POLITICS-ARGENTINA: Menem Arrest Boosts Judiciary’s Image

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Commentary Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 8 2001 (IPS) - The arrest of former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999) Thursday came as a shock to most Argentines, who seemed to have grown accustomed to the impunity surrounding serious crimes in their country, but it is likely to be a boon to the Judiciary, the independence of which had long been in doubt.

“Today could be a great day…” – a song by Catalonian singer Joan Manuel Serrat – was heard on more than one radio station here Thursday morning, when it had already become a well-known secret that Menem, who previously had been able to block legal charges, would be taken into custody for the diversion of arms shipments to Croatia and Ecuador in the 1990s through simulated sales to Panama – which has no army – and Venezuela.

Even some of the leaders who had served in his government indicated that justice was finally being done. Misdeeds come back to haunt the perpetrator, commented assistant governor of Buenos Aires province, Felipe Sol, who was secretary of Agriculture under Menem. “You cannot do everything you please just because you are in the government,” he added.

Officials of the ‘Justicialista’ (Peronist) party refrained from expressing solidarity with the former president, even though he continues to be head of the party.

Menem is charged with “illicit association”, a crime that carries a prison sentence of five to 10 years and does not allow for the release of the accused while the inquiry is underway. However, because Menem is over 70, he has been placed under house arrest, as allowed under Argentine law.

The former president’s most avid defender has been his brother, senator Eduardo Menem. “With this decision, the basis of peaceful political coexistence in Argentina has been broken,” he said. In contrast with the opinion of an apparent majority, he stated that Thursday was “a sad day for justice and for Argentine democracy.”

Once news of the arrest began to spread, radio listeners called the stations, expressing their euphoria about what they considered one of the few positive events to have occurred in this country in the year and a half since President Fernando de la Rúa took office, replacing Menem and failing to enact much-awaited political and economic changes.

De la Rúa’s electoral victory was not so much due to his political merits, but to the fact that Menem’s leadership style was losing popularity, characterised by superficiality and a long series of corruption charges. The new president’s image of an honest man helped him win the October 1999 elections, but the high hopes the electorate had pinned on him evaporated within months.

However, observers pointed out Thursday that, for once, the hands-off attitude of De la Rúa – constantly criticised for delaying decisions, keeping out of conflicts, and failing to lead efforts to find solutions – turned out to work in favour of investigations into the arms smuggling case.

“The position of the government and mine as president is to uphold the independence of the Judiciary, an objective and a value for which we Argentines have been fighting for a long time,” De la Rúa said prior to Menem’s arrest.

After learning of the judge’s decision to remand Menem into custody, the president limited himself to reminding the former president that he can appeal the ruling.

In a survey of Buenos Aires residents conducted by Equis polling firm and released Monday, 98 percent of the respondents expressed their “disappointment” in De la Rúa’s performance as president, as he has been unable to end the nearly three-year economic recession or reduce unemployment, which hovers around 15 percent.

Within this context, the news of Menem’s detention, regardless of the justifications for the ruling, put the spotlight on a principle that seemed to have been forgotten by Argentine democracy: equality before the law – an idea that few believed existed in practice, at least until Thursday.

The possibility that a former president could be sent to prison had been unthinkable in Argentina. The leaders of the most recent military dictatorship (1976-1983) were pardoned – by Menem – after they had been sentenced to prison for serious violations of human rights.

The public image of the country’s justice system plummeted during Menem’s time in office. He went so far as to expand the membership of the Supreme Court in order to designate justices and thus maintain a majority that supported him.

The naming of federal judges with personal ties to the government, some of whom received illegal bonus salaries, contributed to completing the image of “injustice”. A number of legal cases involving government officials ended without trial as a result of court-ordered stays in the proceedings.

Opinion polls during the Menem administration began to show that the Judiciary was among the least trustworthy institutions of the state, alongside the political class, lawmakers and union leaders. On the other extreme were the journalists who had authored the denunciations of corruption that were later dismissed by the courts.

Adolfo Bagnasco, one of the federal judges who tended to rule in favour of the government during the Menem administration, recently joined the former president’s legal team, alongside former prosecutor general Oscar Roger and former Supreme Court minister Mariano Cavagna.

But another judge previously considered partial to Menem has been a protagonist in the arms smuggling case. Jorge Urso for the last six years has been investigating the web of intrigue surrounding the illegal channelling of weapons to Croatia and Ecuador in the 1990s, operations that had the approval of the Executive branch and contributed to filling the bank accounts of a handful of government officials.

Urso had been designated to the Supreme Court on the recommendation of a Peronist deputy, Miguel Angel Toma. Just weeks ago, when suspicions began to loom over former government officials, a recording was released that reveals the judge’s close ties to the Peronists, the party that is now in the political opposition.

In addition, Urso himself is under investigation for alleged illicit enrichment. His reluctance to summon Economy minister Domingo Cavallo to testify in the arms case could be due to his fear that he would be disqualified from the case, according to lawyer Ricardo Monner Sanz.

The judge has already indicted 47 people, including several of Menem’s closest advisers. Antonio Erman González, who headed four different ministries during Menem’s two terms in office, is in custody, and former Defence minister Oscar Camilión and former Foreign minister Guido di Tella have been remanded to justice.

But Cavallo, the current Economy minister who held the same post when Menem enacted the decrees that facilitated the illegal arms shipments, has so far eluded charges.

Monner, who has insisted that Cavallo must testify, believes the judge fears being denounced by the Economy minister, who in the mid-1990s launched accusations against federal justices, including Urso.

According to the attorney, whose 1995 complaint initiated the current arms investigation, Martín Balza – the retired general arrested Wednesday on charges of organising the “illicit association” of which Menem is allegedly the leader – could be found innocent at the hearing of oral arguments.

Balza’s arrest came as a surprise and many consider it a disappointment. He was chief of the Argentine army for eight years until December 1999, but gained international notoriety in 1995 for a “mea culpa” in which he publicly criticised the illegal repression and widespread violation of human rights perpetrated by the military during the last dictatorship.

His lawyer stated Thursday that documentation exists which will clear the name of the retired general and prove that the crimes were committed without his knowledge or consent.

Monner also said that, as Menem had suggested, the United States was not necessarily ignorant of the shipment of Argentine arms to Croatia during the war in the former Yugoslavia, when the United Nations banned the sale of war materials to the nations involved in the conflict.

In the opinion of the attorney, the former president was ingenuous in assuming that Washington would publicly recognise its role in the matter. The US State Department this week denied having any knowledge of the arms shipments to Croatia.

Monner pointed out that even if the United States had entrusted this “dirty deed” to the government under Menem – who declared himself Washington’s number-one Latin American ally – it would not justify the creation of ghost companies for laundering the million- dollar commissions coming from the illegal arms deals.