Two months ago, former President Carlos Menem was sentenced to seven years in prison for trafficking 6,500 metric tons of illegal weapons to Ecuador and Croatia, but compared to the rest of his presidential rap sheet, arms dealing is just tiddlywinks. Last week he was indicted for his role in blowing up the factory that produced those weapons. He is also notorious for selling a myriad of Argentina’s public companies to foreign interests, and pardoning nearly 300 military officials convicted of crimes against humanity. Simply speaking his name in Argentina is bad luck. Politically, I’d say he’s somewhere between Ronald Reagan and Voldemort.
In 1991, He-who-must-not-be-named shipped weapons to Croatia when the country was fighting the former Yugoslavia, violating a United Nations arms ban. The shipments lasted through 1995, long enough to supply Ecuador with the weapons to fight a one-month war against Peru, despite Argentina being an official guarantor of peace between the two countries. In his defense, Menem claimed that the orders he signed were to ship the 6,500 tons to Venezuela and Panama. He must have forgotten that Panama did not have an army at the time.
In November of 1995, a small town called Rio Tercero was rocked by an enormous explosion at the local military factory, killing 7, injuring 300, and destroying hundreds of nearby homes.
Investigators found the explosion to be deliberately triggered, and prosecutors now allege that Menem destroyed the factory as a cover up for his weapons trafficking, just as the public was starting to catch on.
Perhaps Menem’s greatest legacy was his sweeping privatizations. From the state-run oil giant YPF to the telephone, electricity, water companies, and national airline, publicly owned assets were auctioned off to private interests, most of them foreign. While this policy was effective in taming inflation, corruption shot to rampant new heights. German industrial giant Siemens later admitted to sending $2.6 million to Menem, his minister of the interior and immigration chief to secure a contract. In 2002, Swiss prosecutors froze accounts in Menem’s name containing US $10 million.
Not one to pinch pennies, Menem partied with movie stars and footballers, cruised around in his red Ferrari, and ditched his wife for a Chilean beauty queen 35 years his junior. Meanwhile, the unemployment line in Argentina grew ever longer. Many blame Menem’s economic policies, including privatization and pegging the peso’s value to the dollar, for the economic implosion in 2001 that dropped 60 percent of the population below the poverty line, and still reverberates through the country today.
Impunity is considered one of the greatest causes for the continuing violation of human rights. And so, when Menem pardoned the nearly 300 military officers who were members of la dictudura, Argentina’s dictatorship that “disappeared” some 25,000 people, his predecessor, Raul Alfonsín, called it the “saddest day in Argentine history.” Maybe Menem was hoping someone would pay it forward.
As an acting Senator (yes, he was reelected), Menem has immunity from incarceration, something that only his chamber peers have the power to revoke. Let’s hope they follow the judicial branch’s lead, and finally hold him accountable.
