President Cristina Kirchner's Story

by James Neilson

Cristina’s worldview may be nutty and outdated, but not innocuous

President Cristina Kirchner is evidently obsessed with appearances. She thinks that everything from how she looks to the way people interpret the country’s past and present is in the mind and can therefore be manipulated. But while it is easy enough for her to make the most of her own personal assets by dabbing on make-up and wearing expensive clothes plus even more expensive accessories, changing what she calls the national “narrative” is proving to be far harder. As she found out a couple of weeks ago, neither city-dwellers nor the men and women who live in farming areas find the story she is trying to peddle at all convincing.

In Cristina’s view, Argentina is a battle ground in which the goodies, that is herself, her husband, Montonero veterans and “social strugglers” like Luis D’Elía are at war with a coalition of baddies that include military men, most cops, industrialists who are not Néstor’s cronies, mainstream economists, the inhabitants of the Federal Capital’s plusher suburbs and, of course, farmers, all of whom are rich oligarchs determined to starve the urban poor. That was more or less what she said in those strident speeches she made when the farm protests were at their height and supermarket shelves were emptying fast.

Unfortunately for Cristina, few people saw much connexion between what she was going on about and the world they actually live in. What one might call the President’s ideology, a hodgepodge of notions and prejudices, some vaguely Marxist and others of Fascist origin, that she acquired as a student back in the 1970s when in certain circles “revisionism” was all the rage, has always been a minority taste. Since she was young that minority has shrunk considerably and the fiery tomes that presumably made her dream of changing just about everything gather dust in run-down bookshops.

Undaunted by the lack of enthusiasm for her views, Cristina, egged on by her husband, still seems determined to ram them down the public’s collective throat. That is why the government has embarked on a jihad against the country’s biggest media empire whose flagship is Clarín. Cristina took advantage of a mass rally in Plaza de Mayo to rail against Clarín’s highly respected artist-cum-caricaturist Hermenegildo Sábat whom she accused of sending her a “quasi Mafia” message by suggesting she would be well advised to watch her words, while Néstor jumped around before a crowd of Peronists holding a poster that made out that the daily was in cahoots with the hated soybean producers, miscreants that both he and his wife apparently think are ruining the country.

Like other presidents before her, Cristina imagines that if she can get Clarín and its TV stations to back her, the rest of the country will immediately fall into line. For journalists, such respect for the power of the press is flattering, but it is unrealistic. Newspapers and television programmes can influence people up to a point, but if they are thought to be merely parroting government propaganda nobody will take them seriously. If the media seem to be ganging up against a government or a president, they do so in part because it is making far too many mistakes and in part because most owners and journalists feel that public opinion is switching into opposition mode and it would suit them to keep up with the times. There is nothing conspiratorial about this. It is simply the way the press works in all democratic countries.

But Mr and Mrs Kirchner are not just thinking about teaching Clarín a lesson by curtailing the group’s commercial activities with laws designed to limit the number of outlets any particular company can possess. They also want to make the rest of the press see things their way. To help them do this, they have called on like-minded sociology professors and pro-government intellectuals to man a watchdog body willing to pounce on anything that could conceivably be described as racist or indicating class prejudice. Political correctness as the Kirchners define it being what it is, the “anti-discrimination” zealots will be certain to overlook the contributions of the piquetero leader D’Elia, who is about the only person who these days makes a point of interpreting events in decidedly racist and class-conscious terms by ranting against “the whites of the Barrio Norte” and treating himself as a kind of honorary black.

Cristina’s worldview may be as nutty and outdated today as it was when she adopted it almost forty years ago, but that does not mean it is innocuous. Having persuaded herself that she and her husband are up against a horde of ruthless coupmongers who would like nothing better than a re-run of the dirty war of the 1970s, she may feel herself obliged to take measures which are incompatible with democracy in order to save the country from the hideous dangers she tells herself are threatening it. Raúl Alfonsín, a president whose credentials as a defender of human rights were far better than any Mr and Mrs Kirchner managed to collect en route to their current eminence, had several people put under arrest for a while for supposedly plotting against the fledgling democratic order he headed, so it is entirely possible that the ruling couple, alarmed as they must be by the hammering Cristina’s image took as a result of those cranky speeches she delivered when angry farmers were blocking key highways, will feel sorely tempted to do the same.

Source: Buenos Aires Herald

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