BUENOS AIRES, 22 August 2003 — There have been two striking images on the television news and in the press in Argentina over the last week. In one, an elegantly coiffed and expensively dressed woman is being escorted to jail. In the other, a smiling woman is raising a clenched fist in victory.
The first woman is Maria Julia Alsogaray, secretary of the environment under ex-President Carlos Menem, who has been accused of mismanaging public funds and embezzlement.
A high-profile figure, who, while in office, once posed for a magazine cover apparently nude but for a fur coat, the 60-year-old Alsogaray is seen as epitomizing political corruption. Among the many allegations is one that she gave major government construction contracts to a childhood friend’s company.
On the day of her arrest, television comedians mocked her new surroundings and newspapers took pleasure in showing diagrams of the tiny cell she was now inhabiting in contrast to her palatial homes.
The other woman was Patricia Walsh, a deputy for the United Left party, who has piloted the new laws to end immunity for the acts committed by the military and police during the “dirty war” in Argentina.
She was 25 when her father, Rodolfo, one of the country’s leading journalists and authors and a member of the Monteneros guerrilla group, disappeared in 1977. Her sister, Victoria, also a guerrilla, was killed fighting the military during the same period.
The two images could be seen as symbolizing what the new president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, would like to represent: An end to systematic government corruption and the resolution of the darkest period in the country’s recent history.
President Kirchner, who comes from the southern oil-rich province of Santa Cruz in Patagonia, was the surprise winner in the presidential elections in May, following the withdrawal of his main opponent, Menem.
He is part of a new generation of the populist-nationalist Peronists who came of age at the time of political violence in the 1970s. A lawyer by profession, Kirchner was previously governor of Santa Cruz, where he was known as an efficient administrator although also tainted by some allegations of the corruption which permeate Argentinian politics.
Despite his surprise election — he took only 22percent of the vote in the first round behind Menem — he has speedily established himself because of his open style of government. He has traveled the country meeting strike leaders from the teachers’ union and piqueteros, the movement of Argentina’s large mass of jobless in a country where unemployment stands at around 24 percent.
Kirchner has also been able to balance his populist rhetoric with reassurances to Western leaders that Argentina will respect its IMF debt commitments. He has already had meetings with George Bush, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac.
At the moment, Kirchner — married to a Peronist senator, Cristina, a powerful politician in her own right — is enjoying a honeymoon with the electorate, and his approval ratings stand at 75 percent.
His biggest challenge remains the still-troubled economy and the rising crime rate in the big cities. The financial crisis has led to a soaring crime rate nationally, including hold-ups and “express kidnappings”, in which victims are held for a few hours and released for ransoms of as little as $500.
On the financial side, Kirchner has to tackle Argentina’s long-standing recession, endemic tax evasion by the upper classes and big business, corruption within local and national government and business, and the rising utility rates.
Kirchner has expressed a commitment to heal some of Argentina’s deepest wounds by promising comprehensive investigations into the dirty war and other unsolved crimes, such as the anti-semitic bomb attacks in the 1990s in which 145 people died and for which no one has yet been sentenced.
In the task of uncovering what happened in the dirty war, Patricia Walsh has been a key figure. Of Irish ancestry, she ran for the presidency this year and is now a deputy in Congress representing the United Left party. She sat at the back of Congress last week listening to the debate before she added her own calls for the ending of immunity. The lengthy law she drafted contains on its first page a quotation her father had written a quarter of a century ago: “The proven killers are still free”.
