Carlos Menem
Carlos Menem was president of Argentina for ten years, from 1989 to 1999, the Peronist governor of La Rioja with the sideburns of a nineteenth-century caudillo who won the election of 1989 in the hyperinflation and took office five months early when Alfonsin gave up, and then did the opposite of everything Peronism had stood for. He pegged the peso to the dollar one to one by law in 1991, sold the oil company, the telephones, the airline, the railways and the pensions, cut the tariffs, pardoned the generals of the dirty war and the guerrillas together, sent ships to the Gulf war and made Argentina, in his foreign minister's phrase, a country of carnal relations with the United States. The convertibility killed the inflation and, kept too long, killed the economy in 2001, two years after he had gone. He was born in Anillaco in 1930 to Syrian Muslim immigrants, converted to Catholicism to be eligible for the presidency, was elected governor of La Rioja in 1973, and spent five years in prison and internal exile under the junta from 1976. He beat the Peronist establishment's Cafiero for the nomination in 1988 and the Radicals' Angeloz in May 1989 on a promise of a productive revolution and a big wage rise, and delivered the plan of his minister Cavallo instead. The pardons of 1989 and 1990 freed Videla, Massera and the other commanders Alfonsin had jailed, and were annulled by the courts in 2007. He had the constitution amended in 1994 by a pact with Alfonsin to allow his own re-election, won it in 1995 with fifty per cent, and spent the second term on the tequila crisis and the unemployment that reached eighteen per cent. There were the two bombings in Buenos Aires, of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish centre in 1994, whose investigation he was later charged with obstructing, and an arms-smuggling scheme to Croatia and Ecuador for which he was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to seven years, which his senate seat's immunity spared him. He married a Chilean television presenter in 2001, ran for president again in 2003 and withdrew from the run-off against Kirchner rather than lose it. He sat in the senate for La Rioja from 2005 until he died in February 2021, at ninety, with the cases still open.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: president, politician
