With an Argentine presidential election looming this Sunday, TAP Online contributor Jonathan Goldberg has been looking at how electoral politics shapes the lives of the country's poor (read part one here and part two here). Today, he talks to a powerful local politician and the would-be three-time president of Argentina, Carlos Menem. The last in a three-part series.
LANÚS, ARGENTINA -- Manuel Quindimil has ruled over Lanús as its mayor for the last 30 years, with the exception of a seven-year interruption during this country's military dictatorship. Seventy-nine years old, "Manolo," as everyone calls him, is now campaigning for another four-year term on the slogan, El ultimo caudillo -- which means, roughly, the last strongman from the era of quasi-fascist Juan Perón.
Three of the four leading candidates in this Sunday's presidential election -- Néstor Kirchner, Carlos Menem and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá -- are Peronists who rely on clientelism to bring crowds out to rallies and to win votes. Only one candidate, Ricardo Lopez Murphy, eschews clientelism.
Manolo's smiling visage, comforting and confident, is everywhere in Lanús. Its presence on municipal employees' wristwatches and soup-kitchen clocks seems to suggest that the mayor even controls the passage of time (and time, in this town, appears to be stuck in the 1950s). The way he governs Lanús provides a good illustration of how clientelism has led to a seemingly endless string of economic collapses in Argentina -- collapses that have culminated in the current economic crisis.
The atmosphere outside Manolo's offices more befits the workplace of a doctor than a mayor: Along snaking faux-leather couches, dozens of Lanús residents wait their turn to see Manolo. Much like a nurse directs patients, a Manolo assistant dispatches each person to a room to await the mayor.
Manolo has no particular ideology other than a diehard faith in the nebulous concept called Peronism. A Manolo campaign poster reads, "Simple, Practical, Popular, Christian, Humanist," a slogan almost as eclectic and meaningless as Peron's claim to combine "collectivism and individualism, idealism and materialism."
The mayor, it turns out, is not a policy-maker but a puntero, albeit a well-connected one: He'll solve whatever problem you have, even if it means going to the Eva Perón-imitating first lady of Argentina. The catch is that to see Manolo, you must be one of his grass-roots punteros yourself, or be sent with a signed and stamped note from one. "Who are you with?" Manolo's assistant asked me as I waited my turn on a recent morning.
Manolo has achieved near-dictatorial social and political control of Lanús by channeling state resources to the poor almost exclusively through his network of brokers. Every aid program in Lanús is run largely through the brokers -- from the national workfare program to the provincial "Glass of Milk" and foodstuff-distribution programs to municipal services, such as after-school help, primary-assistance medical care, and karate and yoga classes.
Manolo seems to have stopped time's passage in order to remain mayor forever. A suit and dress worn by Juan and Evita Perón are encased in Manolo's office, and the presence of the Perons there seems eerily corporeal. Just as in Evita's day, women in Lanús continue to be granted -- and confined to -- one-third of Peronist candidacies, usually the least-important third. They are reserved -- and relegated to -- the "Women's Branch" of Peronism, made to hoot and sing next to the stage at municipal political rallies while the men stand back and give the look of listening critically.
For now there is not much hope of ousting Manolo and restarting time's ticking in Lanús. The mayor and his punteros are the only source of political information for the poor in this town, where it is hard to find newsstands selling national papers. (Besides, such newspapers would be unaffordable to the poor even if widely available.) When I visited soup kitchens, I often brought a national daily and a bag of pastries, and the newspaper usually generated more excitement than the pastries. Because some of the soup kitchen patrons cannot read, one person would read the news aloud.
In the absence of newspapers, the poor here learn about politics at the rallies to which Manolo sends them and in evening classes about politics where brokers infuse the poor with vapid Peronist propaganda and rally songs. I saw a handout for one of the classes -- a sort of gospel of Manolo given in three-paragraph-long, run-on sentences.
Manolo pursues a bold strategy to co-opt competing brokers who challenge him in the Peronist primaries: After they lose, he puts them in charge of his own clientelistic network. The strategy is a risky one -- it strengthens his rivals in return for their public loyalty -- but it has proved successful.
María Coronel, the soup-kitchen supervisor, embodies the ideological fluidity one needs to maintain in order to participate in the competing networks of Peronist clientelism. Coronel had mobilized people for Menem throughout the 1990s; as a reward, Menem's allies bought her the soup kitchen "Happy Children," which she uses as a political base. In 1999, as Menem left office, Coronel ran against Manolo in a primary election, losing badly. Manolo then invited her to be his soup-kitchen administrator. Today, Manolo supports Kirchner, Menem's rival. And María Coronel has, not surprisingly, switched her loyalties to Kirchner as well.
Manolo's strategy, a common one in Peronist politics, reflects the fact that brokers switch between patrons not for policy-related reasons but rather to maximize their intake of state resources -- with which they win followers. Manolo supports Kirchner in the current presidential race; but if Menem beats Kirchner, Manolo will switch allegiances to Menem, for whom he has stumped in the past.
Besides causing Lanús soup kitchens and workfare offices to be wallpapered with Kirchner propaganda, Manolo's support for Kirchner means that Lanús sends buses to Kirchner rallies anywhere in the area. For a Kirchner event at the River Plate soccer stadium earlier this month, Manolo sent 75 buses.
Until I went to the rally at River Plate stadium, I had an unanswered question: Why would a candidate put so much effort into filling a stadium?
I realized why when I saw the banner behind which Manolo had arranged his busloads of the poor. The banner mentioned the current president, Eduardo Duhalde, but not Kirchner. "Duhalde -- Lanús -- Quindimil," the banner read simply. Quindimil (aka Manolo) was letting Kirchner know, in letters big enough to be read from across the stadium, that his allegiance was not to be taken for granted. Kirchner, by filling the stadium, was telling Manolo and his 75 busloads that he could win the presidential election.
I thought back to a conversation with Mario Anchava, a Manolo broker in the Garden shantytown who'd worked as a union forklift driver until being laid off four years ago. Anchava explained to me why he would support Manolo's presidential candidate no matter whom Manolo supported.
"I'm a unionist. I live by unionist rules," he said. "There is a leader, the leader chooses the man we will align with and we align ourselves. We're not looking for proposals or ideas. We align ourselves."
The strategy may sound undemocratic, but it's a good one for unions, which fight not about what kind of pie to make but how much of that pie they will take to their members. And that zero-sum fight is what Argentine politics is essentially about. Manolo wants to help Lanús -- not by enacting certain public policies but by grabbing as much of the pie for Lanús as possible. And to do so, he'd better bet on the presidential candidate who will win, the presidential candidate who can fill a stadium.
Just as shantytown residents seek resources from Coronel, and just as Coronel seeks resources from Manolo, Manolo seeks resources from the governor of his province, who in turn seeks resources from Argentina's president. This allows the mayor to help his people, but also to consolidate his power. Menem, according to a study by economists Edward Gibson and Ernesto Calvo, dispensed discretionary subsidies to the provinces to buy a coalition when he was president. Duhalde today stands accused by Menem of buying the election for Kirchner -- Duhalde's chosen candidate -- with the same discretional subsidies, for which his administration declines to give a province-by-province account.
Argentina, it turns out, is a nation of punteros.
The result is that true democracy and deliberation is sidelined: Ever since Menem failed to show up at a debate to which he had committed in 1989, presidential candidates have not debated.
Given the level of corruption and clientelism in Argentina's politics, one might be surprised to find that there are a range of independent, policy-focused politicians covering the whole political spectrum -- from the mercurial economist Ricardo Lopez-Murphy on the right to Buenos Aires mayoral candidate Patricia Bullrich in the center to the nationalist parliamentarian Elisa Carrió on the left.
These leaders form a sort of government in exile, waiting for the clientelistic leaders to be overthrown at the ballot box. They seem to just recently be realizing that only by forming new, nationwide political parties can they achieve any independence from the clientelistic system -- and stretch their appeal beyond the country's elites.
"It's essential to put up a fight and explain to people that clientelism leads to more poverty, to more hunger, to a relationship of dependency, and that it's the worst model," Bullrich, a disillusioned former Peronist running for mayor of Buenos Aires, told me.
For now, however, conveying her anti-clientelism message is all but impossible without a national party structure that reaches into the shantytowns, where the Peronists control the flow of information. And the Peronists, for obvious reasons, refuse to let a debate over clientelism enter the public discourse.
Menem, running for his third term as president -- even though the provincial fiscal irresponsibility he permitted led to the country's worst economic crisis -- reminded me in a brief interview that clientelism also occurred in the United States, as if the past existence of ward bosses in America somehow justified clientelism today in Argentina as a necessary phase of development. He blamed clientelism on the current transitional government and made a promise -- "This is going to end with our government" -- that he is frankly unlikely to keep.
Menem's closest political adviser, Alberto Kohan, was annoyed at my questions about clientelism. "Well, [Ronald] Reagan and [Bill] Clinton served two terms in office," he said, weirdly implying that their re-elections were attributable mostly to whatever pork barrels they filled during their first terms. After I asked Kohan a second question about clientelism, a Menem representative sharply pinched my arm, warning me to desist.
Even if an independent candidate could win the presidency, the pyramid of clientelism will not simply collapse because its pinnacle has been displaced. One by one, Argentina's brokers -- politicians such as Manolo -- will need to be replaced by true policy-makers. That task will have to fall to a new nationwide political party that reaches into crowded shantytowns and remote villages, and offers residents something other than bribes for their support. It is a nationwide political party that does not yet exist.
Jonathan Goldberg is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Wednesday: How to fill a stadium with Argentina's poor (and other ways to win the presidency).
Yesterday: Presidential politics and Evita's shadow.
