Man of Courage

President Raul Alfonsin of Argentina was viewed as a moderate, cautious politician when he took office. That he may be, but in less than two years he has also proved tough and courageous, as demonstrated most recently by his dramatic campaign to straighten out the economy.

In a series of sudden moves last month, Alfonsin stopped a run on Argentine banks with a brief bank holiday, imposed wage and price controls to stem an inflation rate of more than 1,000% a month, replaced the increasingly weak Argentine peso with a new currency to restore the confidence of Argentines in their own money, and promised to back up these reforms by ordering his government to stop printing funny money.

Alfonsin’s economic plan is pure shock treatment, but it may be the only hope of returning to a prosperity that the country has not known since the 1940s, when Argentine meat and grain helped feed a war-ravaged world. Argentine governments since then have experimented with various economic programs, but none have been wholly successful.

When Alfonsin took office in 1983, his economic policies were characteristically cautious. He formulated a too-gentle inflation policy that attempted to slow the rate by permitting monthly wage increases equal to only 90% of the previous month’s inflation. It failed miserably. He tried to rally other deeply indebted Latin American nations into a united front to resist the demands for austerity being made by their creditor banks and the International Monetary Fund. That, too, failed. Mexico, Brazil and other Latin debtors cut their own deals with the fund, and left Argentina to cope with its $48-billion debt virtually alone.

Aides to Alfonsin say that by April of this year he realized that half-measures were not working, so he replaced his political appointees in the Finance Ministry with a team of young technocrats, immunized against politics. They persuaded him that only a bold stroke could shake Argentines from their cynical, every-man-for-himself attitude toward economic matters.

The sudden run on several Argentine banks forced Alfonsin to start putting the bold plan of his technocrats into effect earlier than he wanted to, but it appears to have had a salutary effect so far. There has been no financial panic, and public-opinion polls indicate that Argentines are largely supportive of Alfonsin. These are hopeful signs.

It is just possible that Argentina’s political leaders of the recent past sold their fellow citizens short, underestimating their willingness to sacrifice for the good of the nation. They certainly underestimated Alfonsin’s willingness to sacrifice for Argentina. He is risking the future of his government and his political career--a career that certainly will end abruptly if his economic experiment fails.