BLACKOUT

 

 Every now and then we get to be a tiny particle of history, a grain of sand in the hourglass. I was thinking about this because I’ve recently been re-reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which the author describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

I guess I identify with this particular work of Orwell’s because, like me in Argentina, he sort of bungled his way into Spain as a volunteer soldier, with no real knowledge of Spanish politics or of what was going on and, keen observer that he was, learned on the fly. Orwell, who, unlike me, was already a rather well-known writer by then, went to Spain with only one thing in mind: to fight fascism. And Spain was the war front for that fight at the time, though it was growing clear that Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany would also have to be faced eventually.

Orwell

That was a lot like the way I entered the world of journalism in nineteen-seventies Argentina, with one and only one mission: to write for a living. I knew only vaguely about former strongman General Juan Domingo Perón and the all-pervading Peronist movement that had grown up around his personality. And less still about the varied and fragmented guerrilla and militant movements that had backed the push for Perón’s return from exile with armed actions, but each with a different political agenda. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was to get a crash course in the complexities of Spanish politics while serving as a frontline fighter with a leftist militia. For my part, I was to get a crash course in the equally (if not superlatively) complex politics of Argentina, while taking my first baby steps in a big city newsroom.

In nineteen-thirties Spain, Orwell would, after great suffering and sacrifice at the front, see infighting on the left practically turn into another civil war within the broader Spanish Civil War, Communist dominance in that fight, and the weakening of anarchist and socialist movements through attrition, persecution and execution to the point where the left as a whole lost ground to the fascists and permitted Francisco Franco to consolidate and install his absolute power over Spain for the next thirty-six years.

Lt.Gen. Juan D. Perón

In Argentina, I would witness Peron’s return after nearly eighteen years of exile in his friend Franco’s Spain, his utilization of the armed left to regain power, before re-embracing his fascist roots and sparking a violent purge of leftists in the armed Neo-Peronist and Marxist segments of his movement. He would then die, and the country would be plunged into tit for tat violence between the left and the right that would eventually lead to a military coup and more than seven years of state violence and repression. I would also witness and play a small role, as a newspaper editor, in a brief but bloody war between Argentina and Britain. All events that would be recorded in world history, and all also, almost accidentally, a part of my own personal history.

Anyway, I was thinking about all of that when I saw something the other day about the New York City blackout of 2003. Again, one of those historical events that you end up being a passive participant in against all odds. What were the chances that a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, who had been an expat in Buenos Aires and Patagonia for three decades by that time, would end up in New York City, on an unplanned trip, precisely on August 14, 2003, when the lights went out?

My trip back home to Ohio prior to that date hadn’t been planned either. My mother had died on July 22^nd, and I was back for her funeral and then to help my sister and brother put the posthumous affairs of our parents, who had died six months apart, in order.

Dan Newland, Buenos Aires, 1978

The trip to New York was, despite the sadness of the circumstances, sort of a lark. I’d been invited by a friend and former Buenos Aires colleague to take a break and spend a few days with him and his wife in Manhattan. They had moved there in the nineties after he won a full master’s degree scholarship to the renowned Columbia University School of Journalism. Claudio, my friend and former office mate in Buenos Aires, had been one of only two recipients of the prestigious annual scholarship, and, savvy journalist that he was (is), had made immediate and influential contacts, which meant that, by the time he had his degree, he was also involved in several academic projects, including being a founder of the Hispanic New York project, and teaching part-time at Columbia and at the College of New Rochelle. His wife, Marcia, meanwhile, found intense and interesting work at a center for abused women and continued her studies for the psychology degree that she would eventually earn. Like me, who had gone to Buenos Aires “for a year” and ended up staying for twenty, Claudio and Marcia had remained in Manhattan and had been there a decade when I dropped in for a visit.

I had been in New Yok City several times before. Once with a New York area native with whom I was assigned to the Army Element of the Navy School of Music near Norfolk, Virginia. I greatly admired this guy and he was something of a fluke in the Army, because he’d been drafted in the last possible year that he was eligible (aged twenty-six) after earning his doctorate in liturgical music. Although I met and worked with some truly fine musicians and performers in the military, someone of his erudition and intensive formal schooling was a unique phenomenon.

Anyway, he organized a little three-day trip for several of us who could get passes, and we drove up to New York from Norfolk. This guy, Paul, hated driving so I, who loved driving, was behind the wheel for most of the trip in his sleek and lovely Olds 98.

The "Celestial Snooze"

Paul took all of us who had never been to the city, on a tour of his Manhattan: Union Seminary, where he had done part of his specialization studies; the Cathedral Church of Saint John’s the Divine, and the Church of the Heavenly Rest, which he familiarly referred to as “the Celestial Snooze”. But he also took us to see the sights, introduced us to a few of his New York friends, and invited us to go to several of his favorite haunts for drinks. Everywhere he tried to give us little local insights and anecdotes to take with us. Just one example, he said locals referred to the two tiers of the George Washington Bridge, which we all knew from the movies, as “George and Martha”. Martha, he said with a sly chuckle, was on the bottom.

Shortly after I got out of the Army, Paul invited my wife and me to go visit again, since he was also out of the service by this time and had a very classy post as choir director and organ master at a suburban Protestant church with a very exclusive congregation. One of the church’s benefactors provided Paul with a reconverted thoroughbred stable apartment on the family’s rural property in the suburbs.

Paul met us at the airport in the company of his partner, whom I immediately recognized as Gary, the Navy petty officer in charge of the music library at the Naval School of Music when both Paul and I had been there. In those days of don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the US military, this was the first time I realized that Paul was gay. I was glad that he and Gary seemed happy and that they were both out of the closet.

Paul’s mother was in Florida for the winter, and kind, civilized and generous as always, Paul lent me the keys to his mother’s car, and her apartment in the lovely area of Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, a short commute from New York City.  He also again served as our tour guide and invited us to an off-Broadway show as well.  

I went back to New York twice in the late seventies. Once when I was back in the States from Argentina on a visit and decided to go meet the assignment editors at ABC Radio News, for whom I was a part-time foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires. I remember that my appointment with them was in the evening and it was one of the coldest winters on record with a wind chill that night of something like minus twenty. My wife Virginia and I were eminently underdressed for it, she in a lovely dress, hose, princess-heel pumps and a short astrakhan coat, and I in a three-piece business suit, wingtip dress shoes and topcoat. Still, we decided to walk the four or five blocks from our hotel and by the time we got there we almost required treatment for hypothermia. We pretty much had Sixth Avenue to ourselves that evening, since everybody appeared to have fled to their homes early. It was eerie, like an episode of The Twilight Zone, with us portraying a couple of out-of-towners, who wake up in a New York City abandoned by human life.

The other time was also in the late-seventies and in winter, but a much nicer winter. One of those magical New York Christmastime winters, with the city swathed in snow, holiday season lights glittering everywhere, and people skating in front of Rockefeller Center. This time was all about fun, a six-state and Toronto road trip with Virginia and her brother Miguel. We went to museums, hung out in pubs and saw the sights, as well as visiting an Argentine friend and his family who were long-time New York City residents.

And then there had been a third time in the early nineties, when I was special projects editor for a major Argentine business magazine called Apertura. I had presented a special edition of our magazine at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Washington and had then taken the air shuttle to New York for an appointment with a colleague called Christian Frost, who was more or less Steve Forbes’s right-hand man. The idea was for me to negotiate with Frost for republication rights in Spanish on Forbes Magazine articles.

It was there that I learned that the building at 60 Fifth Avenue, where Forbes Magazine was headquartered, also housed a small museum on the ground floor where Malcolm Forbes’s extraordinary collection of Fabergé eggs was on display. I was also told that Steve Forbes had had a chalet built on the roof to stay in any time he didn’t want to leave the office building. I was never able to confirm this, however, so it may just be an urban legend. 

But I think what I remember best about that day was a wonderful lunch my wife and I shared at a soul food restaurant a short distance from the magazine’s offices. I recall a steaming platter of Southern-fried catfish, collard greens, black beans and rice, with plenty of cornbread and warm butter.

Anyway, as I say, my last trip to New York in 2003 was to visit Claudio and Marcia. Claudio and I had been close friends as well as workmates in Buenos Aires. They seemed genuinely glad to see me and were cordial and generous to a fault. They took me out to dine at their favorite places and on a walking tour of Greenwich Village, where Claudio proudly showed me the house where Henry James had once lived. He and I also visited Hispanic community literary and journalistic friends and contacts of his in different parts of Manhattan, and he gave me a guided tour of his alma mater, Columbia University.

They lived in Spanish Harlem, just off Broadway. Most of their neighbors were Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, but there was a mix of other ethnicities as well, including African Americans and, I noticed, a sprinkling of East Europeans. I couldn’t help wondering what my small-town friends in my hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, would say if I told them I’d been vacationing in Harlem. At least back then, I’m sure, they would have been shocked and thought me a bit of a hero, or at least less than prudent.

Personally, I have a theory that people are people wherever you go and there will always be “good” and “bad”, and it’s important to keep your wits about you and remain alert, but not to live in fear of any particular place or people. That philosophy permitted me to explore and get to know a lot of interesting places and people in my decades as a reporter.

East Harlem

But whenever I went to a new place, and especially places with folkloric identifications and reputations, the first thing I always had to overcome was my inherent small-town fear of the new and unknown. It’s a natural enough sentiment for anyone born and reared in a small town. If and until you venture out into the broader world, the only universe you know, if you’re from a town like mine, is a patch of urbanized countryside of completely manageable size and of homogenous population, where, most of the time, little happens to disturb the peace or the orderly march from one day to the next. And most people in such towns like it that way.

There was a time when I was growing up that New York City in general and Harlem and the Bronx in particular were almost universally portrayed as dangerous environs, which white, small-town Midwesterners should steer clear of because they might as well be sheep that local predators would attack and take down as soon as they crossed the imaginary line separating these places from the glittering tourist spots in the city. That was never entirely true—although the city has indeed seen some times that were more lawless than others—but especially not in 2003, which was just after Rudy Giuliani left his post as mayor of New York.

In recent times, I’ve been prompted repeatedly to shake my head and ask, “What the hell happened to you, Rudy?” Today Giuliani tends to be seen as a shady lawyer, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump whipping boy. But back then, he was known across the political spectrum as “America’s Mayor.” And the city had arguably never been safer than on his watch.

This was mostly thanks to his having supported NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s adaptation of James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows” theory about crime and punishment. The theory being that ignoring minor offenses in crime-fighting only increased major crime, as felons, thinking enforcement was weak, would naturally conclude that they could get away with ever more serious offenses. Under Giuliani and Bratton, the NYPD started cracking down on small crimes and misdemeanors like vandalism, parking tickets, turnstile-jumping, soft-drug possession and aggressive panhandling, and, employing such policies as stop-question-and-frisk. This sent out a clear message that order would be maintained at every level in New York City.

Controversial though this policy might have been—and with good reason when it came to aspects like racial and social profiling—it would be hard to argue that it didn’t work. And people tended to breathe a greater sense of safety and security than at any other time in recent history. The relative residual benefits of that policy were still in effect when I was there in 2003.

That wasn’t the only factor, however. There was a different, friendlier attitude in general this time than the other times that I had been in the city, and I put that down to Nine-Eleven. It had only been a little less than two years by then since foreign terrorists had attacked America’s most iconic city, destroyed two equally iconic skyscrapers, and, in one fell swoop, murdered some three thousand New Yorkers. The incident had brought New Yorkers together, and in the aftermath, had given them a new sense of pride in the city and empathy with each other, and with visitors to their home town.

Claudio was quick to remind me, however, that it was far from idyllic. His neighborhood was still an area that fostered street-corner drug dealers, gangs and snitches. But it all seemed to me pretty much live-and-let-live on those streets of Harlem—a significant part of which today is being upgraded to “gentrification” status. Over Claudio’s protests that I shouldn’t take safety for granted in my self-guided walking tours, I said, “I haven’t felt the least bit scared or threatened anyplace I’ve gone, and I’ve been walking all over the place.”

“Yes,” he said. “But have you seen yourself? You’re huge! And dressed in your khakis, military vest and cap, you’re getting spared because they probably think you’re the meanest sonuvabitch who ever strolled out of Vietnam!”

I laughed, thanked him for his concern, and promptly ignored his advice. Back then, whenever I was in a new place for any length of time, I tried not to think of myself as a tourist, but as a new, if very temporary, resident. The fact that I was fluent in Spanish helped me blend into the Spanish Harlem landscape. And the way to get the feeling for a place, I knew, was to walk it. So that’s what I did when Marcia was at her job and Claudio was off doing what journalists do—chasing up contacts, doing interviews and following leads.

Columbia University, Broadway entrance

On these walks, I would usually make my route from their place down Broadway toward the Columbia campus which was about twenty-five blocks. Along the way, I would check out side-streets that looked interesting, or stop for Cuban coffee, or check out some quaint shop or bookstore. And if I felt like getting out of the New York summer heat for a while to have a rest, I would drop into Saint John’s the Divine to enjoy the cool quiet of its interior. Just sit in a pew at the back for a spell and chill. 

This had been my brief routine for a few days before August 14^th—good times with Claudio and Marcia when they were available and the rest of the time entertaining myself by getting a feel for the island of Manhattan. Claudio and I were just coming back from visiting the office of a friend of his and then taking a walk and stopping off for coffee when the blackout occurred. We had traveled by subway and were very lucky to have exited the underground tunnels only shortly before the power went out at a little after 4p.m.

There was almost immediately pandemonium in the traffic as the signals were snuffed out and crowds waiting for trains in the darkened subway tunnels started pouring out into the streets in search of some other form of transportation. It was suddenly gridlock all over town. The NYPD turned out fast, with cops showing up on practically every corner.

It was a hot afternoon, with temperatures peaking at ninety-one degrees. Near Claudio’s place, a harassed-looking rotund police sergeant in short sleeves, collar open and a big cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth, made a hole in the wandering crowds with his squad car, climbed out in the intersection and began energetically directing traffic in an attempt to break up the snarl that had formed there. Claudio’s neighborhood, where the sidewalks seemed always to be occupied by throngs of neighbors, was now jammed with pedestrians who had ventured out of their myriad apartments to see what was going on.

Reporters that we both were, instead of taking refuge in his apartment, we started roaming the barrio to observe the events. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was some kind of major screw-up that wasn’t ending anytime soon. Claudio suggested that we should probably start finding a way to get to Marcia’s office a couple of miles away and accompany her home. I suggested that we’d better hoof it and hope for some kind of transportation along the way.

But suddenly, almost as if he had been called, a young Hispanic guy pulled up beside us in a mini-van and asked where we were headed. Claudio gave him the location and he said, “I’m going that way and still have room. I’ll take you.” I have to admit that I was stunned by such generosity and solidarity. But I was to see a lot of the same that evening. A New York where, at other times in its history, one might have almost expected rioters and looters to take advantage of the chaos, in this post-Nine-Eleven Manhattan, everybody seemed bent on being of whatever help they could be to each other.

We squeezed into the car with other passengers that the Good Samaritan had picked up along the way. We made it a full house. Everybody but me in the car was Hispanic. They fell quiet when I got in. I realized it was because they figured I was an English-speaker. I spoke up right away and said, “¡Buenas tardes a todos!” They answered, “¡Buenas tardes!” And then they resumed the conversation they had been having when Claudio and I got in, everyone talking about where he or she had been when the blackout started, and where they were trying to get to now.

Claudio and I told our story too, and said that we were trying to get to his wife’s office at the women’s center to accompany her home. There was a pretty young Puerto Rican woman sitting next to me in the backseat of the van. Every time I talked, I could feel her gaze fixed on the side of my face, observing me as I spoke.

People poured out of darkened subway tunnels

Eventually, the people in the rear of the van were dropped off, and then, a lady who had been riding in the passenger seat up front. It was now just the Good Samaritan carefully picking his way through the heavy traffic, with Claudio, the Puerto Rican woman and me in the backseat. For a time, none of us spoke. Then, apropos of nothing, the Puerto Rican woman leaned forward and addressed me. “You speak such excellent Spanish,” she said.

“Oh, ¡muchas gracias!” I said.

Then after a pause she said, “But you’re so white!”

Everybody laughed.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

With no other explanation, I said simply, “Ohio.”

She remained perplexed for the rest of the trip.

Commuters waiting to take the ferry to New Jersey

That evening at Claudio’s seemed almost festive. A friend of Marcia’s from work accompanied us home. She had a long commute—Long Island, I think—and decided to wait out the power outage in Manhattan. She was witty and funny. We all had drinks and snacks by candlelight and chatted, while their friend checked every so often by phone on commuter rail services. When transportation services began to be gradually brought back on line, she decided to leave for home.

What I then thought of as the New York City Blackout would actually become known as the Northeast Black of 2003. The outage spread between the Midwestern US and Northeastern states to Ontario Province in Canada. Most places were able to restore power by midnight and some areas were back on line by earlier in the evening. The New York subway system was, admirably, operating on a provisional basis by 8p.m. But full power wasn’t restored in New York and Toronto until two days later.

The outage was much more widespread than the famous blackout of 1965, which inspired such works as the musical Fly By Night and the book and film, Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? And it was second in scale only to a blackout that took place in Brazil in 1999. In a New York City still reeling from the Nine-Eleven terrorist attack, rumors were rife regarding the causes of the 2003 blackout, ranging from a terrorist attack on vital infrastructure to data interference by Russian or Chinese spies. The facts were much more mundane and it all started in my native Ohio, from which I had come for the visit. High-voltage lines that had slunk down into foliage, a resulting fire, a bug in an alarm system at FirstEnergy of Akron, which failed to warn operators that they needed to redistribute the power supply from overloaded lines, and suddenly, everything went dark.

A technicality that in human terms resulted in a major snafu, it became a date that left its mark on history. And, as fate would have it, like other times before, I just happened to be there.

 

REAGANOMICS...ARGENTINE STYLE

 When I heard earlier this month that former Argentine President Carlos Saúl Menem had died on Valentine’s Day at age ninety, I immediately remembered the days leading up to his decade-long reign. I recalled 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, just five years earlier had been worth a thousand dollars. That had been at the outset of the first democratic administration following the more than seven-year nightmare of bloody military rule.

Carlos Saúl Menem

I’m talking about the administration of President Raúl Alfonsín, for which I had held out such high hopes for the dawn of a brand new Argentina, or rather, for a return to the country’s salad days of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when the world saw it as one of the Western nations most likely to succeed. Alfonsín had overwhelmingly won the 1983 election from the ever-popular Justicialist Party, founded by the late Argentine strongman, General Juan Domingo Perón. And indeed, he hadn’t disappointed true democrats at a purely political and philosophical level. Alfonsín had headed up one of the most decent, democratic and human administrations in Argentine history. He had won renewed respect for the country worldwide, after the horrific history of the military regime that had slaughtered thousands of opponents and involved the country in a ten-week war with Britain. His administration made human and civil rights its centerpiece and championed the rule of law as a universal norm for just government.

But if there was ever a case to be made for the idea that “It’s the economy, stupid!” Alfonsín’s five and a half years in office were it. All the good he had done made no real difference where the rubber met the road, once the bottom fell out of the economy.

Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín

In its final days the Alfonsín administration was confronted with widespread supermarket lootings, mass demonstrations and Peronist-led general strikes. After meeting at the Presidential Residence in the northern Buenos Aires suburb of Olivos with Peronist presidential candidate Carlos Menem, then-governor of La Rioja Province, Alfonsín agreed to early elections, which Menem won handily against the governing 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.

Then again, it wasn’t like anybody prior to Alfonsín had been able to handle the recalcitrant economy either. Take, for example, the preceding military regime. Many conservative international economists tried to strike a balance in their criticism between the brutal nature of the Armed Forces government and the apparent “seriousness” of the junta’s economy team headed up by Cambridge-educated, “Chicago school” economist José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz—known to his friends in the Anglo business community as “Dr. Joe”. Turns out the only thing “serious” about Dr. Joe and his team was that they weren’t given to smiling.

And before that, it was the last administration of General Perón, who came back from Spain after almost eighteen years in exile, following his overthrow in a bloody 1955 military uprising. I arrived in Argentina in October of 1973, right about the same time Perón returned. And so it was that I got my first lessons in Argentine politics and economics.

General Juan D. Perón

When I first arrived in Argentina, two currencies—new pesos (or pesos ley) and old pesos—circulated simultaneously and prices were often exhibited in both. Most people on the street talked in old pesos. 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. I remember Whitie, my father, at some point in god-knows-what year, being nonplussed by the fact that in some sort of Argentine currency, my monthly pay was six million pesos. My son the millionaire! Whenever one of his friends would ask me “how I was doing down there”, Whitie would grin slyly and say, “Tell him how much you make, Dan!”

More surreal still, however, was the fact that under the last Peronist administration headed by Perón himself, my pay at the Buenos Aires Herald, the newspaper where I was a reporter, was equivalent to well under fifty dollars a month, but my wife and I could live modestly well on that. In fact, I was feeling quite flush by then, since the two jobs I held during my first eight months in the country were, first, as a night bellhop in a downtown four-star hotel, and then as a rental agent for Avis Rent-a-Car near the city’s port district. In neither of those jobs did my pay reach thirty dollars a month. So landing a job as a reporter at forty-odd dollars a month was not only about having the job of my dreams, but also about moving up in the world economically.

More surreal still, however, was the fact that under the last Peronist administration headed by Perón himself, my pay at the Buenos Aires Herald, the newspaper where I was a reporter, was equivalent to well under fifty dollars a month, but my wife and I could live modestly well on that. In fact, I was feeling quite flush by then, since the two jobs I held during my first eight months in the country were, first, as a night bellhop in a downtown four-star hotel, and then as a rental agent for Avis Rent-a-Car near the city’s port district. In neither of those jobs did my pay reach thirty dollars a month. So landing a job as a reporter at forty-odd dollars a month was not only about having the job of my dreams, but also about moving up in the world economically.

I think the managing editor at the paper 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.

At one point during the year that Perón once again reigned before dying and plunging the country into chaos, I recall a rally at which he complained that he couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to be so preoccupied with the dollar-peso parity. Who cared, he asked the crowd, what the dollar exchange rate was? This was Argentina, he pointed out, where people earned and spent pesos. Then pointing to a laborer in the crowd, he asked rhetorically, “How about you, pal, when was the last time you saw a dollar?”

On Perón’s death, the country entered a new and ever darker phase in the highly incapable hands of his third wife and former vice-president, “Isabelita” Perón (née Martínez)—who this month turns ninety, and, with Menem’s death, has become Argentina’s oldest living former president. Violence between squabbling bands within the politically eclectic Peronist movement was wreaking havoc, with Isabelita being manipulated like a hand-puppet by the extreme right, in the person of a former Federal Police corporal and part-time dabbler in the occult called José López Rega—a.k.a. “El Brujo” (The Sorcerer)—a sinister character who had been a faithful servant to Perón. The economy was left basically rudderless, with a succession of wildly ineffectual economy ministers. By the time Isabelita’s government was overthrown in 1976, annual inflation was nearing a thousand percent and real wage values were plummeting.

"Isabelita" Perón 

Americans will ask me, “How could you possibly survive?” But the truth is that such situations are never black and white. For instance, we had bought our first apartment—a little two-room in an enormous efficiency apartment block—with a ten-year mortgage loan provided by the finance company that belonged to the same firm that had constructed and sold the building. By the time the Peronist administration was overthrown, mortgage loans were almost non-existent, but if you got one, payments were indexed. In a country with hyper-inflation the result is that people who buy anything with an indexed loan are likely to lose it, because wages never keep pace with inflation and it eventually becomes impossible to keep up the loan payments.

In our case, however, the loan contract we signed was payable in nominal (not indexed) pesos and at a fixed interest rate. What this signified was that, with inflation soaring to astronomical levels, the fixed terms of our contract made our monthly payments and interest laughably low. Although we had only been paying for less than two years on a ten-year mortgage, when I got my yearly bonus at the end of 1975, I was able to walk into the finance company and settle the rest of my debt in cash, and still have money left over. So what was a tragedy for some was a bonanza for us.

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 the previously mentioned conservative economist José Martínez de Hoz as economy minister.

But that system also had disastrous results, despite all the flattery that Dr. Joe received from international economists, bankers and business people. I recall that after making the equivalent of under 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. Thanks to the convoluted monetary exchange system that Martínez de Hoz introduced (and which I doubt anybody but he understood fully), in Argentina an equivalent car cost forty thousand and a similar dress shirt one hundred. Ever quick on their feet from years of practice shadow-boxing with the economy, middle-class Argentines took advantage of the fact that they were suddenly affluent everywhere but at home and started traveling the world, bringing back everything imaginable from abroad. Their battle cry on these foreign shopping sprees was “dame dos” (give me two).

Alfonsín and Menem - peaceful transition

The nineties were the era of Menem, who came to office, as I say, in the first peaceful and democratic transfer of power in Argentina since the nineteen-thirties. He was in office from 1989 through 1999, thanks to a Constitutional reform sponsored by his administration. When he first took office, Argentine presidents could only serve one six-year term, and had to be out of office at least six years before they could run again. Under the Constitutional reform that Menem pushed through Congress, the presidential term was shortened to four years, but, as under the US Constitution, with the possibility of one re-election for another four years.

Opposition analysts argued at the time that it was all well and good for the US-style Constitution to be updated to introduce such popular and necessary guarantees as an anti-discrimination clause and eleven articles specifically safeguarding human rights. But they were concerned that Menem was employing these and other amendments to facilitate his own reelection aspirations and to provide himself with an entire decade in power. The two-term clause shouldn’t, his opponents argued, be applicable to the president whose own administration had promoted the change, or who had been elected under the terms of the former Constitution. He should have to leave office after his original six-year term.

Menem doubled down and not only won re-election, but also had his legal team argue that he should be able to run for third term in 1999 as well, precisely because he had first been elected under the old Constitution. His second election had been carried out under the norms of the new Constitution, which permitted him to run for a second term. But the fact that the Peronists lost the mid-term congressional elections in 1997, and that his programs were showing signs of irreversible wear and tear by 1999, made any intention of running again a moot point.

Some of Menem’s fans have tried to cast him as “the Argentine Reagan”. But Reagan was never anything like as pragmatic as Menem. Reagan was a conservative in a conservative party, who merely introduced a new and ever more corporate elitist twist to what his party already championed. Menem, on the other hand, was a populist from a classically populist pan-Argentine movement that had always railed against Yankee imperialism and the evils of capitalist multinationals, as well as against Marxism. Hence the slogan: Neither Yankees nor Marxists. Peronists! But despite that fact, he reversed engines and embraced not only the United States but also the major tenets of neo-liberalism—privatization and an unfettered free market. (So...welcome to the trickle-down fallacy...Argentine style).

Suffice it to say that Menem, a provincial caudillo from La Rioja, a province with fewer than three hundred fifty thousand people, surprised everyone at home and in the international community, by doing the political and economic opposite of just about everything in General Perón’s playbook. But he did so while still wrapping himself in the flag of Peronism and while still frequently invoking the words and person of the late Argentine strongman, who, although dead since 1974, still today casts a long and enduring shadow on Argentine politics.

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.

The provincial caudillo

Most of the privatizations floated former state companies on the international market, which provided Argentina’s disgruntled international creditors with a chance to acquire them, frequently under ridiculously advantageous terms. The gem of the divestiture process was Argentina’s oil giant, YPF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales). I remember that, at the time, I was contracted to write about the YPF sale for a New York Times supplement on Argentina’s privatizations. As usual, I researched by carefully choosing contacts to interview from my days working for Platt’s Oilgram. I tried to find experts from both sides of what was indeed a controversial topic so that I could then make an educated analysis. Most fairly glowed talking about how great it was for the country, and indeed for YPF, that Menem’s economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, had decided to divest YPF by going public with it on the New York Stock Exchange in an IPO worth six billion dollars.

However, several nuts-and-bolts oil industry experts cautioned me not to believe everything I heard. The IPO was “a gift” they said, “a fire sale”. And they showed me how, if the Economy Ministry had bothered to take the time and effort to do it, YPF could have been broken down into exploration, production, services and other operations and sold in pieces to other oil industry players for a total of at least nine billion dollars instead of six.

In writing the story, I was careful to give ample coverage to both sides of the debate. Reporting, not editorializing, and permitting the reader to reach his or her own conclusions. But the story came out in the Times the same day that the Harvard-educated Cavallo arrived in New York City for the YPF launching, and he was very likely one of the first to read it. Later that day, I got a call from a contact in the press section at the Economy Ministry who told me that Cavallo had specifically ordered him to “dis-invite me” from ever setting foot in the ministry again as long as he was the minister in charge. (So I know how CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta felt).  

I’m no fan of Carlos Menem’s. I would be all too accurate if I were to say that his political and personal life were fraught with controversy and charges of corruption and criminal behavior.

Indeed, he was accused during his tenure and later tried for illegal arms trafficking. Namely, 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. After leaving office at the turn of the century, 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. By then under the presidency of opposition politician Fernando de la Rúa, Argentina sought extradition, which the Chilean Supreme Court eventually denied.

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.

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 continued to haunt him for the rest of his life. Menem was scheduled to attend related legal proceedings earlier this month, but died before his court date.

Photo-journalist José Luis Cabezas

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

The pic that killed Cabezas

But the most scandalous of worldwide coverage was reserved for accusations that Menem had covered up the international 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.

Israeli Embassy bombing

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, and indicated that the Kirchner administration was now involved as well. 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 the prosecutor’s family and independent investigators suspected homicide.

There is no way that any of this could be the subject of a “forgive and forget” attitude from civilized, democratic society, but the lasting legacy of Carlos Menem, despite all of his unforgivable failings, is 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—if at significant future cost to the economy and to political stability. While one much-heralded plan after another had failed over the course of successive administrations since the nineteen-sixties, Menem, pragmatic as Perón himself, swiftly moved to strike a pact with the most diverse sectors of Argentine society, and then, while the honeymoon lasted, began opening up the economy to foreign investment, vastly expanded imports and foreign trade, initiated negotiations with international creditors and then tackled hyperinflation.

AMIA bombing

This last, for the man and woman on the street, was the singularly most important plank in his platform. He did it by returning to the peso (yet another new peso), which he 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 to rushing out to buy dollars on the black market as soon as they were paid, before their pesos could deteriorate—sometimes by the hour. A relief too for people 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. Many people, including my wife and me, were able to earn and save dollars during that period and for the first time found that we could afford to buy a new home, new cars, new imported goods, and to also put some money away for a rainy day. The country’s entrepreneurs and creatives were full of new and ambitious products, and people with the right skills could find well-paying, meaningful work.

Frail and elderly Menem with daughter
 and faithful companion Zulemita

For a decade in the nineties, Menem, then, made many middle-class Argentines feel like they were living in the real Western world, that they were the proud citizens of a swiftly emerging nation. Even large numbers of Argentine professionals, previously lost to the “brain drain” of earlier decades, would come home from abroad to enjoy the “Argentine miracle”. Some might call it “a long con”. They wouldn’t be wrong. But for a decade until it all came crashing down, most of us had a good run and didn’t want to look at the fact that Menem had sold the country to the highest bidders in order to finance this party and that the pain of the ultimate fall would be excruciating.

It was a matter of survival for Carlos Menem to remain politically relevant. Ever the provincial caudillo, he managed to cling tenaciously to his Senate seat—and his legal immunity—until his death. Judgment now will be reserved for posterity.