THE BEFORE AND AFTER OF A 'HAVING IT ALL' REGIME

“Vamos por todo...¡por todo!

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

 

 

Dark humor from a Facebook

site called

"Si-no-te-gusta-vaffanculo"

Authentic democracy filled the streets of major cities all over Argentina on the evening of Thursday, April 18, while tyranny stalked the halls of the national Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers. The A18 protest was, like its 8N predecessor, a spontaneous civic demonstration organized from computer to computer through the social media and without partisan links. A number of opposition politicians respectfully joined the protesters but from the uncomfortable low-profile position of tolerated guests rather than organizers, since demonstrators have made it abundantly clear ever since the first of three progressively stronger protests less than a year ago that they are as disappointed with the lukewarm opposition as they are furious with the rabidly self-absorbed ruling political movement.

In an outpouring of genuine democratic zeal, millions of people of all political colors poured into the country’s streets—over a million participating protesters in the nation’s capital alone—to reject what their supposed political representatives were ostensibly doing in their name and in the name of “democratization”: seeking to introduce “reforms” that would give an already autocratic Executive Branch even greater discretionary power, to the detriment of the Judiciary, the rule of law, the rights of the individual and those of the “fourth power” (the media and their role as the guardians of free expression in representation of the people). But that wasn’t all—as if that were not enough—that the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets were protesting. They were also decrying encroaching corruption that, in the last decade, has become so shockingly flagrant that it can no longer be hidden from view. In that sense, the revelations aired the previous Sunday night—and that continued last night—by investigative

In Buenos Aires alone, over a million people turned out

for the A18 protest.



broadcast journalist Jorge Lanata proved a major catalyst for the 18A protests and clearly marked a “before and after” in terms of any doubts anyone might have had about links between blatant criminal activities and the powers that be.

If opposition politicians were relegated to a secondary role in the A18 event, however, they were indeed showing greater activism than usual with regard to the “reforms” that a now embattled administration was seeking to ram through its rubber-stamp majority in Congress with the pace and power of an express train. Two days before the mass protest, members of opposition political movements gathered before court buildings in Buenos Aires to protest the government-sponsored judicial “reform” bills, by holding up a sky-blue and white national banner bearing the inscription “Sin justicia, no hay futuro” (without justice, there is no future)—a noble thought and slogan, but not strictly true. Without Justice there could indeed be a future for a despotic government bent on ruling in perpetuity and on protecting its circle of influences—just not for democracy, representative governance or civil rights.

The protesting politicians also certified their opposition by signing a document rejecting what they unequivocally termed as the government’s “attempt to control Justice.” Among the opposition politicians involved in the pre-A18 protests were representatives of the centrist Radical Party and Peronist Opposition Front, the center-left Civic Coalition and the conservative PRO movement. Joining them were also numerous attorneys, former prosecutors, constitutional law experts and other jurists.

The President, for her part, remained true to form and acted as if she had never heard the revelations of crime and corruption within her inner circle that Lanata reported in chilling detail and with documented evidence to back up his claims. The task of defending her ivory tower walls she left to her surrogates in the press, like Mauro Viale and a once serious investigative reporter, Rodolfo Graña, who, of late, has become an unabashed cheerleader for the K regime and a pitbull sent to attack its enemies. In all cases, pro-K mouthpieces limited themselves to hammering the messenger rather than presenting any sound evidence to refute the Lanata team’s impeccable two-year investigation.

One usual spokesman for the Kirchners, however, did break ranks when it came to the Judicial "reform" bills. As head of the Center for Legal Studies (CELS), writer and former Montonero urban guerrilla Horacio Verbitzky, who not only usually follows the government's script but also often writes it, surprised many observers by sharply criticizing the bills for restricting the civil rights and legal recourse of citizens.

Federico Elaskar, former owner of SGI -

a.k.a. "La Rosadita"

Meanwhile, the public got a taste of what the proposed government-sponsored “reforms” will mean to Argentine civil rights when the corroded wheels of justice failed to creak into action on the heels of Lanata’s investigation. Despite the fact that his televised reports provided compelling information linking a Puerto Madero finance firm called SGI—and nicknamed “La Rosadita” due to its geographic proximity and alleged connection with the Casa Rosada (Government House)—and its former owner, Federico Elaskar, to massive money laundering, the first part of the week passed without a single judge’s daring to invoke his/her own authority to order the premises searched. This, despite the fact that neighbors of Madero Center—the building where the company has its office, and where not only Vice President Amado Boudou but also President Kirchner reportedly own property—went onto Facebook and Twitter to report boxes apparently containing documentation being carried from the building. It wasn’t until Thursday, in the very midst of the A18 mass protests, that police descended on the finance firm’s offices, making a great show of the raid, despite the fact that if they’d found anything of relevance to the Lanata investigation, it would have been a miracle, since those implicated in corruption in high places, had been given all week to make sure anything incriminating—more incriminating, that is, than the documentation Lanata had already made public—was long gone.

Two generations: The Kirchners, mother and son, Cristina and Maxi; the

Báezes, father and son, Lázaro and Martín. Close ties.



Perhaps one of the principal virtues of Lanata’s investigation is that it has taken corruption out of the realm of generality and put names and faces with events, as well as specifying the connections between political and economic powers in the Kirchner era. He has introduced us to Santa Cruz strongman Lázaro Báez, who over two decades and on the strength of his relationship with former governor and president Néstor Kirchner—as attested even by Kirchner’s former lieutenant governor, Eduardo Arnold—went from being an obscure provincial bank teller to, first, running the bank, and then, acquiring a bankrupt construction company and turning it into a major State contractor, as well as accruing interests in oil, media, aeronautics and land (some 250,000 hectares, most of which he bought with cash).

Leonardo Fariña, a compulsive talker.

We also met the flamboyant and singularly indiscreet Leonardo Fariña, who distributed vast amounts of cash that the alleged Báez-Kirchner partnership flew out of Santa Cruz in amounts weighty enough to be considered air cargo. We met Federico Elaskar, who admitted to helping Fariña set up as many as 50 offshore phantom companies through which to launder vast sums of money, before being forced out of business by another nefarious face in the chain, that of Daniel Pérez Gadín. And we also met Fabián Rossi, whose business contacts, allegedly gained through his relationship with Argentine Ambassador Jorge Arguindegui in Panama, allowed him to help Báez set up ghost operations in foreign tax havens.

As Lanata was revealing how in a country where foreign exchange regulations are so tight that Argentine tourists aren’t permitted to legally change enough pesos into dollars or euros to take a business trip or brief vacation abroad, friends of the ruling family have been moving foreign currency out of the country by the bale, another story was being told: that of Santa Cruz Province under the 12-year governorship of Néstor Kirchner. A province so remote and sparsely populated that for the vast majority of Argentines it might as well be another country, it would have been a good case study to have analyzed before the election of Kirchner to the presidency in 2003, when he was an unknown politician who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had observers seen how the Kirchners had their own province sewn up so tight that nothing happened without their say so, it would have been easy to see what was in store for the nation under their power structure model. In fact, many of the key players who have accompanied them in Santa Cruz have remained with them throughout their decade at the head of the national administration. And the President’s latest moves to tie the hands of the Judiciary are simply part of the Santa Cruz model of total control. With 125 seats in the Lower House of Congress belonging to ever faithful rubber-stamp Kirchnerist deputies, the effort to keep this affront to democratic rule from passing has boiled down to bringing as much opposition pressure as possible to bear on just 12 deputies whose past performance has marked them as swing voters. The “reform” bills would give the Executive virtual control over the naming and removal of judges, and, among other things, would also make it virtually immune to any legal recourse that citizens could take against it to protect their rights. Until now the Kirchner government has had to find ad hoc ways of shoving a stick into the wheels of justice, such as allegedly naming temporary judges and prosecutors to replace ones it fears might rule against it. If its bills pass into law, it would be able to handle such manipulation of the Judiciary pretty much as it pleases and within a “legal”—if morally illegitimate—framework.

The 12 mavericks on whom an independent Judiciary depends.

A little over a year ago, on February 27, 2012, at a rally in Rosario commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the first raising of the Argentine flag, Cristina Kirchner stated, in a nutshell, the essence of her government’s plan: “Vamos por todo...¡por todo!” (“We’re going for it all...for all of it!”) she shouted, gesticulating to a clump of her FPV (Frente para la Victoria) political movement gathered in the crowd before the reviewing stand in Argentina’s third largest city. It wasn’t part of her own speech. It was, instead, a sort of battle cry that she issued, without a microphone, in the middle of Socialist Mayor Mónica Fein’s speech, obviously startling the mayor, as the president’s fans drowned Fein out with their shouts of approval for their jefa’s words and gestures. It was a show of power and disrespect. It was Cristina trying to demonstrate to the mayor that she, not Fein, owned the street, that even if Fein was at the mike, the crowd belonged to the Kirchner regime and so did the country—but in ways that clearly have had little to do with democracy or constitutional administration.

As political news commentator Joaquín Morales Solá pointed out this past week, Jorge Lanata’s investigation has brought to the fore what everybody in politics and serious journalism already knew: basically, that Argentina currently reeks of corruption as it never has before—which, after the era of Carlos Menem in the nineties, is saying a mouthful—and that the deeper meaning of “going for it all” carries with it a barely veiled and underlying threat and project of perpetuity in government, the creation of a popular dictatorship capable of protecting the burgeoning Kirchner estate and its friends and partners in power.

Jorge Lanata

As Morales Solá tangentially points out, Lanata’s investigation has been a mere catalyst, a wake-up call, a way of whacking people—including a somnolent opposition—over the head with what, in voluntary blindness, they’ve been tripping over on a daily basis for the past ten years. If most people living in Argentina were honest with themselves, they would have to admit that they have long since seen the signs of advancing tyranny and crippling corruption within the power structures that are seeking to control every aspect of life in this country. But why did it take the unique head-on style of a Jorge Lanata to wake people from their lethargy even as their democracy, their freedom and their well-being are being wrested from their hands? The late Argentine physician and world-renowned heart specialist René Favaloro once said, “After so often seeing incompetence triumph and dishonor prosper, after so often seeing injustice grow, after so often seeing power in the hands of bad people burgeon, Man eventually becomes disheartened with virtue, laughs at honor, and is embarrassed to be honest.” Perhaps the answer to my question lies within this wise man’s simple yet crystal-clear observation.

Some people still cling to the idea that Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s original plan of passing the presidency back and forth between them ad infinitum died along with the late former president, and they cling as well to the hope that the presidential elections of 2015 will no longer contain a Kirchner as a candidate, since it is—currently at least—unconstitutional for any president to serve three consecutive terms. But astute and highly respected political analyst Nelson Castro said it all when he reminded the country this past week that for Cristina Kirchner and her entourage, “a ‘re-reelection’ is a matter of life and death.” Clearly, without a means of retaining their hold on power and the judicial immunity that goes with it, the President and her entourage would become common (if vastly wealthy) citizens, who could be called upon to answer for all charges and allegations against them.

The latest advances by the President and her rubber stamp majority in the Senate against the necessary checks and balances of any truly democratic society should have left no doubt in anyone’s mind about their intention to “go for all of it” by also controlling the Judiciary and thus sealing their future impunity. And if they manage to get away with it by also carrying the Lower House of Congress, then there should also be no doubt about what their next move will be: a rubber stamp constitutional “reform” aimed at “legalizing” the President’s illegitimate, totalitarian ambitions and perpetuating her administration in power.                

Néstor, Cristina and the Isabel Connection

The death of former (and virtual) President Néstor Kirchner this week places Argentina once again at an institutional crossroads. For some time now the parallels between the last government of populist icon Juan Domingo Perón and the fast deteriorating popularity of the musical-chairs administration of Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have been apparent to anyone willing to see them. But this comparison has been conspicuous by its absence from the opinions of most political analysts, in observing the ‘royal Kouple’s’ falling ratings and their desperate attempts to regain control of power.

Caption: Cristina and Néstor Kirchner (Government House photo).

With Kirchner’s sudden death on Wednesday, at the age of 60, however, these parallels have suddenly burst to the forefront of many people’s thinking. And rightly so, considering the vast power that both men wielded and the instant vacuum resulting from their sudden demise. While there are indeed great differences between the situations then and now, I would almost dare suggest that they are more a matter of degree than of nature.

At the time of his death in 1974, Perón was already having trouble controlling rival left and rightwing factions within his political movement. And these rivalries expanded into a war of tit for tat violence when he died and was succeeded by his third wife, María Estela Martínez (better known as ‘Isabel’), who was manipulated by a covey of far rightwing handlers, the most ubiquitous of which was former police corporal and Perón bodyguard, José López Rega, alleged founder of the clandestine Triple-A death squad. The Kirchners too have been facing increasing rebellion and unrest in their party and its circle of influence. In the same way that Perón made use of the Montonero guerrilla movement as a shock force to help clear the way for his return from seventeen years of Spanish exile, Kirchner sought to utilize the piqueteros—a lower class protest movement whose primary methods include prolonged roadblocks and camp-ins—to expand his power base. But just as happened to Perón, this erstwhile alliance backfired on Kirchner when the radical group turned their disruptive and sometimes violent protests against him and his wife. Internal violence among opposing factions is also threatening to boil over now, as then—if, as yet, to a lesser degree—as witnessed by the handgun slaying earlier this month of a twenty-three-year-old leftwing activist in a clash between rival union groups.

The deterioration and self-destruction of Isabel’s government in the two years following her husband’s death is a major chapter in Argentina’s contemporary history and too long and intricate to detail here, but the chaos that this process of decay wrought eventually led to the military coup d’état that took place in March of 1976 and the consequences of which Argentine society is still paying today. It is interesting to note that as the situation worsened and that government’s popularity plummeted, Mrs. Perón’s administration resorted to ever-increasing attacks on the media, opposition politicians, the legislature, the courts and the country’s powerful agricultural sector. These are the very same sectors of society that the Kirchners have been attacking ever since it became clear to them that political power was slipping inexorably through their fingers.

There is a parallel too in the fact that, like the K administration, as Isabel Perón’s popular power base eroded, her government became ever more autocratic, with Isabel acting as a puppet for the interests of her handlers (and Cristina for those of her husband and his close circle of friends) and ruling to an ever increasing extent by executive decree.

In Isabel’s case, however, she was eventually sent away “for a rest”, while Senate leader Italo Luder temporarily took over the presidency and declared the country under ‘state of siege’—a modified form of martial law in which most constitutional rights are suspended and the Executive Branch is provided with almost unlimited power. Abusive use of the state of siege—and abuse of power in general—was precisely what brought the institutional breakdown that followed and was the tool used by the military in order to usurp power “in the name of democracy” from the people’s representatives for most of the next decade.

It can be (and is) argued that nothing like this could happen today, that the Argentine military is now too small, as well as too professional, to ever again contemplate taking over the government in the face of a power vacuum. In an otherwise excellent editorial with which veteran journalist Jorge Lanata began his program (DDT) last Wednesday night on Channel 26, he opined that “no one can cast doubt on institutional continuity” in the Argentina of today. He added that “Argentina will never again have a dictatorship.”

But while Lanata’s statement is very likely true with regard to any sort of military takeover in the wake of Kirchner’s death and the eventual consequences of the power vacuum that this has created in an administration under which separation of powers has clearly been undermined, it seems somewhat politically naïve, in my opinion, to affirm with such assurance that institutional continuity is a given. The fact is that just a decade ago, President Fernando De la Rúa was forced out of his post midway through his term, plunging Argentina into one of the worst institutional crises that it has ever suffered. This was not the result of a military coup, but of an apparently orchestrated and singularly violent civilian uprising. And institutional order was indeed altered, bearing in mind that, following De la Rúa’s fall, the country had no fewer than five presidents over the next year and a half (with at least one serving less than a week).

Another commentator and long-time investigator of the K empire, Luis Majul, has pointed out that at the time of his death, Kirchner was facing the possibility, for the first time since he began his career as mayor of Río Gallegos in 1987, of running for election as president in 2011 and losing. For any normal everyday candidate, this would only signify the agony of defeat, but for Néstor Kirchner, according to Majul, it opened up the possibility of his losing political immunity and being investigated (and very possibly convicted) for alleged illicit activities ranging from misuse of power for personal gain to heading up an illegal association. Majul, who has closely followed the Kirchners’ meteoric rise to the pinnacle of wealth and power, questions why a man who was capable of mounting such extraordinary ambitions would fail to pack a parachute for the day that his career almost inevitably crashed and burned. To me, the answer seems clearly to be that the couple were convinced that they would be able to pass the chains of office back and forth between them for years to come. And more recent polls showing that their popularity is dwindling fast have been the determining factor in their ever more autocratic style of government and the increasingly strong pressure they have brought to bear on their critics, not the least of whom, certainly, has been the CEO of the Clarín news group, Héctor Magnetto. Majul claims that Kirchner was heard among his closest associates to say, on more than one occasion, that if he didn’t put Magnetto in jail first, Magnetto would put him in jail.

Majul quotes “an important ex-minister”, who once, but apparently no longer, formed part of the Kirchner entourage, as saying that the former president and eminence grise behind his wife’s administration had final say on the most minute details of government, from “the price of the dollar to monetary aid for a city councilman in the greater Buenos Aires area.” But according to Majul, the unnamed former official also added that “now Kirchner doesn’t know how to keep himself from being investigated, tried and eventually sentenced, since he never imagined he’d have to face such a situation.”

Lanata observes that, now, “the forbidden word is ‘Isabel’.” This savvy newsman clearly defines the situation that Cristina Kirchner will face once her husband’s funeral rites are over: “An opposition vice president and a divided Peronist Party, one year before elections.” He adds that it is hard to tell on whom the President will be able to depend for any genuine support, pointing out that Planning Minister Julio de Vido is having health issues of his own, that Cabinet Chief Aníbal Fernández is more bark than bite, that Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman has proven more of a political and diplomatic liability than a plus and that the presence of CGT union leader Hugo Moyano is tantamount to having “the enemy within”.

Clearly, Cristina Kirchner is not Isabel Perón—who basically lent her husband’s name to the office of president while doing what she was told to do by those who were really in charge, no matter how disastrous the advice might have been. There are striking differences in the two women's personalities and levels of preparation. Furthermore, Cristina is often defiant and opinionated in her own right, which could work to her advantage in resisting some of the advances of the country’s more nefarious power brokers (like Moyano). But, be that as it may, she has, in the past, demonstrated herself to be patently unyielding to the opinions of really knowledgeable advisors like Martín Redrado whom she forced out of the Central Bank by decree, despite the fact that the policies he set were largely what kept the peso and international reserves stable and kept Argentina from falling victim to the international crisis. In fact, both she and her late husband have systematically removed the soundest of technical personnel from key posts, preferring to replace them with yes-men/women, who will do their bidding, which has been equivalent to doing whatever it takes not to lose their grip on power.

The death of Néstor Kirchner has, however, rendered any plan for continuing to foster a musical-chairs presidential succession between the current president and her spouse, ad infinitum, a moot point. The looming question that remains is, what next?

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NOTE: I'd like to clarify, since several people have made similar comments, that I'm not comparing - as I state in the article - Isabel Perón and Cristina Kirchner in terms of their personalities or their preparation for the post of president. What I'm indeed comparing is a political situation in which extremely powerful men have sought to use their wives as a guarantee of their own continuation in power - Perón had already done so with Evita and wanted to repeat the experience with Isabel (who obviously also wasn't Eva Perón). Kirchner emulated Perón's formula with Cristina - obviously with better fortune in the first case and with a much higher-quality political partner in the second.

That doesn't change the fact, however, that the deaths of both men created, in one case, and will create, in the other, a huge power vacuum. If you look into the statements of people who have worked closely with the successive K administrations, you'll find that Néstor Kirchner has continued to wield enormous power since his wife replaced him in office, to the extent of being practically a co-president and sort of CEO of the empire. And there can be little doubt either that the couple's idea had been to continue to pass power back and forth between them for as long as possible, since few will deny that, had he lived, Kirchner would have been a candidate in the next elections.

The point is that history has shown that power vacuums have a way of getting filled. How they get filled depends on who comes out on top in the political game of King of the Mountain. This is why, after the experience of the orchestrated civilian coup that ended Fernando De la Rúa's government less than a decade ago, it seems to me to be politically naïve to simply assume that institutional continuity will be a given.