Argentina: Has Menemismo Run Its Course? Politics in Argentina have been so thoroughly dominated by the neoliberal economic poli- cies of President Carlos Menem that the upset victory of the opposition Alliance for Jobs, Justice and Education in last October's legisla- tive election was celebrated by many observers as the first crack to appear in the Peronist government. Indeed, this is the first electoral defeat for Menem and his Justi- cialista Party (PJ) since taking office in 1989. The results have been read as a marker for the 1999 elections-- a Peronist victory no longer seems inevitable, and the Alliance seems to have gained enough strength to put up a good fight. The Alliance, a coalition of the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the center-left National Solidarity Front (FREPASO), gained several seats in the Chamber of Deputies, effec- tively breaking the Peronists' absolute majority in the lower house of Congress. The Alliance also won the mayoral elections in Buenos Aires, capturing 66% of the vote in the capital, compared with 16% for the PJ. UCR mayor-elect Fernando de la Rda will govern with an Alliance majority in capital's first elected legislature. The Alliance hit the Menem gov- ernment where it was most vulnera- ble. It criticized measures like pri- vatization and labor flexibilization, which Menem has pushed through despite popular protests. The Al- liance also promised to fight gov- ernment corruption and to improve health and education, both of which have been decimated by cutbacks in state spending. The Alliance, and especially FREPASO, have also been strident critics of state-sanctioned impunity. Many members of FREPASO, like Graciela Fernandez Meijide, who in October was elected national repre- sentative from Buenos Aires province to the Chamber of Deputies, have their roots in the human rights movement. A symbol of the ongoing fight against impunity hung from the micro- phone as Fernindez delivered her victory speech: a photograph of Jos6 Luis Cabezas, a photojournal- ist who was killed last January while investigating police corrup- tion. The consecration of impunity for past crimes-through pardons, like the one Menem bestowed on the generals of Argentina's "dirty war," and amnesty laws elsewhere in the region--has given de facto license to Latin American military and police forces to continue killing, disappearing and torturing today. The victims include journal- ists-with over 200 killed over the past decade-as well as political activists and so-called "undesir- ables" like alleged criminals, homo- sexuals, prostitutes and street chil- dren. In Argentina, where Menem is reportedly proposing to pardon the carapintadas, members of the armed forces who rose up against the government in 1990, voices like that of Femrnndez Meijide are more important than ever. at the Alliance did not challenge was Menem's neoliberal economic poli- cies. The group's chief economist, Jos6 Luis Machinea, said the coali- tion would "close ranks" to defend "convertibility," the cornerstone of Menem's economic plan that pegs the peso to the U.S. dollar. Like the victory last July of Cuauht6moc Cirdenas in the mayoral elections in Mexico City, in which the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) backed off from its more anti- neoliberal positions in order not to alienate national and foreign capi- tal, the Alliance platform is based on criticisms of government poli- cies that violate democratic liberties and that undermine living stan- dards, but it does not directly chal- lenge neoliberalism or offer an eco- nomic alternative. The victories of the PRD in Mexico and the Alliance in Argentina are a step forward for progressive forces in Latin Ame- rica, but they also are a sobering reminder of how little progress the left has made in terms of building economic alternatives to neoliberal- ism. It is not enough to criticize cor- ruption and state cutbacks in health and education if the economic and philosophical foundations of such policies are not challenged as well. For the bottom half of Latin America's increasingly unequal societies, it is this fight that must be waged head on. Former President Ratil Alfonsin of the UCR seems to have understood this better than his FREPASO allies. After the October elections, in which he maintained a low profile, Alfonsin entered the ring of 1999 presidential hopefuls swinging, and Menem's neoliberal policies were his principal target. Unless the Alliance develops a stronger anti-neoliberal platform, it risks alienating its support among Argentine workers, whose living standards have been decimated by neoliberal economics. If mene- mismo has indeed run its course, as Fernandez Meijide told NACLA in its thirtieth anniversary issue last July, then the Alliance should affirm its support for a more egalitarian economic policy and a stronger redistributive role for the state. In FernAndez's own words: "If there is no state, then who regulates the relationship between the powerful and the dispossessed?"
