Carlos Menem, who died at the age of 90, was elected for his first term as president of Argentina in 1989 on a platform of left-wing nationalism, which he immediately abandoned in favor of a drastic program of neoliberalism. He performed this trick of political conspiracy with such skill that he managed, through a constitutional change, to obtain a second term in 1995.
Argentina would hesitate when, in 1999, he proposed a third party. By then, the magic had already dissipated. But Menem never stopped believing in his own ability to reinvent himself. Although pursued by corruption and illicit arms deals, and at one point placed under house arrest, he always seemed capable of recovery.
Menem was born in Anillaco, in the poor and backward province of La Rioja, in the north, the son of prosperous Syrian immigrant parents, Saúl and Mohibe Akil Menem, and from an early age he was attracted to politics and the law. While he was a student at the University of Córdoba, the first turning point came in 1951, when the university basketball team of which he was part visited the capital, Buenos Aires. There he met President Juan Perón and his wife, Evita. An inspired Menem became an instant and lifelong Peronist.
Just six years later, he found himself – for the first time, but by no means the last – arrested on political charges. In the same year, 1955, when he graduated as a lawyer, Perón was overthrown by a coup and Menem began to defend political prisoners. His detention, which lasted a few months, was for supporting a counter-coup.
In March 1976, when Perón’s widow, Isabelita, was deposed by the military, Menem was governor of La Rioja. Arrested again, he spent the next two years in custody, before being released on parole. After the 1982 Malvinas war disaster and the fall of the military regime, he was once again elected to the government.
The Peronist movement was divided between traditionalists and the “Renovators” of the reformist wing of which Menem was a leader. In July 1988, he defeated the right-wing Antonio Cafiero in the first internal primaries of the Justicialist Peronist party and became his presidential candidate. In the following year, he defeated the candidate of the radical government party (UCR), obtaining almost 50% of the votes.
The outgoing president, Raúl Alfonsín, stepped down five months earlier, in the midst of an economic crisis in which annual inflation rose to almost 5,000%. His successor took an instant political turnaround similar to those carried out by Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela and Alberto Fujimori in Peru at the same time.
Previously, Menem had defended the role of the state and was opposed to privatizations or anything that smelled of neoliberalism. But as president, he attacked with such enthusiasm that, by leaving office, he had already privatized more than 400 state-owned companies. Transport, energy and telecommunications – even social security and pensions – ended up in private hands. The job market has been deregulated and the welfare state created by his hero Perón has been dismantled.
Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo decided to crush inflation with a policy of pegging the Argentine currency, the Austral, to the US dollar. This was followed by a much more drastic measure: the government brought the Argentine peso back and made it fully convertible with the dollar. In the mid-1990s, this worked so spectacularly that annual price increases fell to the lowest level in the world – just 0.1%. But the hidden costs of this policy, especially in the form of increased indebtedness, were so severe that Menem’s successor, Fernando de la Rúa, would be forced to step down in 2001 amid the ensuing economic collapse.
Menem’s first term was also notable for controversial pardons in favor of former members of the military junta, along with guerrilla leader Mario Firmenich, issued in response to uprisings by right-wing rebels in the armed forces known as Carapintadas.
The period also saw two major terrorist attacks: the first in 1992 at the Israeli embassy, where 29 died; and the second, which killed 85, at the headquarters of AMIA, a Jewish organization. After leaving power, Menem would be accused of perverting the course of justice by trying to divert the investigation from the alleged perpetrators, Hezbollah and the Iranian government.
The first family, however, began to present the Argentines with a long political novel in which Menem’s wife, Zulema Yoma, and his relatives were prominent. The plot involved not only a confusing and very public separation, but also accusations of corruption and money laundering against relatives of the president and the first lady.
There was also tragedy. In 1995, the couple’s son, Carlos, known as Júnior, died in a helicopter accident. Zulema never admitted that it was an accident, insisting that the plane had been shot down, but despite the exhumation of the body, the accusation was never proven.
Internationally, Menem was one of the architects of the Mercosur four-nation mercantile group, formed by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, founded in 1991. Unlike the Brazilians, with whom he always disagreed, the Argentine president was interested in advancing the as soon as possible for its absorption in the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposed by the President of the United States, George HW Bush. During Menem’s two terms, Buenos Aires became increasingly closer to Washington, insofar as it defined the desired relationship as “carnal” and even proposed the dollarization of the entire region. He was rewarded, when Bill Clinton became president of the United States, as a member of the elite club of important non-NATO allies. It didn’t hurt that he also normalized relations with Britain, becoming in 1998 the first Argentine president to visit London since the Falklands War.
Internally, however, Menem was so widely repudiated when he left office that another attempt to win a third term (in 2003, after the country’s financial crisis) ended in humiliation. His enormous and apparently ill-gotten fortune, a scandal involving the smuggling of Argentine arms sales to Croatia and Ecuador (for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2013) and a widespread belief that he was responsible for the economic crisis everything contributed to an irreversible decline in his political fortune.
Although he made it to the second round in 2003 against Néstor Kirchner, he dropped out after polls suggested he would be defeated. Bitterly, he tried to undermine Kirchner by suggesting that his victory was somehow illegitimate. He became a senator for La Rioja from 2005 until his death.
His second marriage, in 2001, to former Miss Universe Cecilia Bolocco, ended in divorce in 2011. He leaves his son Máximo; by a daughter, Zulema, from her first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1991; and by a son, Carlos, from a relationship with Martha Meza.
• Carlos Saúl Menem, lawyer and politician, born on July 2, 1930; died on February 14, 2021