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Argentine Politician Played Game of Survivor

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Times Staff Writers

The next president of Argentina has not risen to power thanks to his charisma. He speaks with a heavy lisp and one of his eyes often wanders in a different direction from the other because of a childhood illness.

Nestor Kirchner, 53, is an unknown quantity to most Argentines. He won the presidency last week by default, when Carlos Menem, the suave and controversial former president, pulled out of the race four days before the election. He will be inaugurated next Sunday.

He is the governor of Santa Cruz province, a kind of Argentine Alaska with glaciers, snowcapped mountains and 200,000 residents. In a country where politicians are despised with uncommon vehemence, few people have anything bad to say about the governor from the far south. In fact, a Gallup poll this month found that 59% of the electorate had no opinion of Kirchner.

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How a colorless politician from a remote and sparsely populated corner of Patagonia could rise to lead a country of 37 million people is testament to the depth and breadth of Argentina’s economic crisis and its ripple effect on the political establishment. The country’s major parties -- the Peronists and the Radicals -- have split into a total of six factions.

“The traditional two-party system is broken,” wiped out by the “big bang” of Argentina’s social crisis, said pollster Roberto Bacman. Five years of recession and double-digit unemployment have left one survivor to emerge from the rubble: Kirchner, a Peronist.

People in Santa Cruz know him as a caudillo, or strongman, albeit one who looks like an innocuous technocrat. The three-term governor is well-known not only for attacking the provincial budget with the frugal fastidiousness of his Swiss ancestors, but also for padding the payroll with jobs for party cronies.

“He runs this province as if it were a country estate,” said a prominent lawyer here.

Responding to reports in the Buenos Aires media about authoritarianism in Santa Cruz, Kirchner campaign manager Alberto Fernandez said: “Argentina needs a president who knows how to wield power.”

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The scion of a Patagonian family with roots in Croatia as well as Switzerland, Kirchner studied law and was a young Peronist militant during the reign of Argentina’s military dictatorship. At one point in the mid 1970s, the local authorities threw him in jail for a few days.

He practiced law, starting a firm with his wife, Cristina Fernandez. Argentina’s generals surrendered power in 1983 and four years later Kirchner was elected mayor of this city of 100,000 people. His wife won a seat in the provincial legislature.

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After the provincial governor was impeached, Kirchner won the election to replace him in 1991. Facing a budget deficit, he had immediately moved to reduce the size of the provincial workforce when a federal court judge came to his rescue. The judge ruled in Santa Cruz’s favor in a lawsuit, filed before Kirchner took office, over the royalties to oil beneath the provincial soil. Santa Cruz would be awarded $700 million in additional royalties. The layoffs were canceled.

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Today, Kirchner runs what amounts to a mini welfare state in Santa Cruz, where tourism and oil offer the only economic hope. As many as half of all adults depend on the provincial government for their income, either as public employees or recipients of welfare payments.

“Santa Cruz doesn’t have a regional economy: It has no industry, no work for anybody,” said Alfredo Almendra, a Peronist and former provincial legislator. “If you’re not a public employee, you’re unemployed.”

That same wealth, critics here say, has funded an elaborate political apparatus serving the governor’s interests. And much of the oil wealth has moved abroad, “to protect it from the vicissitudes of the Argentine economy,” Kirchner said. About $500 million in provincial funds are in a Swiss bank account.

“We don’t know of, nor have we seen any piece of paper from the governor that can confirm, the amount, or the interests and commissions which might have been paid,” said Omar Muniz, of the pro-Menem Santa Cruz Federal Movement.

Still, much of the windfall has been spent on badly needed infrastructure. Kirchner’s government built a hospital in the provincial capital, roads and an airport to shuttle tourists to the glaciers at Calafate.

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Kirchner also increased the number of justices on the provincial supreme court, creating a majority sympathetic to his rule. The chief justice is a former low-level political operative and member of the pro-Kirchner “Los Muchachos Peronistas.” And Kirchner’s backers rewrote the constitution so he could be reelected governor in perpetuity.

Kirchner was reelected in 1995 and 1999. Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires and Argentina’s populous north, the economic crisis deepened. It would consume the careers of most of the nation’s top politicians.

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During the 1990s, Carlos Menem had spearheaded reforms that led to the dramatic growth of the Argentine economy. He sold off government businesses but borrowed heavily to prop up the currency. He ran up deficits in all but one of his 10 years in office.

After leaving office in 1999, Menem soon became the target of corruption investigations, some of which are ongoing.

The next president was Fernando de la Rua, a member of the Radical Party. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, he developed a “zero deficit” program. Popular protests drove him from office in December 2001.

It fell to the National Congress, controlled by the Peronists, to choose an interim president. Like shipwrecked sailors on a deserted island without a captain, the Peronists almost immediately began to bicker.

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Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, governor of San Luis, agreed to serve as president until new elections. Immediately his government teetered as three Peronist governors with presidential ambitions, including Kirchner, withdrew their support.

After a week in office, Rodriguez Saa resigned.

Congress elected a new interim president, Eduardo Duhalde, who promised to hold office only until 2003. Within weeks, Duhalde was also threatening to resign unless the governors agreed to a reduction in federal outlays to the provinces, one of several conditions demanded by the IMF.

Kirchner positioned himself as a center-left candidate resisting the IMF pressures. “This government isn’t any different from the previous ones,” he said in February 2002.

His criticism of Duhalde gained him national attention for the first time. But he remained a second-tier presidential contender.But several governors who were ahead of Kirchner in the Peronist pecking order either bowed out of the race or failed to catch fire with voters. Desperate to keep Menem from returning to power, Duhalde turned to the last substitute left on the Peronist bench: Kirchner.

The governor of Santa Cruz embraced Duhalde as a powerful ally. “Sometimes you have to hug people whom you’d really like to kick in the rear end,” explained Kirchner’s longtime friend, Miguel Bonasso.

Among other things, Duhalde controlled the Peronist party apparatus in the working-class suburbs of Buenos Aires, where he could promise to deliver about 1.5 million votes to his chosen candidate.

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In a crowded field with six major contenders, Kirchner positioned himself as the only one who could defeat Menem and prevent a return to conservative economic policies and scandals.

“Kirchner chose one way to construct his road to power -- allying himself to Duhalde in the province of Buenos Aires,” said Elisa Carrio, a former Radical who would finish fourth in the April 27 presidential election. “Everyone knew people were voting against Menem and not in favor of Kirchner.”

Kirchner finished second with 22% of the vote, behind Menem’s 24%. Both were headed to today’s scheduled runoff. But with Menem trailing in polls by more than 2 to 1, he quit, leaving Kirchner to be Argentina’s next president.

With the survivor of Argentine politics a week away from taking the oath of office, most Argentines don’t know what to expect. According to the Gallup poll taken before the runoff was canceled, Kirchner remained a puzzle even to his supporters. Of those who said they would vote for Kirchner, 45% could not give a reason why.

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Tobar reported from Buenos Aires and D’Alessandro from Rio Gallegos.

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