This Sunday, Argentines will go to the polls to vote for a new president. TAP Online contributor Jonathan Goldberg spent the last two months speaking to Argentines about the upcoming election. Today we publish part one of his three-part report.
LANÚS, ARGENTINA -- Estela Cabrera, who lives in a shantytown outside Buenos Aires, attended a rally earlier this month for a presidential candidate. With Argentines set to vote for a new president this Sunday, such rallies -- with their massive banners and loud drums -- are an everyday part of life here, especially for shantytown residents such as Cabrera.
Cabrera, a mother of 11, is separated from her husband and has, for the past five years, been unemployed. But she is a busy woman. She cares for her youngsters, works 20 hours a week in a nearby soup kitchen to earn a monthly unemployment subsidy and, until the early morning hours, knits pullovers for less than a dollar each, allowing herself only five hours' rest before her hectic day begins again. So her presence at a rally might seem to be a sacrifice, a sign of civic progress in a democracy with a checkered political history.
The only problem was that Cabrera did not know which candidate she would be rallying for, just that she would be showing up. A few days before the rally, Cabrera said that she would attend only because the manager of her soup kitchen would cut her from the workfare rolls if she did not. "You have to go, no matter what," Cabrera explained. To her, the rally would be just like any day of work. "If I miss the rally, I need to bring a medical certificate saying I'm sick or that one of my kids is sick," she said, resigned and exasperated at the same time. "Even if I were sick, where would I get a medical certificate from?"
Last December protests and rioting toppled the Argentine government; from the ensuing political chaos, Eduardo Duhalde emerged as transitional president. Many hoped this presidential election would provide an opportunity to renew Argentine politics by replacing the old leaders. "Get rid of them all," went a popular protest slogan.
But three of the four leading candidates in Sunday's vote belong to the same party -- the Peronists -- and they espouse the same messianic populism that has repeatedly led Argentina to economic self-destruction. Carlos Menem, a two-time president who ruled via executive decree and court packing, headed the field with 18.3 percent of the vote in a poll published last Thursday in the leading daily, La Nación. Néstor Kirchner, the candidate preferred by Duhalde, was favored by 16.8 percent of respondents. Ricardo López Murphy, an economist starting a new political party, was selected by 16.3 percent. And Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, a nationalist who has promised to put an expiration date on every single Argentine law -- each of which would have to be reapproved to stay on the books -- polled 15.1 percent, though he had earlier led the race.
No candidate has polled even one-fifth of the votes, which reflects deep and widespread political disenchantment. Yet a majority of Argentines are united in their opinion of Carlos Menem: Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they would never vote for Menem, whose presidencies were a circus of corruption and fiscal irresponsibility under the guise of neoliberal reform. But he may very well end up a finalist for the job anyway. Because the vote is so divided, the April 27 elections will likely fail to be decisive, meaning the top two candidates will compete in a second round on May 18. Menem appears poised to make the cut.
The candidates themselves have remained ambiguous about their platforms, choosing instead to dwell on the confidence that they will ultimately win. "Menem knows what to do, and how to do it," says one campaign poster. "Kirchner knows what a serious country is like," says another. Voters are left to speculate as to what those slogans mean.
Manuel Mora y Araujo, who conducted the poll for La Nación, told me, "In one sense, the candidates have positioned themselves. It's like people's real lives. I don't need to tell a woman I love her for her to know that I'm telling her I love her. I can tell her, 'How beautifully you're dressed today,' or give her a certain glance. Likewise in politics, there are a lot of ways to communicate."
And so this election has turned out to be more a flirtation than a discussion about what led Argentina to crisis and how it might emerge. There have been no debates between the candidates -- but there have been a lot of rallies, for which as many as tens of thousands of poor people have been bused in, providing campaigns with an opportunity to flex their organizational muscle. Instead of the U.S. practice of counting red and blue states, Argentines seeking to gauge a candidate's strength ask, "Can he fill a stadium?"
Two months ago, I set out to see how candidates campaign here -- how they fill stadiums. What I discovered is that the roots of Argentina's current crisis lie not only in the presidents Argentines chose but also in how they are chosen.
"Clientelism" is a term political scientists use to describe the exchange of state resources for political support. It is an exchange that explains why Estela Cabrera and 30,000 other, mostly poor, people attended a Kirchner rally earlier this month in the River Plate soccer stadium, where Menem will close his campaign with a similar rally this week. López Murphy, the only non-Peronist among the four leading candidates, is also the only one who eschews clientelism.
In trying to understand how the exchange works, I became more and more immersed in the minutiae of how the poor survive, where they get their food, clothes and medicine, and how they solve their daily problems. The main source for all these most basic necessities among impoverished Argentines is the Peronist neighborhood broker, or puntero. But in Argentina, the exchange of resources for political support occurs not only at the level of the shantytown broker and his -- or, more commonly, her -- desperate clients. Instead, the exchange occurs between the broker and a patron, between the patron and the mayor, between the mayor and the governor, and between the governor and the president.
And so to understand clientelism, I spoke both with shantytown residents and also with Argentine politicians, including Menem, who granted me a rare interview. Argentina, it turns out, is a nation of punteros. And how a stadium is filled has a lot to do with why Argentina suffers an economic crisis that has knocked per-capita gross domestic product back to where it was a century ago.
I began by speaking to María Coronel, the administrator of soup kitchens in Lanús, one of the municipalities in the poverty belt surrounding Buenos Aires. In her municipal office, Coronel told me that none of the soup-kitchen managers are involved in politics or mobilize people for rallies. "If any do, I don't know about it," she said.
But Coronel was being less than truthful. For the Kirchner rally, Coronel herself badgered managers into pledging to fill 40 buses; meanwhile, a smaller set of managers especially faithful to Coronel promised to bring 12 busloads of her people from her territory. Coronel's political base is the "Happy Children" soup kitchen, where more than 100 people, including me, assembled for the rally.
We rode to the stadium on buses displaying Coronel's name in the front window, and I interviewed Estela Cabrera and 63 others before we arrived. Forty-five of the 63 work at Coronel's soup kitchen as workfare recipients, have children that eat at a Coronel-affiliated soup kitchen or eat there themselves. Only six said they were not connected with Coronel's soup kitchens and were simply interested in attending the rally. Amazingly, 46, including Cabrera, did not know the purpose of the rally -- and were certainly not attending out of a desire to support Kirchner.
A group of men waiting for the bus were eager to formulate a group statement for me. "We don't know where they're taking us," one suggested, but the others reminded him that they knew which stadium they were going to, just not which candidate they would be rallying for. The men, unfamiliar with speaking to a reporter, finally agreed to say, "We know where we are going, but not why."
Javier Ariel Medina, 26, had come in place of his mother, a workfare recipient Coronel supervises who had tend to a family emergency. "Because it was obligatory, I came. Will it be OK? I think so. I don't know if it's accepted," he said, unsure if his attendance would make up for his mother's absence.
Given Cabrera and Medina's attitudes, I was surprised to find that some people were not at all annoyed at having to attend. A few were fans of the River Plate soccer team, and this may have been their only chance to see the hallowed stadium from the inside (because the cheapest ticket costs one-tenth of their monthly income).
Several said they were attending because they were grateful for the help Coronel provides. "It's a way of saying thank you," says one woman. "I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful María Coronel is. Whatever problem you have, she's on top of what you need. It's like a family here. Everyone does what they're supposed to do."
"I'm going because María is going," says an unemployed man in his 60s, who eats frequently at Happy Children.
Clientelism, after all, is more varied than the coercion experienced by Estela Cabrera and Javier Ariel Medina. Many poor people are profoundly grateful to their broker for all he or she provides. But whether coerced or thankful, almost everyone shows up, ultimately, for the same reason: María Coronel dispenses state resources to which no one outside the mayor's network of brokers has access.
We gathered at Happy Children around 2 p.m. and waited for the buses to arrive. Cabrera told me, "See, it's a waste of time. I've already been waiting here an hour for the buses to come. In an hour I can sew half a pullover."
We did not arrive at the stadium, in an upper-class Buenos Aires neighborhood, until around 8 p.m., and the rally started late. Sitting in the high bleachers, we drank bitter maté tea to keep warm, unable to hear the speeches because of the banging of the drums -- the bombos Peronistas -- that are a staple of every rally. But it did not matter that we could not hear. Having made our appearance, we left before Kirchner and his running mate even spoke. Everyone was glad to be leaving early: They would be home by 1 a.m., 11 hours after the first among them assembled for the rally.
En route to the event, I'd asked Cabrera if she wanted to remain anonymous, warning her that she could face reprisals. She declined, explaining, "Sometimes we complain among us women, but nobody listens to us." Menem, Kirchner and Rodríguez Saá -- the three Peronist candidates -- certainly do not.
Tomorrow: Eva Peron's legacy and the punteros' power.
Friday: How one local politician uses national politics to control his town.
Jonathan Goldberg is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
