Argentine Leader Faces Key Election : Selling Dream of Reform, Alfonsin Tours Heartland

Tango One drops gracefully out of the cold morning sky. At the airport, hair is patted into place, shoulders are squared, cigarettes are stubbed out and the band is drawn to attention in a well-practiced routine. Raul Alfonsin is once again abroad in the Argentine heartland.

He steps from the twin-engine presidential jet muffled in a blue overcoat against the Southern Hemisphere winter, a pale, graying man with a mustache who walks with a stoop and a cause.

Soon it will be four years since Argentines elected this hard-eyed optimist as their president. For Alfonsin and the resolutely middle-class nation of 30 million he sometimes leads like a balky mule, these have been years of stunning victory and sapping failure.

Next month, voters will judge Alfonsin’s performance in key congressional and gubernatorial elections. They will either endorse his dream of fashioning a “new republic” or cast him as a lame duck for the remainder of a six-year term he says is too long.

At 60, Alfonsin often seems tired but always denies it. He has scheduled 20 trips around the country between now and the election. They are at once partisan and universal. As he reviews airport honor guards and mixes with local notables, he casts a long shadow.

In many ways, the Alfonsin presidency is a microcosm of the aspirations and vicissitudes shared by civilian governments throughout Latin America in the quest for modernization.

Democracy is Raul Alfonsin’s game. As reliable as the corner druggist, as stern as the parish priest, he is the unabashed advocate of political pluralism, which has seldom functioned well in a region weaned on authoritarianism.

Along the way, Alfonsin has emerged as a statesman of international stature, an articulate spokesman for an indebted south seeking a better deal from the creditor north.

Alfonsin carried such concerns with him to this intellectual and industrial center an hour by air northwest of Buenos Aires. The day before, locked in his residence in a Buenos Aires suburb, he had labored on a speech marking the 300th anniversary of a high school here.

“Inequality of opportunity is at the heart of social injustice,” he told the students and their parents. “Education is fundamental in the fight against it.”

He urged educational reform to meet the challenge of a technological age, for he is convinced that “strengthening the educational system to achieve a high level of instruction for all social classes is the best safeguard for democracy and freedom.”

Agenda of Reforms

And he recited the agenda of structural reforms he has fashioned for Argentina: political-institutional, social-economic, educational-cultural.

Alfonsin has many votes among the middle-class burghers at the school, but the realists among them must have believed, as perhaps he has, that his plans exceed his grasp as president in a stolid land that has long been the hemisphere’s paramount underachiever.

There have been some signal victories since Alfonsin replaced disgraced military dictators in December, 1983, but Argentina has proved resistant to the kind of structural change that he, his supporters and even some of his political opponents espouse.

Paramount among the accomplishments that Alfonsin is stressing to voters is the restoration of civilian authority and a representative form of government.

A Changing Image

After dark years when their government kidnaped and clandestinely murdered at least 9,000 citizens in the so-called dirty war against Marxist terrorists in the late 1970s, Argentines live in a functioning democracy again. Under Alfonsin, Argentina’s international image has made a 180-degree turn.

Ideas are welcome. Demonstrations, by everybody from aggrieved workers to concerned environmentalists to outraged human rights advocates, have become a routine of urban life--notable principally as traffic impediments.

The Argentine press is free and diffuse, elections are routine. The Congress is always raucous but sometimes effective, and the arts are flourishing. Argentine film-makers are increasingly found in the international first rank of their craft.

Rule of Law Returns

Official venality endures in a suffocating bureaucracy, but under Alfonsin the rule of law has returned to Argentina. The trials ordered by Alfonsin of former junta leaders for human rights abuses, unprecedented in Latin America, won awed applause at home and abroad.

Former military presidents Jorge R. Videla and Roberto E. Viola, along with three other former junta members, are in jail, alongside Jose Lopez Rega, the sponsor of right-wing terror in a civilian government toppled by the military in 1976, and Mario Firmenich, the leader of Marxist guerrillas whose rampage triggered the military’s “dirty war” response.

The war is over, Alfonsin says. Now is the time to build a new country. As a symbol of his vision, Alfonsin has mustered broad support for a historic and controversial decision to break the grip on national life held by Buenos Aires. Over the next few years, Argentina will build a new capital at Viedma in Patagonia, 500 miles south of Buenos Aires.

Emblematic as well of the renewed assertion of elected authority was the multiparty decision in Congress to enact divorce legislation over the furious objection of the powerful, conservative Roman Catholic Church. A million Argentines flocked to an outdoor papal Mass in May, but the overwhelming majority of them, as measured by public opinion polls, agreed it was time to remove Argentina from the short list of countries where divorce is forbidden.

Military Control Elusive

Where Alfonsin has come up dangerously short in search of structural change is in his attempt to subordinate the armed forces to civilian control.

The generals, who left office in humiliation in the wake of their disastrous 1982 Falkland Islands war against Britain, have finished licking their wounds. But if Argentina has changed dramatically in the Alfonsin years, the armed forces’ view of themselves and their role in society has not. In Argentina, as in many other countries, the president is really commander in chief of the armed forces only if he is also a general.

After a rebellion at Easter time by army officers, Alfonsin was forced, to his own disgust and the dismay of a large segment of the population, to limit new trials against officers accused of abuses during the repression of Marxist terrorists. In Argentina’s complex internal dynamic, Alfonsin was simply not strong enough to impose the weight of law on as many accused military rights violators as he would have liked. Some commanders still face trials, but several hundred of their subordinates will escape judgment.

Officers Take Offensive

Today, the armed forces, supported by a fascist right that despises Alfonsin, are again on the political offensive. Officers once shamed to silence now argue publicly that there should be national recognition of the armed forces’ resolute defense of national security in a war without rules imposed by the terrorists.

Lately, a low-grade virus of right-wing violence has added a further note of destabilization to Alfonsin’s rebuilding efforts. In the hustings, and at home in the capital, Alfonsin goes carefully.

Here he rides on the right front seat of a flag-draped bus, motorcycles ahead, chase cars behind and a helicopter overhead.

Along cordoned streets, the crowds are friendly. They exchange waves and greetings with their president. Like him, most of them are descendants of European settlers. Like him, they are concerned with defending middle-class living standards eroded by prolonged national economic stagnation. Statistics say the average Argentine lived better 20 years ago than he does today.

Economics on His Mind

Economics is on Alfonsin’s mind as the motorcade spills into the grounds of a large, French-owned auto plant. Applause from the green-smocked workers is perfunctory as he walks the assembly line en route to the inauguration of a $15-million, high-technology painting facility.

The inflation-pinched auto workers belong to Peronist unions, the spine of the political party that is the legacy of former President Juan D. Peron, the dominant political figure in Argentina for three decades.

The Peronists, splintered, confused and angry in unaccustomed democratic opposition, are Alfonsin’s strongest opponents in the Congress--and at the polls next month. They would be the most likely electoral alternative to his bourgeois Radical Civic Union in a long-running democracy, but thus far the Peronists have been unable to achieve internal unity or organize any constructive opposition.

Addressing the Peronist workers and their well-groomed bosses on what he calls “a severe economic crisis,” Alfonsin underlined one of the depressing myriad of structural imbalances that bedevil Argentina’s search for self-sustaining growth.

“We inherited a tax system that is more than a paradox,” he said. “It is absurd. Cigarette taxes bring in 25% more than property and wealth taxes combined. More than 200,000 lawsuits for several billion dollars are outstanding against the state.”

Inflation Plans Falter

After a slow start, Alfonsin’s government controlled galloping inflation and stimulated new growth with a stabilization program called the Austral Plan. Imposed in mid-1985, the plan and various of its successors have by now run out of steam because they were not reinforced by the structural changes Alfonsin seeks but has not achieved.

Economic Confidence Sags

To enable a government that spends more than it makes to pay its bills, the printing presses are running again. Inflation is now at nearly 10% a month, and economic confidence is sagging.

Alfonsin vows he will overwhelm lethargy, disbelief, labor opposition and hostility from big government fans in his own party to see the reforms through, but the best he can hope for at this late date in his term is a modest groundswell on which a successor might build.

Would-be domestic reforms are vastly complicated by a huge foreign debt inherited from Alfonsin’s military forebears. There is peace between Argentina and the country’s foreign creditors, but the debt, now around $53 billion, grows steadily despite painful repayment as refinanced interest piles up on unpaid principle. A favorable balance of trade, Alfonsin says tartly, has been diminished by export subsidies on agricultural goods by the United States and the European Economic Community.

For Alfonsin, national problem-solving must be a function of a revised national self-perception. There are gray days when he sounds like Argentina’s only optimist, but his invitation to meet challenge with spirit and audacity never wavers. Too often he has heard the old saw that in Argentina, for every solution there is a problem. After 30 years of economic stagnation accompanied by high inflation and a series of inept governments, Argentines tend to be as melancholy as their tango.

“Que desastre!” (What a disaster!), a national slogan among a people accustomed to having things go wrong, does not play well within Alfonsin’s hearing.

We can do, he tells Argentines at every turning. More, we must do, he insists, if democracy is to take root.

50 Years of Coups

A pending dream, whose future likely hinges on the government’s success in next month’s election, is to make democracy more flexible and to better insulate it from the instability that has triggered 50 years of coups. Not since 1928 has one elected civilian president handed power to an elected successor.

Alfonsin wants Argentina to become the first country in Latin America to scrap the U.S.-style presidential form of government.

In its stead, he envisions some as yet unspecified variation of a West European parliamentary system in which an elected president above the fray appoints a prime minister to run the government. When things go bad, he argues, the prime minister might fall, but not the system itself. The president would simply ask someone else to form a government.

The commitment to democratic overhaul of a country that grew old and tired before its time is certain to consume all of Alfonsin’s considerable energies for the remainder of his term. Pitfalls and naysayers abound. Success is uncertain.

Raul Alfonsin knows where he wants Argentina to live, but after four years of exhilaration and frustration, it is still a long way from home.