Argentina marks bicentenary but political corruption endures

BUENOS AIRES LETTER:The pity for the country's long-suffering citizens is that the politicians keep taking everyone else down with them

A BICENTENARY is a historical milestone in any nation’s history and on Tuesday two million people took to the streets of Buenos Aires in a show of flag-waving patriotic fervour to celebrate 200 years of Argentine nationhood.

In crisp autumn sunshine they jammed the centre of South America’s most urbane capital, showing up in numbers that beat all expectations, even surpassing the massive rallies that marked the return of democracy in 1983.

There were Te Deums, galas and rock concerts, parades and flyovers and, when night came, a sound-and-light show projected on to the austere colonnaded front of the Cabildo, one of the few surviving colonial structures in the city.

Sitting across the Plaza de Mayo from the more famous Casa Rosada of Evita fame, it was in this building that on May 25th, 1810, Argentina’s founding fathers launched the tumultuous six-year campaign that would culminate in the Spanish colony’s formal emergence as an independent nation.

But the melancholy fact for Argentines, and one commentators referred to amid all the jubilation, is that since the country’s centenary celebrations in 1910 something has gone seriously awry on the left bank of the River Plate.

One hundred years ago Argentina was one of the world’s 10 largest economies. Today it languishes at 30th. It has since been passed out not just by emerging giants such as China, India and Brazil but by its once poor, backward former master Spain as well as 11 other states with significantly smaller populations.

The citizens of more than 50 other countries are now considered wealthier by the International Monetary Fund, a cruel blow for a proud people who once inspired the French expression riche comme un Argentin.

Today historians and economists study the country’s history for clues as to how a rich country blessed with abundant natural resources – far from the world’s geopolitical faultlines and second only to the United States as a destination for emigrants to the New World – could have squandered such a hand and slipped from the rich list into the ranks of what are today politely termed “developing economies”. Although cynical local observers suggest that “post-development” might be more apt in Argentina’s case.

Such a complex, long-term trend has no one answer, but the country’s fractious political scene cannot help.

Division and bad blood are rife. President Cristina Kirchner even banished her own vice-president from all the bicentenary proceedings, having fallen out with him in 2008.

Her officials say they invited opposition leaders to the inauguration of a new Gallery of Latin American Patriots in the Casa Rosada, but the opposition said this was news to them.

The president also snubbed an invite from the mayor of Buenos Aires to the Monday night gala to mark the reopening of the city’s world-renowned opera house, the Teatro Colón. The feud between the two stems from the fact the mayor covets the president’s job, which she intends to pass back to her husband Nestor, from whom she received it in the first place.

The great show of patriotic unity displayed by the millions of ordinary citizens who celebrated peacefully together on the streets was not matched by their leaders, who continued their zero-sum political game right through the historical moment.

These days a broad front of critics decry the Kirchners’ tacky authoritarianism: her obsession with her appearance which delayed the start of Tuesday night’s banquet in the Casa Rosada until close to midnight while she changed into a third outfit for the day; his avarice which, if some former officials are to be believed, has led corruption within their administrations to outstrip even the free-for-all under the country’s playboy president Carlos Menem in the 1990s.

But the Kirchners have their own worries – the viciousness of politics means that Argentine presidential careers are either cut short by popular unrest or have, as their coda, long fights through the courts on corruption charges. Or both. Politicians have long used corruption at all levels of government to buy support in this fragmented and volatile political marketplace. But having used such sordid methods to rule, the incentive to stay in power by whatever means necessary goes up dramatically for fear of what will happen to you afterwards.

Opposition leaders say they want a new type of politics once the Kirchners are removed from office, hopefully at the polls next year.

But that is just a rebroadcast of the optimistic message of Nestor Kirchner when he took power in 2003. They are battling against the grim reality that nowhere is Enoch Powell’s dictum, “all political lives . . . end in failure” truer than in Argentina.

The pity for the country’s citizens is that the politicians keep taking everyone else down with them.