Argentines Enthralled by Novel’s Tale of Rampant Corruption

A lot of people got rich during Argentina’s era of “pizza and champagne,” but Enrique N’Haux, a high-ranking official in the state-owned Bank of the Nation, was not one of them.

His friends see him puttering around his hometown, Cordoba, in an old car, living in a humble apartment, and just don’t get it: It makes as much sense as seeing a polar bear in the Sahara.

In 1990s Argentina, the heady boom time when N’Haux worked for the government, a job like his was a license to steal. People with political appointments entered a world of conspicuous consumption. You could stamp and sign a few documents you shouldn’t, and pay for a new car or a vacation in Florida.

Now he’s trying to make up for the lost opportunities with a novel, “Machiavelli Didn’t Know the Argentines,” his insider’s account of the graft and bribery he saw all around him.

“My corruptible imagination was not as well developed back then,” N’Haux said at a recent book-signing here. “I didn’t want a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. I just wanted to buy a couple of houses to live off the rent.” But although he took some secret “bonuses” he shouldn’t have, he didn’t even manage that.

Now his fortunes have changed. N’Haux’s book has come out just when the excesses of the government of the ‘90s are being exposed in a series of legal proceedings. The first edition of “Machiavelli Didn’t Know the Argentines” sold out in one day this month. Two more editions have been printed.

“This book has allowed us to see things that we didn’t want to see, things we’ve needed to look at for a long time,” said Patricia Bullrich, a former labor minister. “It’s about what happens to the individual who comes to power in a society with weak institutions that operate outside the law.”

Even though it’s a novel, “Machiavelli Didn’t Know the Argentines” has been entered into evidence by a judge investigating charges that officials of the government of former President Carlos Menem enriched themselves with $466 million in under-the-table bonuses.

In his book, N’Haux describes how the cash for the bonuses was taken from classified accounts belonging to the military and intelligence service.

In recent months, former Cabinet minister Maria Julia Alsogaray, on trial on corruption charges, has given a similar explanation of how the payments were made.

N’Haux writes that the cash was surreptitiously distributed the first day of each month by a “trusted subordinate” of then-Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo.

“The trusted subordinate walked casually in front of the Pink House,” Argentina’s White House, carrying a small fortune in a backpack, N’Haux writes.

Most of “Machiavelli Didn’t Know the Argentines” details the career of a fictional economist known as “the Repentant Honest Man,” an unassuming and idealistic conservative serving in his first government job.

The character is a thinly veiled stand-in for N’Haux, who worked for five years as a senior advisor to the board of directors of the Bank of the Nation.

Like many other economists in the Menem administration, N’Haux was a protege of Cavallo, the guru of Argentina’s “neo-liberal” economic reforms.

Cavallo aimed to transform Argentina into a model of free-market efficiency. He and Menem privatized government services, wiped out restrictions of foreign investment and allowed the U.S. dollar to circulate as a second national currency.

As part of his project to bring Argentina to the First World, Cavallo advocated accountability in government. And at first, as N’Haux relates in his book, the technocrats Cavallo brought into the government were known for their austerity. Others in the administration nicknamed them “the Mormons.”

Eventually, they too were swept up by the spirit of plunder that pervaded Argentine officialdom, N’Haux says, as millions of dollars in bribes and bonuses flowed into their offices.

In the novel, the Repentant Honest Man at first recoils at the lawbreaking he sees around him. He tries to report a bureaucrat who is engaged in some shady dealings. An all-powerful boss named Mingo promises to “take care of the problem.” (Mingo is Cavallo’s real-world nickname.) A few weeks later, the bureaucrat gets a big promotion.

The fictional Repentant Honest Man slowly comes to accept the “cynical realism” all around him. He begins to study the Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote five centuries ago that those who cling to idealistic principles “learn the path to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”

Many Argentines tolerated the corruption because everyone seemed to be doing well during the 1990s boom. A popular saying summed up how people felt about their leaders: “They steal, but they get things done.”

It was only in 2001, when the economy crashed and the government became hopelessly mired in debt, that a new saying swept the country: “Throw them all out!”

N’Haux left the government in 1995. Personal crises soon ate away at his savings.

“My friends and neighbors would tell me things like, ‘Enrique, how is it that you were in the government for five years and you don’t have a penny to your name?’ ” N’Haux said in an interview.

“ ‘Everyone else got rich.’ You hear that enough, you begin to feel like a fool.”