Leader Sets Pace With Tough Talk, Soccer and the Tango : Menem Energizes a Doubting Argentina

President Carlos Saul Menem took office in July telling Argentines to “rise up and walk,” but his own pace is quicker. He has played an entire soccer game with the national team, danced the tango on television and co-piloted a jet fighter.

Just 2 1/2 months into his term, Menem has invoked tough talk, humor and personal example to energize a fractious, doubting country with a burst of stunning initiatives. Even many of the staunchest critics of his Peronist party agree that “Menemstroika” may finally put Argentina on the road toward modern economic development.

Menem leaves Saturday for a seven-day trip to the United States, including the first meeting of a Peronist president and his U.S. counterpart. His goal on this trip, he said in an interview with four American correspondents, is to sell the “new face of this country”--a nation headed for “absolute stability” within two years, where foreign investors are welcome.

Popularity Still High

Menem departs amid signs that his honeymoon may be ending. A few trade unions are beginning to talk of strikes, business is chafing at the loss of subsidies and the middle class is writhing under the weight of his austerity program. Yet Menem’s popularity remains overwhelming.

“It’s like the man who falls from the 10th floor, and at the 4th floor says, ‘So far I’m fine,” Menem said with a laugh. “Well, so far, we’re fine.”

With surprising speed, he has set in motion fundamental changes that few people expected from a populist-style governor from a backwater province. In what he calls “surgery without anesthesia,” Menem has begun to:

-- Balance the budget and behead Argentina’s terrifying hyper-inflation.

-- Privatize the huge money-losing state corporations.

-- Challenge both the trade union bosses and pampered private companies.

-- Clear the way to absolving military officers for human rights offenses.

-- Repair ties with Britain, severed after the 1982 Falkland Islands War.

Argentines have embraced their 59-year-old president, in part thanks to his folksy, outgoing style. He played a grueling charity soccer match, alongside Diego Maradona and other stars, before a cheering crowd of 40,000. (Menem’s team won, 1-0). In a basketball game with the national team, Menem, 5-foot-6, scored 13 points, drawing on skills from his college days.

Mainly, people are grateful that after six months of hyper-inflation that reached 196% for the month of July alone, suddenly prices have virtually stabilized and some have even fallen. But beyond that lies a sense that Menem is attacking the causes of the malaise, not just the symptoms.

Stabilizing Prices

“Menem made a decision to break all the rules, to be completely different from what people expected of him,” said Maria Julia Alsogaray, a leader of the conservative Union of the Democratic Center party. “He said, ‘The central government won’t do what the provinces can do, the provinces won’t do what the cities can do and no one will do what the individual can do for himself.’ That is quite a change.”

“It was the first government of (Gen. Juan D.) Peron that created state intervention . . . and in a way this is completing the circle,” said Alsogaray, whom Menem appointed to privatize the telephone company within six months. “If Menem succeeds, he will be dismantling the system that Peron built--and doing it on the strength of Peronist votes.”

Menem also has resolved to end tensions with the armed forces that have simmered since the government of his predecessor, former President Raul Alfonsin, filed charges of gross human rights abuses against leaders and other officers of the military dictatorship of 1976-83. Menem probably will halt 18 pending trials of senior officers and pardon other officers already convicted, including five members of former military juntas. He may also drop charges against soldiers who took part in three uprisings against Alfonsin, hoping to avoid the conflicts that dogged his predecessor.

Menem told United Press International in an interview Thursday that any pardons he grants will not immediately include former army Gen. Carlos G. Suarez Mason, who was jailed in California and extradited to Buenos Aires last year at Alfonsin’s request. Suarez Mason, former commander of Argentina’s 1st Army, is accused in the disappearance of thousands of political prisoners held in clandestine prisons under his jurisdiction in the late 1970s.

Emilio Mignone, a Peronist human rights leader who opposes concessions to the military, acknowledged that the public now is more worried about hunger than human rights. He said that Menem was correctly emphasizing structural economic reforms to accompany the all-too-familiar short-term emergency measures.

“It also has been a great achievement to emphasize national unity, and not reduce the government to just the Justicialist Party,” Mignone said, using Peronism’s formal name. “The people have received this warmly.”

Yet some voices complain that Menem is betraying the heritage of the worker-based party by adopting a conservative economic program and by placing an array of non-Peronists in key posts to implement it.

Attitude of Compromise

One current joke tinged with bitterness is that the intelligence service has been given a new assignment: keeping an eye out for Peronists trying to infiltrate the government.

Where Alfonsin confronted the armed forces, the Roman Catholic Church and other groups, Menem has sought to woo the rival sectors into his camp. That has helped generate a willingness to compromise, not a common trait in Argentine politics.

The widespread anguish over the depth of the crisis helped galvanize support for his harsh programs. Many were chastened by an outbreak of looting and violence in late May, when inflation left people uncertain from hour to hour what they could buy. Soup kitchens operate across a country famed for its beef and wheat.

“When I took office, there were still people guarding their shops with guns,” Menem said. “The image of Argentina (was) decadence, without a future, chaotic. In two months, we have changed this image completely.”

Willing to appear in a “Saturday Night Live”-style skit on nationwide television and to wander among crowds, Menem quickly established a different tone from the regal Alfonsin. He lives in a downtown apartment, not the official residence, and drives himself to work.

His technique of going directly to the people rather than courting political interests comes naturally; he used it to win the governorship in La Rioja province three times, to win the presidential primary over the entrenched party structure, and to win by a landslide in the May election--without ever stating clearly how he was going to achieve his “productive revolution.”

Alberto Kohan, Menem’s private secretary and confidant, said Menem knows he has little time.

“The political credibility of the president has remained intact so far, but there must be quick action. The people have little patience. We recognize this, we understand the suffering.”

‘Waiting for Action’

Daniel Ferrari, 35-year-old owner of a downtown candy stand, underscored a pervasive public sentiment: “We’ve reached such a level of total disbelief that we’re waiting for action, not more words. We need to see factories belching smoke, creating jobs. My sales have at least stopped falling, at least we have some stability. But to be a power, we need to change our mentality. It will take us 50 years to refloat this country.”

Along with a 90-day price accord worked out with business and industry, Menem won speedy passage of a reform law that commits Argentina to unraveling the fabric of government domination of the economy.

The new law calls for selling off 17 major state-owned firms that run the railways, oil business, national airline and other ventures. Deficit-ridden subsidy and “industrial promotion” schemes are being shelved.

Conservatives had blanched at the notion of Menem, with his extravagant hair and sideburns, as president. They are now his champions.

“Now people say they had known all along, but the truth is that we were surprised,” said Eduardo Roca, a conservative lawyer who served as an ambassador for past military regimes. “The first Peronist government had been one of total irresponsibility, and the second (from 1973-76) was even worse. We said, ‘This is what is coming again.’ But it is such a huge surprise. He is waging a struggle against 50 years of our history.”

“One of the things that impresses me most is Menem’s reflexes as a man of government,” Roca said. “He has the reflexes for leadership; he has the special qualities needed for presidential power.”

Bitter Labor Battle

Menem has stayed publicly neutral in a bitter fight for control of the General Confederation of Labor, in which his professed allies are attempting to oust Saul Ubaldini as leader of the Peronist-dominated trade union movement.

While such conflicts boil around him, Menem keeps moving. He beat Jeffrey Bush, President Bush’s 35-year-old son, in a three-set tennis match, and wants to play Argentine star Gabriela Sabatini.

Fitness became a useful excuse for the president when he had to raise gasoline prices by 600% to eliminate the state oil company’s huge deficits.

“If you have to sacrifice by not driving, get onto your bicycles,” he told Argentines. “Anyway, it’s better for your health.”