LATIN AMERICA : Attack on President’s Brother Confounds Uneasy Argentina

The attackers had targeted the home of one of Argentina’s most powerful men: Sen. Eduardo Menem, a leader of the ruling Peronist party and the brother of President Carlos Menem.

Just before midnight a week ago, gunmen--short-haired, 25- to 35-years-old--stormed the garage of the senator’s red-brick, two-story house in the exclusive suburb of Nunez. They confronted five federal police bodyguards using the garage as a command post. After a point-blank gunfight, the attackers fled in a stolen sedan.

They left behind a dead police sergeant, a gravely wounded corporal and a bona fide mystery that has confounded Argentina.

The assault on a figure of Eduardo Menem’s stature is unprecedented since civilian rule was reestablished here in 1983. Menem, 58, is a 13-year senator from the province of La Rioja, an advisor to his brother and provisional president of the Senate--third in the chain of presidential succession.

As days pass, speculation has heated up. Was the incident a terrorist attack by extremists of the kind who were active earlier this decade? Was it a political message to the Menem clan, which has held power since 1989? Was it a mafia-style hit linked to business disputes or corruption scandals? Or was it simply a blunder by robbers who barged into the wrong house?

A few officials incline toward the latter, the least politically difficult theory. But others, including police veterans, find it hard to believe that a gang of armed home-invaders would not scout a site first and discover it belonged to a dignitary with guards.

The government has tightened security. An unusually large contingent of police surrounded the president and his Cabinet during outdoor ceremonies this week for Argentine independence day.

The senator, who was in the kitchen with relatives just a few yards away during the gun battle in his garage, has made it clear that he does not rule out any scenario. But he doubts the easy version. “It does not make sense to me that the criminals did not know that it was my house,” he told reporters. “I don’t believe they saw the garage door open and decided to rob.”

He said he had received vague, threatening telephone calls. In the hours before the shootout, a caller seemed to be checking if his home was occupied, ringing his unlisted number several times, only to hang up.

An official close to the senator said in an interview that Menem believes that mere robbers would not conduct an assault with such “ferocity. . . . They practically executed the police sergeant,” the official said. “Of course, if it was a political attack, then there is the question of the motive.”

If the assailants were professional assassins or kidnappers, they might have been expected to carry more powerful weapons or to strike when Menem was on the street, the official said, noting, “I think he would prefer that it were a robbery. If not, then it is an attack on the entire system, not just on his person.”

Compared to the bloodshed of the 1970s, when an oppressive military and urban guerrillas ran amok, Argentina now is a relatively peaceful place. The president, with his trademark rhetorical verve, declared after the attack on his brother’s home that “Argentina is the safest country in the world.”

That is hyperbolic. But Buenos Aires is one of Latin America’s safest big cities.

The last eruption of domestic political strife here was a failed coup by the “Painted Faces” military commandos in 1990. Col. Mohammed Ali Seineldin, the imprisoned leader of that right-wing group, fired off a hasty jailhouse communique denying any ties to the shooting at Menem’s house.

Meanwhile, journalists, diplomats and other analysts continue to weave speculative scenarios--with big questions as to motive.

And the Menem case feeds the Argentine public imagination, with readers and viewers already immersed in this nation’s customary whirl of scandals, from alleged clandestine arms sales to Ecuador by the government to unsolved crimes that mix politics with mafia-style “warnings.”

On Friday, a police manhunt resulted in the arrest of a possible suspect.

Now the police must clarify the extraordinary personal assault on the president’s family, said Hector D’Amico, editor of the weekly magazine Noticias.

“It is a trial by fire of the government,” he said in an interview. “They have been hit close to home. Will the authorities have the capacity to discover the truth and to communicate it to the people?”