Former Argentine President Menem dies

– Former President Carlos Saul Menem (pictured), who led Argentina from 1989 to 1999, died on the 14th (local time). 90 years old.

According to local media such as Telam News, former President Menem died while being hospitalized for a urinary tract infection at a hospital in Buenos Aires that day. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez announced his death on Twitter, proclaiming a three-day period of national mourning.

Former President Menem is considered a political leader who brought both light and shadow to Argentina’s economy in the 1990s. A lawyer from a Syrian immigrant family, he joined the Peronist Party, entered politics early, and served as governor of La Rioja in his 40s. After being imprisoned as a political prisoner for five years after the military coup in 1976, after being released, he served as governor of La Rioja again, and in the 1989 presidential election, he ran as a candidate for the Peron Party and became president.

Peronism, which succeeded former President Juan Peron, is considered a synonym for left populism, but after taking office, former President Menem adopted a neoliberal policy far from Peronism. It attempted a change in Argentina’s dying economy through massive privatization of state-owned enterprises, abolition of price control policies and aggressive foreign capital attraction. In addition, by introducing a peg system that fixed the exchange rate of the peso against the dollar at one-to-one, inflation, which had reached 5,000% per year, stabilized to a single digit in 1993.

Re-election was successful thanks to economic stability, but in the second half of the rule, the side effects of the rapid introduction of neoliberalism began to appear. The gap between the rich and the poor widened, the unemployment rate soared, and foreign debt continued to grow. The fixed exchange rate system has not been able to respond effectively to changes in the global economy.

Eventually, Argentina faced a massive default (default) in 2001, and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) described that former President Menem had sown the seeds of the debt crisis. He ran for the presidential election in 2003, but failed the final and has been a senator since 2005.

[이재철 기자]
[ⓒ 매일경제 & mk.co.kr, 무단전재 및 재배포 금지]

–
–