FOCUS / ROCKY TIMES IN ARGENTINA : Leader’s Marital Strife Reflects Nation’s Woes : President Menem’s separation from his wife stirs more than gossip. Some say it may affect debate on the country’s future.

The rocky marriage of President Carlos Saul Menem and his wife, Zulema, has long been a talking point in Argentine cafes and at dinner parties. Now Argentines are asking if it has become a matter of state.

Menem has complained with annoyance that his separation from his wife last month is nobody else’s business, but most of the national press has ignored his plea for privacy.

Some papers focus on the gossip, but others say the dispute reflects, and may affect, the broader national debate on how Argentina should face its future.

It escaped no one’s attention that when Menem presided over the annual May 25 holiday commemorating independence, the protocol required some impromptu changes because of the latest split in the often tempestuous 25-year marriage.

Menem has not been staying with his wife in the official residence in the suburb of Olivos, and he sleeps in the downtown Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, or at friends’ homes. So the traditional holiday morning salute was conducted at the palace, with Zulema Menem absent. Furthermore, according to most of the media, Menem had to use a hurriedly constructed copy of the president’s ceremonial staff because his wife would not allow his aides into the official residence to retrieve the real one.

“Kramer vs. Kramer,” the left-of-center daily Pagina 12 declared in a bold front-page headline the next day, in a reference to the American movie about a bitter divorce. A cartoonist in the paper pictured a puzzled aide asking his boss: “Do we send Menem one invitation or two?”

Overall, fractious Argentina is struggling with a monumental attempt to modernize its moribund economy. The conflict reaches into the trade unions, the government and the ruling Justicialist (Peronist) Party. The marital tension is often portrayed as a further manifestation.

Zulema Menem, a blonde 46-year-old, has publicly sided with a number of old-style Peronists who oppose Menem’s alliance with free-market conservatives, and she has complained vocally of government corruption. She has long squabbled with Menem’s brother, Eduardo, who is a senator and the president’s key adviser. She is friends with anti-Menem union federation leader Saul Ubaldini and cashiered Col. Mohamed Ali Seineldin, who led a military uprising against previous president Raul Alfonsin.

Zulema Menem was linked to a poster campaign suggesting that her husband was surrounded by corrupt people, including his brother, Eduardo. She is said to believe that Eduardo Menem and others in the conservative wing are pushing her husband to isolate her, despite her loyalty in the face of his purported infidelities, because she is willing to speak up about corruption and other contentious issues.

Menem, dapper and athletic at 59, is occasionally seen in the company of other women, and his wife has been quoted as calling him a “womanizer.” Latin American politicians are forgiven and even sometimes applauded for displays of machismo . Menem told a magazine recently: “I am not as much of a womanizer as people seem to think.”

A leading weekly, Somos, broke the news of the separation in early May, apparently with Menem’s approval. An aide was quoted as saying Menem felt compelled to demonstrate that he alone is the president--not jointly with his wife.

Menem’s staff includes several members of Zulema Menem’s family, who like Menem are descendants of Syrian immigrants, from the interior province of La Rioja.

Zulema Menem is Muslim, while her husband converted from Islam to Roman Catholicism; the constitution requires presidents to be Catholic. Many papers have analyzed the implications of a possible presidential divorce, which was legalized in Argentina only in 1987. Others say a permanent split is unlikely and assert that she has opted to redesign the living quarters in the residence to allow them to lead separate lives. But a friend of Zulema Menem told a television talk show Thursday night that Menem could enter whenever he wanted and that the issue was invented to smear her.

Zulema Menem broke the news in February that the residence was bugged with clandestine microphones and also has filed a complaint over death threats, which her husband minimized.

The president, meanwhile, is reportedly disgusted with all the attention and especially with the foreign media at a time when he is seeking to portray Argentina as a serious country engaged in fundamental reforms.

Zulema Menem isn’t speaking to the media, although she issued a statement recently declaring that Jorge Raul Mazzuchelli remained her official adviser, just hours after her husband dismissed him from the presidential staff.