ARGENTINA : Beset by Scandals, Menem Scrambles to Hold High Ground

One noisy scandal has implicated President Carlos Saul Menem’s in-laws while another has embroiled a provincial branch of his Peronist party. Caught up in controversies, Menem is struggling to keep from being judged by the company he keeps.

The resilient and flamboyant Menem will probably survive all this, but the political damage deepens as the scandals reverberate day after day in the Argentine media.

The in-law problem touches Menem’s administration despite the fact that he and his wife, Zulema Yoma, are separated and she filed for a divorce in March. Throughout a long history of marital troubles, Menem, 60, has kept close ties with some of Yoma’s family. Like Menem, 60, the Yomas are of Syrian descent.

Early in March, word leaked out in the press that members of the Yoma clan had been implicated in a drug-trafficking investigation by authorities in Spain. A report by Spanish anti-narcotics officials said a trafficker-turned-witness accused one of Zulema Yoma’s brothers, one of her sisters and the sister’s former husband of cocaine money-laundering.

In the report, made public here early this week, brother Carim Yoma is said to have worked “in the introduction of money from the United States.” The sister, Amalia Beatriz Yoma, known as Amira, brought “$1 million in a briefcase from New York to Buenos Aires,” the report said. And Amira Yoma’s former husband, Ibrahim Al Ibrahim, was said to have used his former job as a customs official to help sneak cocaine money into Argentina.

Carim Yoma, 49, resigned his position in the Foreign Ministry before the so-called Yoma case became public. Ibrahim, 40, a former Syrian army officer, no longer holds the customs post that Menem’s vice president gave him. And Amira Yoma, 38, took a leave of absence from her high-sounding position as “director general of audiences for the presidency of the nation.”

The Spanish report said the money-laundering ring was headed in Argentina by Mario Anello, a friend of President Menem.” Menem and the Yomas have denied having anything to do with Anello or the alleged money-laundering.

Mario Caserta, a former official in Menem’s administration, has been formally charged in the Yoma case. His role, according to the informant in Spain, was to recruit “camels” to bring cocaine dollars into Argentina for laundering.

Another scandal that indirectly touches Menem’s government is centered in Catamarca province, long ruled by a family named Saadi.

In September, the Saadi political machine became the target of popular protest after the body of Maria Solidad Morales, 17, was found in a roadside ditch. Provincial Gov. Ramon Saadi, a Peronist who had supported Menem in his 1989 presidential campaign, was accused of covering up the crime.

Solidad had died of a cocaine overdose. Charged with giving her the drug is Guillermo Luque, son of Peronist Congressman Angel Luque, a Saadi protege.

Congressman Luque said in a newspaper interview this month that if his son had been involved in the death, no body would have been found. He accused the judge in the case of taking a $250,000 bribe to arrest his son.

Last week, after debating all night, Congress voted to expel Luque for undignified conduct. This week, Menem replaced Gov. Saadi with an appointed official. Saadi, furious, said his financial and political support had helped elect Menem, implying that the president was betraying him.

“I owe my electoral triumph only to the Argentine people,” the president retorted.

Other, lesser scandals have helped keep Menem on the defensive. And his estranged wife hints that there is more to come. A Buenos Aires newspaper said sources close to Zulema Yoma want to testify in Congress on “everything included in the subject of corruption that up till now has not been said.”

Menem, taking the high ground, has said he wants all corruption to be uncovered.