The Discursive Continuities of the Menemist Rupture

In 1983, Raúl Alfonsín of the UCR was elected president of Argentinain the first democratic elections after a long period of military rule. Incontrast to the country’s violent and authoritarian political traditions, thenascent government set up as its paramount objective the restoration of democratic institutions. However, as a decline in political authority,hyperinflation and popular uprisings prematurely forced Alfonsín toresign before the end of his mandate, in July 1989 Carlos Menem, theopposition Justicialista (Peronist) candidate, won the early elections.In spite of Alfonsín’s failure, 1989 marked the beginning of a new polit-ical era for Argentina. Not only was there a change of governmentthrough free and fair elections, but also for the first time in the country’shistory an opposition party candidate succeeded a democratically elected president. Since this juncture, the country has known the longest unin-terrupted period of democratic rule since independence.

The newly elected president, Carlos Menem, was regarded as representing a radical rupture with the democratic discourse that haddominated the period of transition to democracy under Alfonsín, centredon the recovery of democratic freedoms and rights and the institutional-isation of a stable democratic party system. In contrast, Menem was seenas a charismatic leader from the interior of the country, with a discourse

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The Discursive Continuities of the Menemist Rupture

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‘contaminated’ by demagogic promises, coming to power with thesupport of groups linked to Argentina’s authoritarian past. Moreover, itwas argued that Menem had also broken with crucial elements of thePeronist’s identity, as his policies where in opposition to those carried outby Perón in the 1950s, to the extent that doubts were expressed about thepersistence of a Peronist identity subject to radical changes.

This chapter argues that Menemist discourse had more in commonwith the democratic discourse of the Alfonsín era and with traditionalPeronist identity than is often assumed by the literature. For this purposeI will analyse Menemist discourse and compare it with the discourse ofdemocracy articulated by both Alfonsín and a Peronist group calledRenovación Peronista (RP). I will also compare Menem’s discourse onthe economy with the discourse on economic reform present in thepolitical formation since, at least, 1976. First, I will briefly present thenotions of dislocation and relative structurality that will be used for theanalysis of Menem’s discourse and that of his predecessors.1 I will thencompare Menemist discourse with Alfonsín’s and RP’s discourses ondemocracy, and with the liberals’ discourse on economic reform, inorder to show how, far from being a discourse of rupture, Menem’s discourse shared significant elements with political and economic discourses already circulating in Argentina’s political formation.

Dislocation and relative structurality

What are the conditions for the emergence of a given discourse? Everysocial demand emerges as a result of a structural dislocation. Whenexisting forms of political representation are destabilised and dislocated,new meanings and identities are required to institute a new sense oforder. The notion of dislocation is thus central for political analysisbecause a dislocation is the instance that creates new political possibilities.A dislocated political order is the ambiguous condition of possibility fornew forms of political action.

The effects of a dislocation are traumatic for the actors of the dislocated social order as it fragments and dissolves social identities

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that, under normal circumstances, are not problematised. The disloca-tion of identities means that new forms of identification are neededthat could give coherence and sense to people’s experiences. However,it is important to point out first that this ‘new order’ has no a prioricontent. This means that the re-articulations of the social order madepossible by the dislocation are in principle indeterminate, as the natureof the new order would be the result of a hegemonic struggle. Thesuccess of a certain discursive position in occupying the commandingplace of the new order depends on its efficacy in making better senseof the generalised dislocations. However, the new order is never com-pletely new because it takes place in a political space in which there isalways a relative structuration: the dislocation of a structure does notmean that everything becomes possible or that all existing symbolicframeworks of meaning melt into the air. Thus, a particular dislocationmight have had a multiplicity of origins and could be more or less‘deep’ in its effects, depending on the context in which it emerges.

The novelty and depth of the structural dislocation requires furtherelaboration. Novelty is never completely new. There will always remaintraces of the relative structurality of the dislocated order into which thenew demand anchors its commanding pretensions. This is clear even in themore radical attempts to constitute a new structurality that would completely erase the dislocated chaos. One of these attempts was Hobbes’Leviathan. He tried to eliminate all traces of the state of nature by reduc-ing the plurality of voices characteristic of the state of nature to one: thevoice of the sovereign. However, he cannot succeed in his attempt withoutconstantly referring to the traumatic and miserable experience of the warof all against all. Thus, the acceptance of the absolute sovereignty of theLeviathan depends on the constant recollection of the miseries of thestate of nature. Therefore, from the moment in which a discourse emergesas a response to a dislocation of the social order, and its content starts towork as the solution to the crisis, it will necessarily have to make referenceto the previous structurality and its failure to provide a stable order.

A dislocation of the existing structures of meaning forces the emer-gence of different demands that will seek to re-signify the political

252 POPULISM AND THE MIRROR OF DEMOCRACY


context by advancing a specific solution to the critical situation pro-voked by the dislocated structure. Two points need clarification here. Inthe first place, it is important to consider that, as a response to the dislocation, a particular demand can be characterised in two ways. Onthe one hand, it will represent a particular solution to the crisis. But onthe other hand, and at the same time, the demand’s particular contentwill carry with it a promise of fullness, which is a promise for the real-isation of the whole community. This promise, which is grounded inthe relative structurality described above, allows the particular demandto become a surface of inscription for other demands. This means thatevery demand can be potentially articulated with a plurality of otherdemands.

The notion of articulation is also central, and takes the argument tothe second point. When a political order is dislocated a multiplicity ofdiscourses will emerge, seeking to make sense of the new situation.Among these, there is one that will become hegemonic by imposing itsreading of the situation as the only possible reading, articulating otherreadings. But articulation changes both the meaning of the articulatingand the articulated discourses, and because of this a discourse cannotcompletely hegemonise the field of interpretation.

The success of a given reading of the situation implies that the newstructurality has in its origins a struggle for excluding other demands.This shows that a society only exists as a political relationship thatexcludes some interpretations of the social order and includes others: asociety can only have a political existence. The logic of hegemony liesprecisely in the notion of articulation and in the possibility of a particu-lar demand imposing its reading of the dislocation, and working as asurface of inscription for other demands. The fact that a hegemonicsuccess can be analysed in terms of the ‘imposition of a reading’ meansthat we can ask if any demand has the same chance of becoming hege-monic. The answer will be affirmative only if we consider it as a logicalpossibility. But in political analysis the answer will be negative. If theimposition of a demand is a matter of power, it is obvious that not everydemand will have the same chance of success. If, on the one hand, there



is no pre-given essence or objectivity that in the abstract denies orpermits a particular demand to embody a more extended generality, weshould not forget the relevance of the relative structurality of the dislo-cated context. There will always be potentially more powerful discoursesthat would be better suited to impose their particular content as univer-sal, and thus hegemonically articulate a response to the dislocation. Letus now examine the relative structurality of the Argentine political formation in which Menem’s discourse emerged.

Menemism and democracy

The notion of democracy was the nodal point around which all demandswere articulated in Argentina after 1984. This was particularly clear in rela-tion to Alfonsín’s discourse, which occupied the centre of the politicalformation. The Alfonsinista discourse was organised around the rejectionof an authoritarian, bureaucratic and corporatist past that had came to anend with the failure of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (PRN),as the military called their government, and to which the country shouldnever go back. Alfonsín was referring to a recent political past that wasstill very much present in the memories of Argentine society. From hispoint of view, once the Argentine people had agreed to and enacted thedemocratic organisation of society and the guarantee of civic freedoms,all national problems would be solved. Thus, democracy was the sole condition for the rebirth of Argentina’s greatness.

The situation of Peronism was rather different. In 1986 the PartidoJusticialista (PJ, the official name of the Peronist party) was seeking torecover from a series of crises that started with Perón’s death, from thecollapse of the Peronist government in 1976, and from the consequencesthat the PRN had for the party. The electoral defeat of 1983 was oftenunderstood at the time as ‘the final blow’2 for the Peronist movement.

Faced with this challenge a group of Peronist leaders argued thatPeronism had to change its internal organisation. Renovación Peronista– as this new group was called – proposed the democratisation and insti-tutionalisation of the party. RP argued that the movimientista character of



Peronism had to change, and the movement needed to be transformedinto a proper political party. However, the suggestion that Peronismshould become a political party represented an important shift in thePeronists’ imaginary, since one of its main elements was the critique ofthe so-called partidocracia liberal as the cause of most of the country’sproblems.3

In order to achieve its goals RP faced a political dilemma: they had toshow that they were the real Peronists after the death of Perón. They hadto demonstrate that they were not completely breaking with the Peronisttradition, but at the same time that they were changing the party to‘dance to the music of times’, which was democracy. The discourse ofthis new Peronist group was centred on the eradication of the authori-tarian practices still present in the party. The main goal that Renovaciónset itself was to establish distance from the authoritarian bureaucracy incontrol of the PJ and transform Peronism into a democratic party. Butthis was very difficult to carry out, considering the historic characteris-tics of Peronism, an anti-party movement in which decisions werealmost exclusively taken by the leader. Moreover, while they sought tochange the party, RP had to stay within the Peronist tradition in order tokeep the support of PJ voters.

Renovación’s discursive strategy was to reclaim Peronism’s populartradition while trying to articulate it into the democratic discourse thathegemonised the transition to democracy. But the common elementsbetween RP’s discourse on democracy and the discourse of the UCRmeant that the Radical government perceived Renovación as a threat, asboth would effectively be competing for the same voters and presentingsimilar ideas. The government thus called a series of meetings with theofficial Peronist leaders, excluding Renovación from the talks. The meet-ings made evident the first public splits within Renovación. RP leaderAntonio Cafiero objected to the government’s meeting with the PJ, andshowed concern at the public support that Carlos Menem – then a fellowRenovador leader – gave to the meetings between the party’s authoritar-ian leadership and the President.4



Menem’s discourse on democracy

Thus Carlos Menem became Cafiero’s main opponent within Peronism.The difference between them was initially on a tactical issue: whileMenem defended the unity of Peronism, including the authoritarian oldguard, Cafiero argued that formal unity was worthless. He cited the elec-toral defeat of 1983 as an example of a type of unity that had not beenparticularly successful for Peronism.5 In a development from Menemand Cafiero’s tactical disagreements, the dispute became centred onwhether RP should present separate candidates from the official PJ listfor the 1987 election.

Menem gained the internal support of the Peronist groups excludedfrom Renovación’s successful struggle to control the party. HenceRenovación found itself having to face the re-emergent anti-party andanti-democratic Peronist tradition now headed by one of Renovación’sown leaders. As early as July 1986 Menem was proclaimed as the PJ’s pres-idential candidate for the 1989 election by a Peronist group in Córdoba.Another group that expressed its support to Menem was the right-wingfaction that controlled the Peronist party in Buenos Aires Province. Itsleader, Herminio Iglesias, was the defeated candidate for the provincialgovernment of Buenos Aires in 1983, and was identified as having violentand gangster-like political manners. His support for Menem was attackedby some RP leaders. Eduardo Duhalde,6 for example, expressed hisconcern, arguing that ‘Menem’s legitimate aspirations to the presidencycan suffer a serious stumble if he insists on forming an alliance withPeronist groups close to López Rega and Herminio Iglesias’.7

Menem’s discourse has to be understood as the articulation of the tra-ditional Peronist discourse on populist democracy with the newliberal-democratic discourses of Renovación and the UCR. In a letterpublished on 24 March 1988, titled Carta abierta a la esperanza (Open letterto hope), Menem presented himself as the figure that would make surethat both the formal elements of democracy as represented by the UCRgovernment and the social critique of formal democracy carried out bythe Renovación were preserved – and, in a way, brought together.



‘I come to tell them [the poor] that a future is possible. That democracyis still worth it. That justice is a good reason to build something biggerand more transcendental’. Menem’s discourse thus took democracy asthe bedrock upon which to ground its content.8 Its main characteristicwas an ambiguity – which made possible the inclusion of those who feltexcluded from the political articulation centred on the notion of democ-racy as advocated by RP and the UCR.

In order for a given signifier to become the surface of inscription fora plurality of demands, the signifier’s particular content tends to becomeemptier and emptier and to be opened to different meanings. It is thisemptiness that permits a particular demand to symbolise many differentdemands. In the case of Menem’s discourse the ‘emptiness’ was given byits ambiguity, which made it different from both traditional Peronist discourse and that of RP.9 Menem’s use of ambiguity was evident for instance in his abandonment of the traditional categories used toidentify Perón’s supporters. Thus, he no longer identified his addresseesas ‘workers’ or compañeros peronistas, appealing instead to more ambiguousidentities such as ‘brothers and sisters from my motherland’,‘Argentines’, or to sociological categories that were emptied of their pre-vious political meaning: ‘I want to talk with you all face to face to expressmy intimate convictions. With you, workers; with you, professionals;with the youngsters, the women and the elderly of this blessed land of all.’ 10

The appeal to the ‘workers’ was typical of Peronist discourse, but thefact that this appeal was combined with appeals to ‘professionals’,‘women’ and ‘the elderly’, transformed the category ‘workers’ into amere sociological notion, partially empty of its political significance inthe Argentine context. But the emptying of the signifier ‘workers’ wasonly partial because, at the same time, the term could still be read as atraditional Peronist category. At other times, the ambiguity of Menem’sdiscourse was represented by elements that seemed charged with a moralcontent. In the Carta abierta, for example, the mediocrity of theArgentine condition was the trait to overcome.



I summon you to take imagination to power and to follow a path thatreally makes sense. We have to overcome mediocrity. Because themediocre person does not invent anything. The mediocre person specu-lates, gives up, feels like a passive spectator of the times he has to live in.And this time, precisely, is not for mediocre people.

In other cases, the appeal to the people was formulated as a messageof hope, where hope was defined as ‘the realisation of our best dreams’,or as evidence that a better ‘future is possible’. This appeal to hope waseven more evident during the presidential campaign of 1989. The mainmotto of Menem’s campaign was ‘Síganme, no los voy a defraudar ‘ (Followme, I won’t let you down).

I take up this challenge in the face of a life or death alternative. I have twobanners to confidently look at the horizon and calmly wait for the future[electoral] decision [of the people]. One banner is from God: faith. Theother banner is from the people: hope.11

Menem’s discourse took its distance from RP in a move that allowed himto put RP and the government at the same discursive level. Cafiero’sreaction parallelled the denunciation of the military-union pact thatmarked the emergence of the Alfonsinist discourse.12 It stressedMenem’s ‘caudillista’ attitude and presented it as a return to the worstcharacteristics of Peronism. Cafiero criticised Menem’s supporters byclaiming that he was surrounded by ‘figures from the Montoneros,López Rega collaborators and other compañeros who we can only associ-ate with the dark days of the electoral defeat’.13 Cafiero’s reference to aviolent political past was almost a carbon-copy of Alfonsín’s discoursein 1983. In Cafiero’s discourse Menem represented the return of the so-called ‘marshals of defeat’, now re-united around Menem to ‘recover theprivileges that the Peronist people took away from them’.14 Menem’s discourse was thus a critique of the exclusion of certain Peronist groups from Renovación’s project of party renewal, and a reassertion ofthe anti-party characteristics of Peronism. This strategy proved to be



successful against the party machine then in the hands of theRenovación candidates: on 9 July 1988 Carlos Menem and EduardoDuhalde won the PJ primary presidential election with 53.4 per cent ofthe votes.

It can be argued that Menemist discourse did not represent a radicalrupture with the discourse of democracy that dominated Argentina’sreturn to constitutional order. Rather, his discourse shared certain elements with the notion of democracy that characterised the transition,but its contents were re-signified, as the ambiguity of Menemist dis-course allowed him to articulate discursive elements so different as toappeal to the followers of both Herminio Iglesias and the Montoneros15

alike. In this way the notion of democracy in Menemist discoursebecame the floating signifier of the political formation, and, at the sametime, transformed the concept of democracy into an empty signifier thatcould be clothed with different meanings.16

Menem and the Peronist tradition

A good part of the literature about Menemism compares and contrastsit to the ‘original’ Peronism of 1945. Most authors highlight the policydifferences between the two governments while, at the same time, stress-ing the way in which Menem partly retrieved the Peronist tradition. Itwas said that Menem had the ability to ‘make his mere presence evoke aseries of political contexts and messages associated in one way oranother with the Peronist identity’.17 Even when these ‘contexts andmessages’ were never properly defined in the literature, it was clear thatthe particular style of Menem’s discourse allowed a link to be establishedbetween the Menemist and Peronist traditions.

It has been argued that Menem presented himself and was perceivedby his followers as the heir of the justicialista dream; that he was elected‘by the inertia of tradition only to subordinate the Argentine economyto the dominant classes of the international capitalist system, and, inparticular, to the financial capital and its “guard dogs” the IMF and theWorld Bank’.18 Another writer, Manuel Mora y Araujo, points out that



Menem’s success was due to the fact that Peronism had to change afterits defeat in 1983. Thus the renovation of the party took place, particu-larly in the ideas and political style of the PJ.19 Style was also the termused by José Nun to refer to the changes in the patterns of political representation that made possible the emergence of Menemism. Withhis particular style ‘Menem appealed to the traditional [political] recipesof Peronism in order to be President’. Nun argues that after his electionMenem rejected most Peronist policies, but ‘retained some that nowa-days are related to a kind of peripheral postmodermism’.20 The contrastbetween Perón’s and Menem’s political programmes was also stressed byJuan Carlos Portantiero. But when examining the success of Menemismhe also refers to a ‘problem of style’, and a similarity between the twoleaders that ‘alludes to deeper zones of the collective sensitivity’. Fromhis point of view, Menem ‘stablished a symbolic relationship with thedeep sensitivity of Peronism’ different from the ‘modernist rationalism’of the ‘republican mood’ hegemonic in the mid-1980s.21 According toRicardo Sidicaro, the Menemist ‘anti-elite’ character emerged against this‘republican mood’ represented by Alfonsín and Cafiero. Menem couldbecome the leader of this reaction ‘because of his attachment to the oldPeronist style, that appealed to the support of the poorest sectors ofsociety by promising greater social equality and better wages, at the sametime that he raised nationalist issues and criticised the world’s hegemoniccentres’.22

Menem’s discourse had a particular constitution. It was mainlydefined by its closeness to the electorate, by the changes in the patternsof political mobilisation, and by his presentation as a quasi-religioussaviour. All these in a moment in which the political word was discred-ited, political mobilisation and participation were almost non-existent,and a feeling of scepticism and pessimism was widespread. This discur-sive framework was one of the elements that helped Menem’s success inthe PJ’s primaries of 1988. He entered the political scene with a strategythat was different from those of his opponents. For several years, hevisited towns and cities throughout the country where he showed a greatability to establish direct contact with the people based on affect and



empathy.23 Gabriela Cerruti describes Menem’s political strategy in herbiography of the Peronist leader. She notes how Menem travelledthrough Argentina, spending two days of the week in La Rioja (his homeprovince), two in Buenos Aires, and three travelling around all over thecountry meeting the minister of the economy, the President of the BancoHipotecario and the secretary of sport. In a single week he would appearon several television shows and in some show-business magazines.24

At the same time, as Marcelo Cavarozzi and Oscar Landi haveexplained, ‘[h]is closeness to the electorate contrasted with the growingdistancing that affected both the actions of a large part of the politicalclass and the technical justifications for the condition of the economy’.25

Menem’s close and direct contact with people was reinforced by thechanges in the forms of political mobilisation. There were no largemobilisations of people, as was usually the case under Peronism, becausethis required a significant organisational effort and the collaboration ofother sectors within the party – unions, local leaders, and so on. Instead,Menem would go to neighbourhoods and small towns participating incaravanas around the country.26 He would arrive in a town and smile andwave at the people gathered to watch him. He would kiss children andwomen, constantly repeating blessings and messages of love – ‘I blessyou’, ‘I love you all’. When asked about his plans if he won the election,Menem said that he did not want ‘to talk about government plans butabout a complete change of structures and a rebuilding of the essentialnational character’ of a people that ‘have lost all faith’. Menem would‘firmly’ try to maintain the religious message and ‘the eternal messagefrom God’, because ‘things that are not made with love, are useless’.27

This religious appeal was combined with his portrayal as the saviour ofthe country. When contemplating the possibility of defeat, he wouldargue that his election as president was the last chance to change thingsaround, because ‘if I lose – and I say this with total humbleness – welose the last chance to recover Argentina and the opportunity to build agreat country’.28

Menemism appealed, as RP had done before, to the social contentthat only Peronism could traditionally attach to state policies. His explicit



promises were a salariazo (slang for a large wage increase), and a revoluciónproductiva (a productive revolution) which would mean an increase injobs. But even the social elements of his political discourse were pre-sented in an ambiguous way:

First of all, the Productive Revolution is a human accomplishment, a collective epic deed, an arduous and transcendental achievement. It is a challenge that starts in the head and the heart of every Argentine,before starting with the necessary transformation of the social structures.Without this intimate and decisive change, no revolution is possible.No future is possible. There is no possible progress’.29

By appropriating the discourse of democracy and appealing toambiguous and more generic or fragmented identities, Menem’s dis-course achieved two goals. First, it ‘Peronised’ the notion of democracy,without becoming open to the charge of being the government’s ally –as had happened to RP. Simultaneously, it could claim that it representeda democratic Peronism even when the most authoritarian groups withinthe party supported him. Second, the appeal to generic identities allowedMenem’s discourse to achieve something that Peronism had failed to doduring the transition to democracy. As was argued before, after the deathof Perón, Peronist candidates had struggled, firstly, to convince theirown partisans that they were true Peronists, and secondly to be regardedas representing something more than just the PJ’s core constituency – asAlfonsín did vis-à-vis the UCR. Both discursive achievements werecrucial for Menem’s electoral win in the PJ’s 1988 primary election – andlater in the 1989 national election. Menem’s success was due to his useof discursive ambiguity to articulate a heterogeneous set of demandsaround signifiers that had been emptied of their traditional content.

Menemism and economic reform

An important aspect of Menem’s presidency was his alleged change ofeconomic policy immediately after ascending to the presidency. It has



been alleged that Menem won the election with a traditional Peronisteconomic discourse, but that once he took office he radically changedcourse and implemented a series of policies openly opposed to those ofPeronism (selling state companies, opening the economy to the worldmarket, reducing the size of the state apparatus, and ending ‘state inter-ference’ in the economic arena). In this section I will show that theeconomic reforms that he carried out in the early 1990s were groundedin an economic discourse that was already in circulation in the Argentinepolitical formation before Menem adopted it.

According to the discourse of economic reform circulating inArgentina in the late 1980s, the solution to the country’s economic prob-lems required structural changes in the economy through the adoptionof liberal economic policies. This diagnosis was not new in 1989. Liberaleconomic ideas were constitutive of one of the poles of political antag-onism that had divided the Argentine political scene since 1955. Theyrepresented a critique of the model of development identified withPeronism.30 Economic liberals advocated an economy opened to theworld market and the reduction of the state’s activity in the economy.Controlling inflation was interpreted as the condition for restoringhealthy economic growth. The key measures to be adopted were restrict-ing the money supply, holding down wages, and balancing thegovernment’s budget by reducing public spending and raising revenue.

In their critique of the economic condition of the country, the liber-als highlighted two main issues: on the one hand, the growing stateregulation of the economy; on the other, the development of a closedeconomy isolated from world markets. According to the liberal discourse,state participation in the economy had led to long-term budget deficitsfinanced by monetary emission, the main cause of inflation since 1946.31

Thus, inflation was characterised as the main problem of the economy,and its solution required important structural changes. The military government that took power in 1976 accepted the liberal diagnosis ofthe Argentine economy: if the economic crisis is to be overcome, infla-tion has to be defeated; required for this would be an open economy andthe withdrawal of the state from economic activity.



However, liberal economic reform found itself in a predicamentduring the transition to democracy, as liberal economic ideas becameassociated with the PRN – not exactly a prestigious association. Butwhile these ideas lost importance in the transition to democracy, thisdoes not mean that the discourse of economic liberalism disappearedfrom the political formation. On the contrary, economic liberalism wasconstantly present as the ‘other’ of the economic discourse of the UCRgovernment from 1984 to 1987. It was the strength of the discourse ofdemocracy that relegated the discourse of economic reform to the back-ground. Economic problems were not absent from the agenda of the1983 electoral campaign, but the candidates did not address them indetail. After the failure of the military government’s economic policies,epitomised in the liberal orthodoxy of the economy minister José A.Martínez de Hoz, the main parties shared the perception that the eco-nomic recovery of the country was not a matter of economic reform butonly of ‘re-opening the doors of factories’. This alone would finish withpoverty and malnutrition, unemployment and low wages. Economicproblems were thus pushed into the background. They were, forexample, reduced to the judgement of human rights abuses committedby the military, or the preservation of democratic institutions. But reduc-tion of economic issues did not equate to the disappearance of thediscourse of economic reform, as is evident from an analysis of the discourse structuring Alfonsín’s government between 1984 and 1987.

During the first years of Alfonsín’s government, economic reformwas constantly linked to Argentina’s authoritarian past. The main criti-cism of economic liberalism was that liberal economic policies wouldharm certain sectors of society to the extent that its alleged objectiveswere totally incompatible with the idea of democracy. If democracy wasgoing to ‘cure, educate, and feed the people’ (as Alfonsín claimed), theeconomic policies associated with the authoritarian past could not besustained. Thus, the discourse of economic reform was present as anundesirable possibility. Even the incipient reform attempts of theAustral Plan represented this undesirability. In 1985 the economic crisiswas put at the centre of the political debate by the president’s appeal to



a ‘war economy’. But this appeal did not represent an attempt to reformthe economy. Rather, it was presented as an effort to control inflationand appease social conflict – especially regarding the unions. A strongdiscourse of democracy thus precipitated the subordination of economicreform to other issues.

This situation started to shift in 1987, when the perception of theeconomic crisis changed dramatically. By January it was clear that theheterodox Austral Plan was not working. In July an important changetook place when the minister of the economy, Juan V. Sourrouille,announced a new plan. The minister pledged to go beyond monetary stabilisation and carry out structural economic reforms. The minister’spledge signified a shift in the limits of economic discourse in Argentina.While the discourse of democracy attributed responsibility for thecountry’s economic problems to the liberal economic policies enacted bythe military dictatorship, after July 1987 the blame for Argentina’s eco-nomic situation was placed on the crisis of a dirigiste economic modelthat resisted ‘the transformations demanded by Argentine society’.32 Thenew economic plan was ‘against the populist and facile model’ that was‘slowing down the development of the [economic ] potential of thecountry’.33

The objectives of the new economic plan were almost a restatementof the neoliberal principles of the discourse of the military regime. First,it was argued that the state had become a major obstacle to economicrestructuring, so the deregulation of markets and the privatisation ofpublic companies were recommended. Second, it was stated that finan-cial markets provided an opportunity for speculation, so they also had tobe reformed. Finally, a third major objective was to open Argentina’seconomy and to integrate it more closely into world markets. The government’s plan of structural reform meant that the liberal discourseof economic reform regained the place it had lost during the first yearsof transition to democracy. And this shift was implemented by the hege-monic discourse that had articulated the transition – Alfonsinismo.

How was it that a discourse that was constituted around the notion ofdemocracy could change and embrace the discourse of liberal economic



reform which had been regarded as antithetic to democracy? It has to beremembered that 1987 was a critical year for the UCR government. Theeconomic policy represented by the Austral Plan was not successful.Politically, things were no better. On 6 September the PJ won the provin-cial and legislative elections in twenty out of twenty-two electoraldistricts. From the point of view of the government, the UCR had lostthe elections as a consequence of the poor performance of theeconomy.

The most visible manifestation of the economic crisis was high infla-tion. The hegemonic discourse was shifting as a consequence of thisdislocation, and it reacted as a critique to it: ‘This is precisely the goal ofthe set of measures we have announced: to dismantle the inflationarybomb.’34 To overcome the dislocation of the social order brought byhigh inflation there was only one option: to reform the country’seconomy. A new order would be achieved by restructuring first the rela-tionship of the Argentine economy with foreign capital, then the role ofprivate economic initiatives, and finally the state’s participation in theeconomy.35 From this point on, the Alfonsín government repeated thearguments of its predecessor, the PRN: the state had to be reformed andthe economy had to be integrated into the world market. The differencefrom the military regime was that the call to carry out the structuralreforms was issued with a warning regarding its social costs. The reformprocess needed the participation and social responsibility of all sectorsof society: ‘the collective enterprise of the Argentines implies changeand progress with justice and solidarity’.36

Alfonsín presented the transformation of the economy as a necessity,and did not leave space for many options. The reform of the economy,as intended, was the only alternative left to the country. The governmentwas not only doing the right thing, but the only thing that was possible.This required the integration of Argentina into the world market, thereform of the state to make it more efficient, and the spreading of thecosts of the economic adjustment to the whole society, and not only thepoorest sectors. Thus, if in 1983 democracy was considered sufficient toimprove the economic situation of the country, and if in 1985 this had



started to change with the Austral Plan, in 1987 the reform of theeconomy became the necessary condition for the survival of Argentina.The discourse of economic reform ceased to be an undesirable possibil-ity, and was transformed into a necessity.

As was noted earlier, when a particular discourse starts working as asurface of inscription for other demands it functions as a promise offullness. Faced with the failure of representation provoked by a disloca-tion, the new demands will present themselves as the representation ofplenitude. In the case of the re-articulation of the discourse of eco-nomic reform by the Alfonsín government, there was the promise of a‘new society’. The terms of the original equation, democracy = pleni-tude, radically changed when the control of inflation came to representthe condition of possibility for the establishment of new mechanisms ofsocio-political negotiation.

Thus, Alfonsín’s discourse changed its core priorities. The economicplan was meant to stop inflation in order to achieve democratic stability.High inflation had to be eliminated if democratic negotiations betweenpolitical parties were to be possible. ‘Because, obviously, if we do notdeactivate the [inflationary] bomb, no negotiation is possible.’ At thesame time, the relative structurality of the previous articulation is evidentin Alfonsín’s speech opening the legislative sessions that year. ThePresident presented the social pact as a negotiating mechanism that wasgoing to erase ‘corporatist hindrances’ and their authoritarian origins.But, after this reference to the notion of democracy as formulated in thefirst stage of the transition, a new signifier emerged to replace democ-racy. The reform of the economy would provide ‘certainty, peace, andwelfare to the men and women of our country’. In other words, it would‘provide the certainty’ that inflation seemed to be taking away from ‘oureveryday life’.37

This process of discursive change was not limited to Alfonsinism. Onthe contrary, it is possible to trace the dissemination of the discourse ofeconomic reform to almost all political groups. The need for reformingthe economic structure of the country was only rejected by left-wingparties and certain sectors of the union movement. From the second



half of 1987 onwards, the discussion was not about whether theeconomy had to be reformed or not, but about the social costs of thereforms, and how they would be distributed among the population.Antonio Cafiero stated that ‘the economic adjustment has to be done,but the way in which its costs will be spread has to be examined’.38 In thecase of the unions, there was a split in their attitude towards economicreform. On one hand, there was a group within the CGT that rejected itbecause it was a proposal that implied ‘the handing over of the nationalpatrimony [to foreign interests]’.39 But on the other, there was a groupthat was seeking to negotiate the economic adjustment. As union leaderJorge Triaca put it, Peronism had to redefine its ‘historic role because theprinciple of redistribution of wealth is not in accordance with thecurrent economic situation of the country’.40 Even the leaders of thetwo main parties, Eduardo Angeloz (Radical ) and Menem (Peronist),were part of the process of dissemination of the discourse of economicreform during the campaign for the presidential election in May 1989.This was more evident in the case of the Radical candidate, Angeloz. Hewas constantly presented as a good administrator arguing for a change inthe model of economic development of Argentina. Menem presentedan economic plan called ‘We have to change, it is the only alternative’.The plan proposed ‘to subordinate public expenditure to new criteria ofmorality and austerity’ and ‘a serious privatisation policy with parliamen-tary consensus’.41

The end of Alfonsín’s government was traumatic. After the failure ofthe Austral Plan the most important attempt to dominate inflation wasthe Plan Primavera (Spring Plan) of August 1988. In February 1989 theplan could not resist the market coup (golpe de mercado) that implied thepolitical destabilisation of the government by different economic groupsthrough currency speculation and reckless price increases. Following thegolpe, inflation in March stood atat 17.0 per cent, in April 33.4 per cent,and in May at 78.5 per cent. At the same time, political problems weremultiplying. In December, another military rebellion took place, and inJanuary a left-wing group attacked the La Tablada military barrackscausing a violent confrontation with military and police forces.



What followed can only be described as chaos. In May there werefood riots and attacks on supermarkets in poor neighbourhoods of themain cities. Fears of a massive popular insurrection provoked the decla-ration of a state of siege. Inflation was now hyper-inflation, with priceincreases of 114.5 per cent in June and 196.6 per cent in July. The gen-eralised perception was that of a government with no economic policy,no monopoly on coercion, and no political initiative – specially after itsdefeat on 14 May, when C. Menem and E. Duhalde won the presidentialelection with 49.3 per cent of the vote, against 37.1 per cent for the UCRcandidates.

Menemism and economic stability

Once in power, the position that had become the articulatory demandduring 1988 and 1989, thanks to the particular way in which it was con-stituted and the ambiguity of its content, started to change. Menem’sdiscourse provided a new reading of the dislocatory effects of the crisis,representing it as a terminal crisis that put the country in a state of emer-gency and in danger of dissolution. The critical effects of this readingimplied a new positivity, articulated around the idea of national unity.This implied, firstly, the reconciliation of the people, who had sufferedartificial divisions as a consequence of the 1989 crisis. Secondly, nationalunity worked as a justification for the alliance of the government withright-wing political groups. This was particularly important in the PJ,where these groups were understood to be the best representatives ofthe ‘anti-popular front.’ Finally, national unity came to represent therestoration of the authority of the state lost in the terminal crisis. Thisalso implied that the diagnosis and prescriptions of the faction occupy-ing the state at the time – Menemism – had to be accepted without anysort of nuances.

Menemism was thus starting to make sense of what was happening inthe Argentina of the early 1990s. In other words, the ‘political vacuum’of the end of the Radical government had passed, and now there was adiscourse that was starting to give coherence to people’s experience. But



the suturing of the dislocated space and the creation of a stable sense oforder was not free of problems.

The series of dislocations that took place in 1989 and 1990 were inti-mately related to those faced by the Radical government. They were amixture of economic and political problems that tested the reactioncapacity of the new government. In this respect, Menem’s governmenthad the advantage of the UCR experience – from which some lessonshad been learned. And the first lesson was that if the government pro-jected an image of weakness regarding decisions to attack problems, itwould not last long. The weakness of Menem’s government was relatedto the credibility of its appropriation of the discourse of economicreform. As has already been said, the discourse of economic reform hadgone through a process of expansion since 1987 that meant that it wasthe central discourse available at the time of the galloping crisis. But itwas also said that no other available discourse putting itself forward asan alternative could make sense of the dislocatory effects. Menemismfaced this problem. No subject position was going to be credible simplybecause of its appropriation of the discourse of economic reform.

In March 1991, a month in which Menem had explained that he was‘the best disciple of Perón’, and the PJ had called a congress for its doctrinaire updating, the government committed itself to another anti-inflationary shock: the Argentine currency would be freely convertibleinto US dollars. Congress passed a bill fixing the exchange rate for thedollar and prohibiting the Central Bank from printing money to coverbudget deficits unless new emissions were fully backed by gold orforeign currency. The fixing of the price of the dollar was crucial toreverse expectations of inflation, and the results were music to the gov-ernment’s ears: inflation rates in July, August and September were 2.6 percent, 1.3 per cent, and 1.8 per cent respectively. Inflation in Decemberstood at under 1 per cent for the second month in a row, and the lowestsince 1974. Interest rates also plummeted from a 3 per cent daily rate to3 per cent per month. Real wages improved, and commercial credit wasavailable again. The Buenos Aires stock market experienced a true explo-sion: ‘Operators in the porteño 42 financial district joyously welcomed the



beginning of the “Argentine miracle”’.43 This euphoria was not exclusiveto business. The quick success of the Convertibility or Cavallo Plan, asit was called, moved Menem to say that ‘the Plan Cavallo will last for ever[de por vida] or at least for the duration of my administration’.44

After a year and a half of economic plans and recurrent inflationarycrisis, the Peronist government of Carlos Menem had been able to sta-bilise the situation. The Convertibility Plan created not only economicstability and growth, but, more importantly, gave the country a collectivefeeling of order that it had lacked for decades. The implementation andsuccess of the plan was explained mainly in economic terms: they werebased on the importance of expectations regarding the anti-inflationaryshock.45 Palermo and Novaro’s account of the ‘political success’ of theConvertibility Plan also pointed in this direction. They tried to show thatthe most important aspect of the plan was the fact that the governmentwas abandoning certain regulatory powers in order to gain credibility.46

The Convertibility Law not only fixed the exchange rate, but alsorestricted the powers of the government in the management of monetarypolicy – thus achieving a ‘maximum compromise’ regarding exchangerates.47 The government would not be able to modify the exchange rateto give in to political interests, and party or entrepreneurial pressures.Palermo and Novaro’s conclusion is that this politico-institutionalarrangement gave the plan the necessary credibility to be successful.

But from the point of view presented here, this explanation might becorrect only for the initial success of the plan. Given the poor weight ofinstitutional arrangements in Argentine politics, it is untenable that asimple law could transmit credibility and help with the expansion of a spe-cific discourse. In 1991 there was no reason to think that after six monthsof low inflation the government would not pass a different law, surrender-ing to union pressure for September elections. Thus, the reason for thechange in decisions and expectations has to be sought elsewhere. In thisaccount, it was not until the government could stop escalating inflationrates that the political formation, in crisis since 1987, could be stabilised.It was not until a particular position could fulfil the positivity of the dis-course of economic reform that the political space could be re-articulated.



After the Convertibility Law, the idea of stability started to play therole that democracy had played during Alfonsín’s presidency. Thus, forexample, when faced with the resistance of certain groups, mainlyunions, to measures that implied redundancies or lower wages, govern-ment officials would claim that the opposition were the representativesof a past to which nobody wanted to return. Jorge Triaca, for example,after a period as minister of labour, was designated director of a state-owned steel company in order to close it down. Confronted with theopposition of unions and workers defending their jobs, he claimed thatthey were ‘agitators who want to damage the Convertibility Plan’.48 AsAlfonsín had done during his government, Menem presented any sort ofpolitical opposition as an attempt to wipe out the public policy that had‘stopped the country from falling into the abyss towards which it washeading’.49

The idea of stability presented by the government was thus theelement that articulated, on the one hand, the discourse of economicreform, and, on the other, the policies carried out since 1989. Stabilitywas presented as a consequence of the Convertibility Plan – describedby Menem as the ‘most important social revolution in the history ofLatin America’.50 At the same time, the idea of stability contained all theelements present in the discourse of economic reform. From the pointof view of Menemism, the proposed transformation of Argentina’s economic structure implied ‘a scenario where private initiative was the driving force, at the same time that the state retired from the sceneeliminating all sorts of regulations’.51 The ‘idea of self-sufficiency andabsolute autarchy’ implied in the old development model were describedas ‘adventurism’ or as ‘suicidal’ adventurous tendencies.52 Against thesetendencies was the government’s project, which had provided ‘order andstability’ from the chaos of 1989.

Conclusions

I began by stressing the importance of considering the relative struc-turality of a given discursive context when examining the emergence of



a new discourse. If a crisis situation is the origin of new and unfulfilleddemands, the particular crisis will mark the contents and meanings ofthe new structurality. No discourse emerges in a political vacuum. Thecritical dislocation of the structures of meaning will provoke the emer-gence of a series of demands claiming to be the solution to the crisis.One of these demands will be able to present itself as the best readingof the situation (i.e. as hegemonic). And this success will cruciallydepend on the demand’s references to the dislocation and relative struc-turality of the context. It is in relation to these references that the powerof a demand to exclude other possible readings lies. In the case ofMenemism, this is clear in relation to the discursive articulations thatmarked the transition to democracy, as I hope to have shown in thischapter.

When the continuities of Menemist discourse with contemporary discourses about politics and the economy are appreciated, Menem’spresidency should not be regarded as a radical rupture with the way inwhich politics and the economy were understood in Argentina.Menemism repeated the arguments of two discursive articulations thatwere present in the Argentine political formation well beforeMenemism. Menem’s discourse of democracy, which had dominated thetransition from the military regime, did not represent a radical break withthe Alfonsinist discourse on democracy, which was partially shared byRenovación Peronista. Menem presented himself as part of the newdemocratic Argentina. He did so by ambiguously emptying certain ideological categories of the new discourse on democracy, while simul-taneously presenting his notion of democracy as compatible withtraditional Peronist discourse. In the case of the discourse of economicreform, Menemism occupied a discursive place that had already, since1987, been going through a process of dissemination.



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The Discursive Continuities of the Menemist Rupture

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