Argentina Eyes Election With Anxiety

People in this poor suburb of Buenos Aires say they have suffered enough already. Thousands have been thrown out of work during five years of recession. Groups of unemployed routinely shut down the local highways.

Now this community is facing a new threat to its peace and prosperity: a presidential election, scheduled for April 27.

There are widespread fears across Argentina that election day could degenerate into street fighting and that the result will be tainted by accusations of fraud. Four candidates -- backed by separate groups of impassioned supporters -- are in a neck-and-neck race to see who will take over for beleaguered President Eduardo Duhalde.

Argentina “may be about to lose the few remaining threads of political civility it has left,” Jose Claudio Escribano wrote in the daily newspaper La Nacion recently. “If the political fragmentation which has dominated the campaign persists ... there is a good possibility that on the night of the 27th we will be faced with a major controversy.”

In Isidro Casanova and other communities of the La Matanza district, a key electoral battleground in Buenos Aires province, violence and corruption have long dominated local politics.

“Elections in La Matanza are always manipulated, especially in the poor areas like Isidro Casanova,” said Ruben Castro, 59, a taxi driver.

A political operative might pay residents of local slums 10 pesos each (about $3) to vote, Castro said, and hire taxi drivers like him to give them rides to the polls. He expects a bidding war for votes between rival candidates in this election.

If, as expected, no candidate wins outright, a runoff is scheduled May 18. But more than a few observers predict that the runoff will be delayed by weeks of legal wrangling.

Candidate Carlos Menem, president of Argentina during the 1990s, controls a majority of the Supreme Court justices, observers say. His bitter rival Duhalde controls most of the party muscle in the province of Buenos Aires, forces Duhalde is marshaling in support of his own candidate, Nestor Kirchner.

All of this, many fear, adds up to a recipe for chaos.

“Carlos Menem won’t accept defeat because with his age it’s his last chance to occupy the Casa Rosada [the seat of government], and Eduardo Duhalde will never accept handing over power to his archrival,” La Nacion speculated last week. “This whole thing is going to rot.”

Fears of violence stem in part from the rioting that forced the cancellation of provincial elections in Catamarca last month, when a Peronist senator mobilized gangs of soccer hooligans to protest a court decision that left him off the ballot.

Supporters of Sen. Luis Barrionuevo sacked polling places and burned ballot boxes. In the wake of the incidents, Barrionuevo faced impeachment proceedings in the Senate, but escaped removal from office thanks to support from other Peronist senators.

Congresswoman Elisa Carrio, the only one of the leading four presidential candidates who is not a Peronist, criticized the party for failing to even censure Barrionuevo.

“First they burned the ballot boxes, then they protected him and impeded justice,” she said.

Carrio predicted the presidential election will be marred by a similar shenanigans.

“On April 27th the mafias will try and grab for power,” she said.

The Peronist movement, officially known as the Justicialist Party, has split into three factions, led by Menem, Duhalde and Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, a provincial governor who was president for one week in December 2001 before a dispute with other Peronist governors drove him from office.

Mass mobilization and physical intimidation have long been part of Peronist political culture. But this year, instead of fighting their traditional rivals, the Radicals, the various Peronist party factions are busier fighting themselves.

On Wednesday, three Peronist campaign offices in Buenos Aires’ southern suburbs, including two staffed by Menem’s Front for Loyalty faction, were attacked with firebombs. Authorities linked the bombing to “internal” party disputes.

In Isidro Casanova and other communities in La Matanza, members of the Kirchner faction have engaged in fistfights while painting walls for rival candidates for mayor.

Two criminal complaints have been filed in La Matanza describing alleged assaults between members of the Kirchner faction. One took place in front of a hospital in Isidro Casanova, when a squad of campaign workers painting a wall for one mayoral candidate was attacked by supporters of another.

“The assailant was armed,” the official report of the incident said. “At least five other persons were carrying arms.”

With some 1.3 million residents, La Matanza is the largest district in Argentina’s largest province. It is also an epicenter of this country’s sudden epidemic of poverty: government figures say nearly half the workforce is unemployed or underemployed. Two-thirds live below the poverty line.

In the central plaza of the district capital, San Justo, most of the light posts and walls are covered with graffiti and posters of candidates from the various Peronist factions.

Rodriguez Saa and his Popular Front Movement have promised a New Deal-style public works program to pull Argentina out of recession. Menem calls for a return to the orthodox economic policies of his presidency.

Kirchner, the governor of Santa Cruz, has portrayed himself as the candidate of stability after years of political upheaval.

Most pollsters expect Kirchner to carry La Matanza. But people in San Justo aren’t so sure. More than one said the outcome would depend on the Peronist party’s “point men,” low-level operatives who distribute cash and government handouts in exchange for votes.

“The feeling here in La Matanza is that the fix is in for Menem and that at the last minute the point men will decide everything,” said one 51-year-old municipal employee who declined to give his last name.

Menem hovers over the election like a ghost of successes and scandals past. Argentina experienced record growth during his first term, but the economy was slowing when he left office in 1999.

In 2001 he was placed under house arrest for several months in an arms-trafficking scandal; the charges were eventually dropped. Last year, Swiss authorities announced they were investigating whether he accepted a $10-million bribe to cover up Iran’s alleged role in a 1994 terrorist bombing in Buenos Aires.

On March 20, he cut a somewhat sickly figure at a campaign rally attended by some 5,000 people at a dilapidated soccer stadium in Isidro Casanova.

Menem accused Duhalde’s government of “squeezing” local officials so that they would support Kirchner.

“The national authorities tell them, ‘If you’re with Kirchner, you get money,’ ” Menem said. “ ‘If you don’t, we won’t send you a single penny.’ That’s a bastardization of politics.”

Polls show that Menem is the politician with the highest rejection rating. But the same surveys show more people think he will win the election. No candidate receives more than 25% of the vote in any of the polls.

*

Times staff writer Andres D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.