president and congratulated himself for making the right call.

Macri said, “...It took us 30 years to convince you to come, Donald...We had to wait for you to become president and for me to become president to manage it, but we Argentines are really very happy to have you here in our country.” 

Clearly, there are many Argentines who would beg to differ. 

As in many other parts of the world, Trump is a less than popular figure here among a very large segment of the population. He is often seen as a bully, when not as a buffoon, and as a danger in his role as the most powerful leader on earth, due to his America First (America alone) policy, his contempt for traditional US allies, his unpredictable and often belligerent foreign policies, his fostering of a worldwide trade war and his disregard for the basic tenets of democracy and for the science behind efforts to rein in global climate change. Add to that Argentina’s previous negative experiences with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and foreign business and banking under the former military regime (1976-1983) and under the 10-year reign of elected President Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999), as well as the extraordinary and massively disruptive security efforts surrounding the G20 summit itself, and the mood among a major portion of the population is anything but positive surrounding either Trump’s visit or the summit as such. 

Security for the two-day summit alone will cost Argentine taxpayers an approximate 43 million dollars at a time when adherence to IMF guidelines is imposing a cruel austerity program on the population at large. Since taking office, Macri has also scrapped former subsidies on basic services such as privatized electric power, natural gas, water and sewage, etc., causing utilities to skyrocket, while permitting concession-holders to pretty much dictate their own prices. A free-floating exchange rate and free-market price policy has significantly raised retail prices for basic necessities in dollar terms, while, additionally, new and increasingly onerous taxes have been imposed on a population already stretched thin, while pay increases and social security are being severely restrained by the Macri administration.

Ramped-up security for the summit has prompted a veritable shutdown of the entire country. Mobility has been so severely restricted for the Friday and Saturday summit that the government saw fit to declare an extraordinary national holiday on Friday, and there has been a nationwide shutdown of domestic air services. Long-distance bus services have also been suspended, as have subway and train services for Buenos Aires and the Greater Buenos Aires area and maritime services in the Port of Buenos Aires. Local bus services were being maintained on a restricted basis. In short, Buenos Aires and indeed much of the country as a whole were being held hostage by the G20. 

A vast number of Argentines tend to tremble whenever world leaders get together with their own government to decide their fate. This is not surprising, considering the country's checkered foreign policy and economic  history. Many tend to figure that any time world leaders gather behind closed doors, the purpose will be to figure out how to divide up the world’s wealth, power and resources, and that, in the end, the common people will always lose. Judging from their own experience, the people of Argentina may very well have a point.

With regard to how certain local experts view Argentina’s hosting of the G20 summit, the opposition newspaper Página 12 asked Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, professor of international relations at Argentina’s Universidad Di Tella, to provide an opinion on what the benefit to Argentina would be of hosting the G20 here and of subordinating its foreign policy to the whims of Washington.

“The Government is composed of an elite that believes that some of the Menem administration’s recipes worked,” Tokatlian told the daily. “But (Macri) doesn’t know the level of financialization that has taken place in the world and that it’s not possible to go back to the '90s. That world doesn’t exist anymore.”

According to the Universidad Di Tella professor, “They (the Macri government) are not intellectually sophisticated. They have a logic of interrelationship between the political world and the economic world more typical of the '90s, which doesn’t exist today within the domestic internal dynamics of the United States. So they opt for the third way, which is to believe that security issues are going to be what will open other economic doors. Then they look for the path to see how to get the Southern Command into to the DEA, into the FBI. This shows ignorance.”

Tokatlian went on to say that, “in addition to their ignorance, they have a very optimistic view of the world, of globalization, of the free market, of the flow of investments, of the attraction posed by the arrival of a government different from (the earlier) Argentina and of the end of what they call populism. When optimism meets ignorance, the balance is a catastrophic cocktail.” The fear, he said, was that Argentina would overreact. “Then,” he said, “we go from ignorance and optimism to naivety and to voluntarism. That is a very bad reading of the United States.”

Macri got a taste of this new, non-'90s realpolitik on the first day of the summit when Trump laid down a new rule. Basically, you're either with China or with the US. There's no in between.  

Last Sunday, I arrived back in Argentina after almost a month away in my native United States. I had nearly five hours to kill in the Jorge Newbery metropolitan airport before catching my domestic flight to Patagonia. After checking my bag, I decided to cross the street in front of the airport to walk a while along the beautiful coast of the River Plate. But instead of the usually lovely view I found blocks and blocks of what looked like a miniature replica of Donald Trump’s ´proposed border wall—solid sheet metal nine feet tall, topped by endless coils of razor wire. At first I couldn’t imagine why this romantic and iconic Buenos Aires attraction had been so monstrously violated. And then I realized that this was the ugly face of the upcoming G20 meeting.

Disheartened, I walked along the barrier dragging my carry-on behind me, unable to get even a glimpse of the miles-wide, lion-colored waters of the River Plate until, abruptly, passing the main security area of the airport, the wall ended and a familiar and welcome sight unfolded: the inveterate anglers who daily fish the waters of their city’s river from the sidewalk behind the flood wall. This was where they had all re-grouped, squeezed up the coastline by the aggressive new barrier, but undeterred from their beloved enterprise. There was the lady who sold bait, coffee, sandwiches and churros. There too was the food wagon that sold sausages, hamburgers, fries and drinks. And then the fishermen themselves, with their rods lined up along the flood wall, enjoying what had turned out to be a truly fine spring day. It was passive resistance, a reminder that the coastline was a long one and that the government wasn't going to be able to fence them out of all of it.

I found a place to sit and watch them for a while, and as I did, I had to smile. The razor wire and security wall would always represent the unassailable power of the rich over the common people. But the anglers represented the simple truth that people adapt and find a way to work around the government, no matter what gets thrown at them. Life goes on, governments and policies change. The only thing that was constant, I realized, was this, people in the pursuit of happiness...against all odds.   

NO REQUIEM FOR A NAZI

My friend John was the first person who ever talked to me about Erich Priebke. An American World War II vet, he surprised me by saying he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. 

SS Captain Erich Priebke

This was back in the mid-‘90s when I’d first moved down to Bariloche in Patagonia, and I was just starting to find out about Priebke from the news reports about Italy’s attempts to extradite him for his role in the massacre that the Nazis had carried out in the Ardeatine Caves in Rome during World War II.

“Well,” I said, “you know, John, he’s a war criminal, a former SS leader, and, if the Italians are right, a mass murderer...”

John chuckled sardonically under his breath—something I’d learned he did when he didn’t believe a word you were saying. He reeled to his feet (we were sitting at his dining room table) and made his way to the kitchen where he kept his gin stashed out of sight of his wife, in a cubbyhole between a cupboard and the woodstove. His wife and mine were out on a walk along the lake and wouldn’t be back for a while so he wasn’t being as shy as usual about his gin. (Cheap white wine was what he favored throughout the day as his ostensible “sole drink of choice,” but the gin was what he used to keep his buzz going from morning to night). He deftly snatched the liter bottle of Gordon’s from its hiding place, poured a water glass half-full and, standing right there by the stove, he drank it down thirstily like water.

“Want another beer?” he asked, clearing his throat, his diction, as always, incredibly unslurred.

“No, I’m good for now,” I said, holding up my half-full can.

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged, adding, “Just grab one out of the fridge when you need it,” and then he meandered back to the table, sat down and poured his water tumbler full of chilled wine from a pitcher that sat on the table between us. The wine he sipped as he thought about where to go next with the conversation. That was the way conversations went with John—no rush, nice and easy. Originally from New Jersey, he hadn’t been in a hurry since 1968, when he’d negotiated a golden handshake from his executive post in Buenos Aires with the Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals firm and moved to the 200 acres of mountainside he’d bought here in Patagonia with a business partner. Back then, they’d bought it for a song from the widow of the former owner, because it was out in the wilderness where nobody wanted to live. He still owned 25 acres of it despite having lived ever since on the profits he’d made from selling off his half a couple of acres at a time, once there was electricity and a better road to get here, and the area started becoming attractive to people with a little money who wanted to get away from it all.

After a moment he chuckled quietly again, but his piercing blue, bloodshot eyes remained serious, unwavering. “Erich’s no murderer. He’s one of the nicest, most respectable guys you’d ever want to meet. I remember him from when he had his deli and butcher shop in town. Everybody liked him. And he’s been a pillar of the community, head of the German school and all that.”

“Just your everyday, good-guy storm trooper, huh?” I goaded.

“Oh hell, Dan,” he said, “he’s no more a storm trooper than I am.”

“Not strictly true, John,” I said.

“And he wasn’t any kind of Nazi leader like they’re trying to make him out to be,” he went on, ignoring and immediately forgiving my sarcasm. “He was a pipsqueak captain, an administrative one at that. He was a nobody. Whatever he did, he was just doing what he was told to do.”

“That argument hasn’t flown since the Nuremberg Trials,” I said. “And it doesn’t fly in the American Army either. I was a soldier like you. I know that you’re only obliged to follow all lawful orders. Somebody tells me to shoot a hog-tied civilian in the back of the head, that’s not an order, it’s a moral choice and I have to make it. I can opt to refuse.”

Again, the low, bitter chuckle, almost under his breath. “That’s pretty naïve of you, Dan. I mean for a former big-city newsman, at least. One thing’s the theory in the rule book. Another’s being at war.” His voice quavered when he said, “I did some things I’m not very proud of when I was following Patton’s ass through Europe, and I imagine your dad did too.”

“He never talks about it,” I said.

“With good reason, I’m sure,” he responded.

“So you were with Patton?”

“Sort of...like I say, behind him, kind of.”

“I guess everybody was sort of behind Patton,” I said. “To hear my dad tell it, Patton breezed through Europe with a convoy of tanks and then bragged about winning the war.”

This time John’s laugh was genuine. “Well, I never saw him out there directing traffic like they had George Scott doing in the movie, at least,” he snorted. He drained his glass and filled it with wine again. He sat there sipping his drink in silence, but I could almost hear him thinking. On his battered old Zenith stereo, Satchmo was singing “Jelly Roll”. There was always jazz on the stereo at John’s house. He’d shuffle back and forth for hours on end between his two loves, white wine and old-time jazz music. Sitting there at the table, the music coming from behind him, in the living room, he cupped his right ear, grinned and said, “I love this tune,” and then, in his scratchy, froggy, tenor voice, he softly sang along for a few bars: “My momma said today...when she went away...you be a goo’ boy, I bring you a toy...’cause I’m Momma’s pride an’ joy...”

Then his face went serious again and he looked me hard in the eyes.

“There was this time, somewhere on the Rhine, I think. We’d been fighting for days. We were exhausted. But by now we were winning. It was toward the end...sometimes house to house. It was ugly. We’d lost some guys. There were guys in our outfit that wanted to burn Germany to the ground. Anyway, one day we took this factory. When we overcame the security, we had our interpreter order everybody in German to come out with their hands up. They didn’t try to run or put up a fight. They came out single file, their hands in the air. All of the sudden this sergeant of ours points his forty-five at this kid at the front—because that’s what he was, just a kid—and shoots him pointblank in the head, right here.” John put his index finger to his left temple. “I was looking right at the kid’s face when he died. It was, like, surprised, his eyes, his expression when his brains flew out the other side of his head, and then he was dead.” John was seeing it, right now, I knew, as if he were there. Tears welled up in his eyes and one spilled over and ran down his cheek. He didn’t bother to wipe it away, maybe didn’t even notice it. It dripped from his chin. He went on: “I yelled, ‘What the hell are you doing? They’re giving up! What the hell’s wrong with you?’ But he just laughed and said, ‘These dumb-assed krauts deserve to die...’”

John rubbed his eyes, shook his head, as if trying to shake the image of that day, perhaps of what followed as well. “Even now,” he said, “I see that boy’s face, and so many other boys’ faces, every night before I fall asleep.” Now he looked at me intensely. “And I’m sure Erich sees the people he killed too, Dan...and the ones he didn’t. He’s a good man. I know him well. War’s hell, Dan. That’s not a metaphor. It’s a fact. You think a mere captain had any real choice in the Nazi army? He had to take part in that massacre or be killed himself for refusing a direct order from Hitler.”

“He had a moral choice, though, John,” I insisted. “He could have chosen death over such a heinous crime.”

John chuckled low and insincerely. “Nobody chooses death in war, Dan. Your only thought is surviving till the end.”

* * *

On the mountain road that leads to my house, 20 clicks from Bariloche, where Erich Priebke not only lived under his own name for half a century following World War II but was also a well-known and highly respected businessman and community leader, there’s a sheet metal plate bearing his name on the post of an electrical transformer. There are actually two transformers on that road. The other one bears the name of another pioneer neighbor and architect, Raúl Bozzarelli. It was the practice of the local electrical cooperative, way back when, to identify the transformers for new areas of service by the surname of the first settler to request it, mainly because in order to have electricity, whoever arrived first had to pay for the installation of the transformer. Accordingly, if the lines are down and you call in for a maintenance crew to be sent out, even today, what the co-op will want to know is if your sector is Bozzarelli or Priebke.

Even today, what the electrical co-op will want to know

is if your sector is Bozzarelli or Priebke.

Although Priebke had a home in town from the late 1940s on, at some point he had also bought about 15 acres of mountainous woodland fronting on the beautiful, glacial Lake Moreno and built himself a fine country home there. After Priebke’s extradition in the ‘90s to Italy for trial on charges of crimes against humanity, a neighbor or two tried to stir up a movement to get Priebke’s name removed from “our” transformer. But in the end, there was no real interest: Besides us, who’d see it, out here in the middle of nowhere? And even if they did, who’d care? Furthermore, the name on that transformer was the surname only and Erich Priebke’s family were still the owners of that land. A moot protest, then. So the sign still says “Priebke” on it, a reminder of the past when Don Erich was thought of as a respected neighbor, not a murderer, and when his family were well known and well liked members of the community, not descendants of a Hitlerian monster.

That piece of land, where the Priebkes’ country home is, shares a property line with 70 acres of forest for which I’m the caretaker. So I used to run into Priebke’s granddaughter walking her dogs on the high road, or driving her little VW Saveiro pickup into town for supplies when she lived there for a time before moving, I’m told, to the United States. Sometimes too, one of his two sons and I would wave hello to each other when he’d come out for a visit to the place. But since Erich Priebke’s conviction in Italy, the only one I see from time to time, caretaker to caretaker, is Don Pedro, the Priebkes’ foreman, who still lives on the spread and is in charge of protecting it for the family.

“The señor hasn’t been out here for several years now,” he said, his voice and face forlorn, when I met up with him while we were both on our rounds one day earlier this year.

“Well, he’s under arrest in Italy, after all, and he’s nearly a hundred years old!” I said.

“No, no,” said Pedro, “I mean his son and his family, the one who still lives here.  It’s very sad. It has all been very terrible for the family.”

So now it’s mostly just Don Pedro...and the Rottweilers that help him keep the poachers away—a case of the past catching up to the present and completely changing the perception of reality.

* * *

Journalist, writer and former National Parks Ranger Abel Basti has been researching the lives of former Nazis in Argentina—and particularly in Bariloche—for the past 20 years now. His research for Hitler in Argentina and the book itself have gained him a reputation as a crackpot among detractors and as a knowledgeable authority among those who have long believed, like him, in cloak and dagger collusion and trade-offs between the post-war US intelligence community and the former Reich that permitted some top Nazis, including—if Basti is to be believed—the Führer himself, to slip through the cracks and live out their days in southern Argentina and Chile.

Basti was sitting in Priebke’s living room interviewing him the day Argentine Federal Police officers arrived at the door carrying a Interpol order with them for the arrest of the then-octogenarian former SS captain. What would ensue was a very long process of extradition demands from Italy and Germany and appeals by Priebke’s attorneys that had the effect of delaying the inevitable for long months. But eventually, all of these tactics failed and the Argentine government, then under President Carlos Saúl Menem, eventually cleared the way for Priebke’s extradition and trial.

Shortly after Priebke’s extradition, going about his duties as a local reporter and correspondent, Basti would be surprised one morning to see a tour bus full of foreign visitors stopped in front of Erich Priebke’s home and hear the tour guide telling the travelers that this was the home of the infamous Nazi leader, Erich Priebke. Basti found this hilarious and immediately started toying with the idea of a satirical work, a sort of travel guide to Nazi points of interest in South America’s best known ski resort—and one of its best known havens for ex-Nazi exiles.

Joking about it with me when we met on the street in town one morning, he asked, half in jest, what I thought of a “Nazi Bariloche” travel guide. Without batting an eye, I said I thought it would sell like hotcakes. A few weeks later, Basti called to say he’d written it and asked if I’d read it, and, if I liked it, write the back cover. The book, with my comments on the back cover, is now in its seventh printing, according to Amazon.

The controversial cover bears an image of the famed Bariloche Civic Center but instead of the equestrian statue of General Julio A. Roca—revered by nationalists as the founder of modern Argentina and reviled by liberals and left-wingers as the author of a veritable genocide waged against the native population—an image of Hitler, in full uniform, right arm raised in a Nazi salute and standing on a pedestal has been photoshopped in.

Shortly after it first came out, a close friend of mine in the tiny local Jewish community told me that Bariloche Jews were furious about it. Why, I wanted to know? Shouldn’t they delight to anything that brought the Nazis to light and smoked them out of their hiding places?

That wasn’t how they viewed it, he told me. Things like this just stirred up the whole thing again and bred enmity. For instance, one of the places that Basti had marked as a Nazi site in his book was precisely where a Jewish couple had rented space for their business. Bariloche was a quiet town. Nobody wanted any trouble.

But Basti’s main business was (and is) finding old Nazis—in recent years his works and documentaries have been published in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, though the United States continues to ignore his claims—and in a town that was a frontier outpost less than half a century old when the war ended and did much of its developing with a post-war wave of immigration, when popular dictator Juan Domingo Perón, a military man of well-known Fascist sympathies, opened the country’s doors to fugitive former members of the Reich—Bariloche is a treasure trove for such an investigator.  Basti’s book, Bariloche Nazi, documents his claims with maps, photos, papers and drawings, so that, although it started out as a joke, it eventually became a serious work that some foreign tourists arrive carrying in their knapsacks or under their arms. But the book’s crown jewel is almost as inaccessible now as then: Incalco Ranch located on Lake Nahuel Huapi, on the opposite shore from Bariloche, the place where Basti claims Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun lived an idyllic existence after the war. It is an exclusive residence that, back then, was accessible only by boat or hydroplane, and it belonged to none other than Argentine businessman Jorge Antonio, one of Perón’s most trusted friends.

* * *

Born in Berlin in 1913, Erich Priebke died earlier this month (October 11), at the age of one hundred. He had been under house arrest (because of his extremely advanced age) in Rome since his conviction in 1996 for his part in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre.

Priebke naïvely thought he could tell his story.

The facts are historically simple if morally complex.  Priebke was a 31-year-old captain in the SS police force, stationed in Rome under the orders of German Commander Herbert Kappler. It was in the latter part of the war, in March of 1944, that Italian Resistance fighters attached to the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (GAP) attacked a column of SS Military Police troops marching along Rome’s Via Rasella, killing 33 German soldiers by first setting off a bomb near the detachment and then attacking the group with small arms fire and hand grenades.

Although never documented, Commander Kappler is alleged to have received direct orders from the Führer himself to execute ten imprisoned Italian anti-Nazis for every soldier to die as a result of the attack. It was Kappler who compiled the list of 330 people whom the Reich condemned to die in the Ardeatine Caves.

Major Karl Haas (who was an SS Intelligence officer with a well-established reputation for ruthlessness that included sending hundreds of Jews from the region to Auschwitz) and Captain Priebke were placed in charge of rounding the prisoners up. Priebke was specifically charged with checking the list. And although the Italian courts that tried him, in principle, tended to agree that he had been a staff-grade officer following orders, his responsibility for the list and his own participation were what eventually condemned him. During the trial it was established that while the order was to kill ten Italian Partisans for each of the 33 German soldiers killed in the Resistance raid, the number of people killed in the Ardeatine Caves was 335, not 330—with five people not on Kappler’s list having been added by mistake. Furthermore, Priebke admitted to having executed two of the prisoners himself, as did Haas.


Entrance to the Ardeatine Caves in Rome Photo originally posted at
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/antmoose/66450192/

Both Priebke and Haas were captured by the Allies following the war. Interestingly enough, however, while Priebke was held in a British prison camp to be bound over for a war crimes trial for his part in the Ardeatine slayings, Haas went from being a POW to allegedly going to work for US intelligence as a spy against the Soviet Union. Priebke ultimately escaped from the prison camp and, after some time in hiding, in South Tyrol, eventually received help from Bishop Alois Hudal at the Vatican, who reportedly aided him in obtaining false documentation and finding a new home in Argentina. There he would live under his own name for half a century until the team of TV reporter Sam Donaldson of the ABC network in the United States stumbled onto a less than successful clearance table book in which Priebke was described as one of the architects of the Ardeatine Massacre and decided to follow up on the lead, which took them to Bariloche.

Largely unrepentant and always believing that he had only acted on orders and that the people executed at the Ardeatine Caves were, at the time, “terrorists”, Priebke naïvely felt that enough time had passed that he could talk about the incident and gave Donaldson an interview. Once aired on US television, the interview sparked outrage in Italy and the backlash led to Priebke’s arrest and extradition. Curiously enough, former Major Haas was called as a mere witness for Priebke’s trial. But as a result of his testimony, he eventually also ended up being charged and tried, and died under house arrest in a rest home near Rome at age 92.

 

* * *

There can be little doubt that Erich Priebke, not a boy but a mature man of 31 at the time of the war, was a thoroughly committed SS officer and he played a key role in the organization of one of the most heinous Nazi war crimes of World War II. Nor can there be any doubt that, in trying him for his part in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre, Italy was doing long-delayed justice for a terrible atrocity.

But where justice would appear to have turned to vengeance was when Priebke died this month. The Vatican (perhaps as damage control for the role of one of its own number in Priebke’s escape and exile) reportedly issued an unprecedented ban on his funeral’s being held anywhere in Rome. Priebke’s own native city also refused his body, fearing his tomb might become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In the end, his funeral was eventually arranged—not without violent protests—by a Catholic splinter, the Society of Saint Pius X—a group alleged to have Fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies. Their plan was to inter the former Nazi in the Italian city of Albano Laziale. Since protesters kept the body from being buried there, it was eventually decided that Priebke's remains would be laid to rest in an undisclosed location.

But the cruelest cut of all, I feel, was Argentina’s refusal to repatriate Erich Priebke’s body. His last wish had been to be laid to rest next to his wife in the country that he had called home for half a century after the war. Despite the fact that the founder of the current ruling party, General Juan Domingo Perón, was clearly the key to the immigration of fleeing former Nazis in the post-war years, and although the Peronist government of Carlos Menem that preceded the current Peronist-led administration upheld the concept of “due obedience” that kept members of Argentina’s former military regime from being tried for human rights violations and murder until the current Peronist administration overturned that amnesty, the administration of Cristina Kirchner felt perfectly justified in turning down the Priebke family’s request that they be permitted to bring his remains home. Considering that congressional elections (where ruling FPV candidates aren’t expected to do well) are to be held in this country next Sunday, and that the current administration has blatantly used its early human rights stand to cover up abuses of power of every color ever since, not accepting the return of Priebke’s body seemed hypocritical at best and like political grandstanding at worst. What part could his family possibly have had, I asked myself, in the cruel and misguided decisions and choices that a young army officer made nearly 70 years ago? Didn’t the sentence against Priebke end with his death and shouldn’t his family have the right to mourn and bury him?

I was immediately reminded of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Hojarasca (Leaf Storm), in which a fallen physician’s perceived sins against the town where he once practiced lead him to live the life of a recluse, locked away in his home, and to eventually commit suicide. But even then, the townspeople refuse to forget his misdeeds, and ban anyone from burying him. So great is their hatred that they say there will be no burial for the man “until they can smell his corpse rotting in his house from the other side of the street.”

In the story that García Márquez tells, the moral conundrum has to do, precisely, with when “enough is enough”, when blind justice turns to blind vengeance, and when the actions of a “just” society turn nearly as hateful as the sentiments behind the crimes they condemn.

To my mind those are questions that emerged this month too from the refusal of the countries of his birth and choice to afford Erich Priebke a proper Christian burial in the presence of his family, no matter what crimes he was convicted of and sentenced for in life. And perhaps another question that this begs is how much more we know of compassion in dealing with his family and his death than Priebke himself did in making at least one major decision of his life.