ARGENTINA: Rotten Apples

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 16 2003 (IPS) - In Latin America, there have been abundant examples of corruption cases brought to light by the press.

But the latest scandal in Argentina has taken a new twist: one of the key individuals implicated in the alleged payment of bribes to push through a controversial labour reform law decided to spill the beans himself.

”We had never seen a case like this before in Latin America,” Néstor Baragli, with the government Anti-Corruption Office, commented to IPS.

”In the best-known cases, even those which involved presidents, the plot was always discovered from the outside, never due to a decision made by one of the implicated parties.”

When the investigation of the allegation that bribes were paid to senators in 2000 was about to be called off due to a lack of evidence, former Senate aide Mario Pontaquarto approached María Fernanda Villosio, a reporter with the local magazine TXT, to tell what he knew about the biggest corruption scandal to shake the government of Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001).

After the April 2000 passage of a labour law that eased employment regulations and made it easier to hire and fire workers, the local press gave heavy coverage to the bribes that the de la Rúa administration had allegedly paid to push the bill, one of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) requirements, through Congress.

But despite the abundant press reports and the generalised public conviction that the allegations were true, the probe into the case made little progress.

However, Pontaquarto has now come forward to accuse de la Rúa of ordering the payments of bribes to win over several senators opposed to the labour reform law, which helped companies reduce their labour costs.

The former legislative secretary has provided details of how he delivered the money, the equivalent of nearly five million dollars that was removed from a vault in the State Intelligence Service (SIDE) headquarters, to the home of a senator.

Parliamentary Deputy Graciela Ocaña with the centre-left Party for a Republic of Equals was pleased that Pontaquarto decided to step forward with evidence that backs up denunciations that she herself had made.

”The ‘mafias’ base their operations on silence, and the silence was broken here, which means it is possible to dismantle the ‘mafia’,” the lawmaker said in an interview with IPS.

There is much speculation as to why Pontaquarto decided to confess. Those close to him say he felt remorse and wanted to come clean in front of his children.

Others believe the catalyst was the Senate’s decision to dismiss him early this month, after he failed to report what he did with more than 35,000 dollars in travelling expenses that he received for a trip to Portugal that he never took.

It took over a month for a TXT team of investigative journalists to quietly put together the story that the magazine published on Dec. 13.

In exchange for Pontaquarto’s tape-recorded testimony, the magazine arranged to meet his demands: personal protection, the transfer of his family to another country, and legal advice.

Argentina lacks anti-corruption witness protection laws, which would provide guarantees such as those arranged for Pontaquarto by the magazine.

While the publication agreed to the former legislative aide’s conditions, it also set its own: that he would appear in court.

After hearing several hours of testimony by Pontaquarto, a federal judge barred de la Rúa and more than a dozen former senators and parliamentary aides from leaving the country Monday as the former legislative secretary’s accusations are being investigated.

The public prosecutor’s office reported that de la Rúa, his former labour minister Alberto Flamarique, and the then-head of SIDE, Fernando de Santibáñez, had been summoned to give their depositions.

A second witness testified on Tuesday: Antonio Fraga, Peronist Senator Remo Constanzo’s former legislative secretary.

Although Pontaquarto said Fraga, currently a legislative aide employed by the Peronists, ”knew a lot” about the case and would probably provide more information, Constanzo’s former secretary denied all of the allegations Tuesday.

”It is common in these cases for the accused to evade responsibility by blaming others,” Daniel Morín, the head of the Anti-Corruption Office, told IPS. ”But what we are looking at here is unprecedented testimony, because the accused is pointing the finger at everyone else, while admitting his own responsibility.”

Morín also noted, however, that the case highlighted a key shortcoming of the legal system: Although Argentina has a law that protects ”repentant” criminals who agree to testify in connection with drug trafficking offences, there is no law providing similar witness protection in corruption cases.

Not until after he gave his testimony in court was Pontaquarto assigned five federal police officers to protect him.

As the head of the office that investigated the Senate bribe scandal, Morín was present last Friday during the lengthy deposition in which Pontaquarto furnished Judge Néstor Oyarbide with the details of the alleged bribe payments.

He told the court that he was handed the briefcases full of money at SIDE headquarters, drove with the money in the trunk of his car to his own home, where he kept it for several days before taking it to the apartment of former senator Emilio Cantarero of the then-opposition Justicialista (Peronist) Party.

Pontaquarto claimed that he himself received no payment for running the ”errand.”

He said the order for the payments to be made came from de la Rúa during an April 2000 meeting in the presidential office attended by Flamarique, two Peronist senators, and a senator from the Radical Civic Union (UCR), which was governing the country at the time in alliance with the centre-left FREPASO.

Pontaquarto said he was present at the meeting as the right-hand man of UCR Senator José Genoud, who now stands accused by his former legislative aide of being one of those who divvied up the booty.

Genoud, like de la Rúa and the rest of those implicated in the scandal, has denied the allegations, and has attempted to discredit Pontaquarto by casting aspersions on his private life. The former senator did admit, nevertheless, that the de la Rúa administration had to distribute ”favours” to secure approval of the labour law, including ”posts, embassies and contracts.”

De la Rúa, who abandoned public life when he was forced by protests and rioting to resign from the presidency in December 2001, said Monday that the accusations were ”a huge lie, absolute nonsense, a conspiracy” against him.

But on Tuesday, de la Rúa admitted on TV that it was ”possible that a president could be unaware” of corruption that was occurring at lower levels in his administration.

The ex-president denied participating in a meeting like the one mentioned by Pontaquarto, and said that on the contrary, he had ordered an investigation into the allegations of bribe-paying, which arose two months after the labour law was enacted.

It was the journalist Villosio herself who obtained remarks at the time by Cantarero, one of those who allegedly accepted the bribes, which were published in the La Nación newspaper. However, Cantarero later denied having made the statements.

The scandal triggered the resignation of Vice-President Carlos Alvarez – who was also head of the Senate – when de la Rúa decided to ratify in their posts the main suspects: then-labour minister Flamarique and head of intelligence de Santibañes.

According to Alvarez, de la Rúa was ultimately responsible for the scandal. The former vice-president has now provided new information. He said, for example, that a senator had confessed to him that it took ”300 million dollars a year” in bribes to push laws through Congress.

”It wasn’t just one apple, it was the whole barrel that was rotten,” said Alvarez.

The former vice-president, who entered academia after retiring from politics, said ”it is impossible to have a just country if laws are bought and sold.” He recommended that the justice system investigate the assets and wealth of the country’s legislators in order to uncover the Senate’s ”system of corruption.”

The charge faced by those implicated in the scandal is bribery, punishable by one to six years in prison, although the sentence can be non-custodial.

An anti-corruption prosecutor said ”the important thing is to obtain a conviction,” after an oral trial.

The government of Peronist President Néstor Kirchner, which was informed several days ahead of time of the step that Pontaquarto was planning on taking, said it would do everything it could to facilitate the work of the justice system.

Since taking office in May, the centre-left Kirchner has spoken out loudly against the corruption that has dominated political life in Argentina in recent years, and has taken steps, for example, to purge the Supreme Court of corrupt judges.