ARGENTINA:
Book Sheds Light on Enigmatic President
Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, (IPS) - Who is Néstor Kirchner, really? This is the main question that Walter Curia attempts to answer in his book, currently a best-seller in Argentina, about the country's outspoken president, who enjoys high approval ratings at home but has had frequent public clashes with several governments in the region.

"The president is perhaps one of the most complex characters to emerge among Argentina's political leadership since 1983," when democracy was restored in the country, Curia, a political reporter for the local daily Clarín, writes at the beginning of his biography, "The Last of the Peronists: The Hidden Face of Kirchner" ("El último peronista: La cara oculta de Kirchner", Editorial Sudamericana, 2006).

To illustrate this idea of the two sides to the president, the author relies on Uruguayan political cartoonist Hermenegildo Sábat, a longtime contributor to Clarín, who draws Kirchner as a composite of two faces: one of them in profile, smiling, and the other facing front, with a severe expression.

Three years into the Kirchner administration, the president enjoys an approval rating of 75 percent of respondents in surveys conducted by the Public Opinion, Services and Market (OPSM) polling firm, and 75.8 percent according to an opinion poll by the Centre for Public Opinion Research (CEDOP) of the University of Buenos Aires.

But his popularity at home is in stark contrast with the awkward relationships between Kirchner and several of his South American counterparts, and with his even stormier relations with leaders of the business community, on both the domestic and international fronts. In a Jul. 30 column in the local newspaper La Nación, editorial writer Joaquín Morales Solá said the president "is losing all his friends."

Kirchner has recently been at loggerheads with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet over the price hike for the natural gas that Argentina sells to Chile, a knock-on effect after Bolivia raised its own prices for the fuel, since Argentina imports its natural gas from Bolivia.

A longer-running and more intractable conflict is the stand-off between the Kirchner administration and that of Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, on account of two paper pulp mills being built on the Uruguayan side of a border river between the two countries. Argentine residents on the opposite bank fear possible negative environmental impacts.

When President Alan García took office in Peru on Jul. 28, Kirchner snubbed him by not attending the ceremony. And Mexican President Vicente Fox complained about his treatment by the Argentine government at the Fourth Summit of the Americas, held last December in Mar del Plata, a resort south of Buenos Aires.

"The president does tend towards isolationism," which may be detrimental to Argentina, commented Morales Solá after providing a laundry list of disputes that Kirchner has been involved in. He added that the president only gets along well with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Curia's book tries to unravel the personality of a man with a benevolent domestic profile and another face for the outside world, with a stern determination to vigorously confront anyone who gets in the way of his political agenda.

According to Curia, Kirchner is subject to fits of rage that frighten even his closest associates. He, on the other hand, is not intimidated by anyone, and he is quite capable of making a foreign president or influential business leader wait, while he deals with a domestic matter that he considers top priority.

Music, literature and the visual arts leave Kirchner cold, Curia says. He despises frivolity and fashion trends. He has just one vocation: power. Ever since the mid-1980s, when he was living in his native province of Santa Cruz, in the south of the country, he has been planning to become president, and he has achieved his goal.

He is extremely wary and obsessive. He does not hold cabinet meetings. He does not use computers, but writes things down in a small notebook. His power structure is like the spokes of a wheel in which he is the hub. He is pragmatic, and brave without taking foolish risks. He has a reputation for being tight-fisted, perhaps because his concept of politics is based on strict and efficient fiscal management.

"Politics, for me, is cash and expectations," Kirchner once told Curia. And so it has been throughout his political career. From his début in public office, as president of the provincial social security fund in Santa Cruz, he was concerned with administering financial resources efficiently. The same was true when he was mayor of Río Gallegos, the capital of the province, from 1987 to 1991.

Kirchner served as governor of Santa Cruz for 12 years, and earned the province a reputation for sound financial management, and the best economic and social indicators in the country by early 2000, when the rest of Argentina was entering the throes of the crisis that led to the country's economic collapse in 2001.

As president of Argentina since May 2003, Kirchner has overseen the restructuring of billions of dollars in foreign debt through negotiations with private creditors, in which they accepted a significant write-off on their investment. He also repaid in full Argentina's debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ahead of time, thus freeing the country from the international lending institution's often highly criticised prescriptions.

Kirchner's family and close friends know that he cannot bear to be in debt.

In his personal quest for economic independence, Kirchner worked at accumulating a small personal fortune. "To engage in politics, you must first make money," he used to say when he worked as a lawyer representing businesses and trade unions in his province.

Kirchner was elected president of Argentina with just 22 percent of the vote in the first round of the elections in April 2003. Although he was two percentage points behind former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999), Menem pulled out of the runoff when the polls predicted that he would suffer a devastating defeat at Kirchner's hands.

As soon as he took office, Kirchner began to assert his leadership. His first act was to force into retirement the army top brass, tainted by its role in the 1976-1983 military dictatorship's "dirty war".

That marked the start of his proactive stance on human rights, in which he has vindicated the claims of victims of the dictatorship's abuses, and has stood in favour of the judicial review of cases of those responsible for human rights crimes, who had previously been granted amnesty.

He partially restructured the Supreme Court, replacing judges accused of corruption, and quickly consolidated an economic model which has generated growth in GDP (gross domestic product), investment, exports and employment. Poverty and unemployment have fallen considerably, and all this has been achieved while maintaining fiscal balance.

But the same Kirchner who was capable of rebuilding a ruined Argentina is also an insecure man, who is enraged by those who criticise him. His enmity with the press is a hallmark of his government, and his confrontations do not end there.

The president has spoken out harshly against agribusiness leaders, industrialists, owners of supermarket chains, large local and foreign investors, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church, representatives of multilateral lending institutions, presidents of other countries, and even the United Nations.

Soon after he became president, he lashed out at Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for failing to explicitly support him in his negotiations with the IMF.

Kirchner also distanced himself, at one point, from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, and from Enrique Iglesias, then president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), after they both rejected the candidacy of former Argentine vice president Carlos Álvarez (1999-2000) for the post of executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In addition, the Argentine and French governments clashed over the controversial departure of the French Suez corporation which controlled the Aguas Argentinas water company.

According to Curia's account, Kirchner and former Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle (2000-2005) exchanged barbed remarks in June 2003, one month after Kirchner had taken office. He was attending his first summit meeting of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), at that time made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (Venezuela has since joined).

"Who in Argentina could have imagined a month ago that you would end up sitting here!" Batlle said. "For that matter, in Uruguay people are wondering how it is possible that you are still sitting here!" rejoined Kirchner, alluding to the severe economic crisis that Uruguay was suffering.

Like Kirchner, his immediate predecessor as president of Argentina, Eduardo Duhalde (2002-2003), is a member of the Peronist Justicialista Party. Yet Kirchner severed all contact with him during the campaign for the 2005 legislative elections, and they presented separate and quite different lists of candidates.

At the time, Duhalde was president of the Mercosur Commission of Permanent Representatives.

Curia reveals in his book that when the group photo was taken at the bloc's 2003 summit in Asunción, Paraguay, Kirchner muttered in Duhalde's ear: "You must always stand behind me, do we understand each other?"