Freedom in the World 2001 - Argentina

2001 Scores

Status: Free
Freedom Rating: 1.5
Civil Liberties: 2
Political Rights: 1

Ratings Change

Argentina's political rights rating changed from 2 to 1 due to efforts to curb opportunities for congressional and executive branch corruption, particularly by changing laws and regulations governing the conduct of elections and in promoting ethical behavior of elected representatives. Its civil liberties rating changed from 3 to 2 due to improvements in the treatment of the media, in attention to issues of public corruption, and, to a lesser extent, in the operation of the judiciary.

Overview

In office for its first year, the multiparty government of President Fernando de la Rua found itself confronted by a minefield of public corruption and economic sluggishness bequeathed by his predecessor, Carlos S. Menem. Faced with a senate and a judiciary packed with Menem supporters, De la Rua lost a crucial ally – his vice president – who resigned in protest of the official handling of a congressional bribery scandal that appeared similar to tactics used during the Menem government. The scandal threatened to wreck De la Rua's center-left coalition and squander the clean-government political capital it had won while in the opposition. By year's end, the government's tentative efforts to confront spiraling violent crime and the growing impoverishment of parts of the middle class led to growing disaffection with the government as well. The fight against crime has been complicated by Menem's legacy of security forces and intelligence agencies seasoned with former death squad activists and former members of a lethal military regime, whose presence has exacerbated a troublesome and long-standing problem of excessive violence and corruption on the part of the police.

The Argentine Republic was established after independence from Spain in 1816. Democratic rule was often interrupted by military coups. The end of Juan Peron's authoritarian rule in 1955 led to a series of right-wing military dictatorships as well as left-wing and nationalist violence. Argentina returned to elected civilian rule in 1983, after seven years of repression of suspected leftist guerrillas and other dissidents.

As amended in 1994, the 1853 constitution provides for a president elected for four years with the option of reelection to one term. Presidential candidates must win 45 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. The legislature consists of a 257-member chamber of deputies elected for six years, with half the seats renewable every three years, and a 72-member senate nominated by elected provincial legislatures for nine-year terms, with one-third of the seats renewable every three years. Two senators are directly elected in the newly autonomous Buenos Aires federal district.

As provincial governor, Menem, running an orthodox Peronist platform of nationalism and state intervention in the economy, won a six-year presidential term in 1989, amidst hyperinflation and food riots. Once inaugurated, Menem discarded statist Peronist traditions by implementing, mostly by decree, an economic liberalization program.

Rampant corruption and unemployment headed voters' concerns, when in October 1997, they handed Menem's Peronists their first nationwide defeat. The Alliance, composed of the centrist Radical Party and the center-left Front for a Country in Solidarity beat Menem's party, 46 percent to 36 percent. On November 29, 1998, Buenos Aires mayor and Radical Party leader Fernando de la Rua won a contested primary to become the Alliance candidate in the 1999 presidential elections. In anticipation of his party's eventual defeat, Menem orchestrated the packing of the Argentine senate with two members of his ruling party in an attempt to stave off corruption inquiries until at least 2001.

At the end of 1999, Transparency International ranked Argentina 72 out of 99 nations rated for public corruption. Menem's feud with the Peronist Party presidential nominee, Buenos Aires governor Eduardo Duhalde, sealed the latter's fate as Duhalde was beaten by De la Rua 48.5 percent to 38 percent in national elections held in October 24, 1999. The Peronists retained control of the senate, with 35 of the 67 seats, and they hold the governorships in 18 of 23 provinces. Upon taking office, De la Rua sought to put the government's accounts in order, cut spending, raise taxes, and push forward with unpopular labor reforms. He also made a series of appointments and issued sweeping rules and regulations designed to rein-in public corruption. A reform-minded serving police officer was appointed head of the corruption-riddled Federal Police, and there also appeared to be a greater willingness by some judges to investigate cases of official corruption, including vote-buying scandals in both houses of congress. In April, De la Rua dismissed a nine-member military tribunal after they claimed military rather than civilian courts had jurisdiction over cases in which military personnel had been accused of kidnapping, and in some cases killing, hundreds of babies born to detained women during the so-called dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s.

De la Rua's government also moved to confront a problem of mostly narcotics-related money laundering that had ballooned under Menem. In May, the Alliance received a boost when its candidate, Anibal Ibarra, won the Buenos Aires mayoralty vacated by De la Rua when he assumed the presidency in December. In October 2000 De la Rua twiced reshuffle his cabinet, the second time after Vice President Carlos Alvarez's stunning decision to resign. Alvarez stepped down after the president's determination appeared to waiver on uncovering the truth about the reported buying of congressional votes in order to pass labor legislation. Possible government involvement, including by members of De la Rua's inner circle, was suspected in the vote buying. In December, a judge who himself was under investigation for "illegal enrichment," dropped the charges against the 11 senators named in the scandal, saying he lacked sufficient evidence to proceed.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Citizens can change their government through elections. Constitutional guarantees regarding freedom of religion and the right to organize political parties, civic organizations, and labor unions are generally respected. The 1999 elections were generally free and fair, with serious complaints of voter fraud in one province. More worrisome was the trend towards campaigning through the mass media, a costly process financed by money from largely undisclosed sources. Scandals uncovered in 2000 lent credence to reports throughout the Menem administration of congressional vote buying. Several senators resigned their seats in order to face possible criminal charges after an investigation was launched by a judge.

The situation of human rights groups and journalists, the latter of which had been subject to more than 1,000 beatings, kidnappings, and death threats during Menem's rule, improved notably under De la Rua. In 2000, several people, including Buenos Aires police officers, were sentenced in connection with their role in the murder three years earlier of a photojournalist, reportedly at the instigation of a key Menem associate and business leader. In 2000, journalist Eduardo Kimel was sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence, and fined $20,000, for publishing, in a book about the 1976 massacre of five religious workers during the military regime, that the judge in the case did not investigate the still-unsolved crime properly.

Labor is dominated by Peronist unions. Union influence, however, has diminished because of corruption scandals, internal divisions, and restrictions on public sector strikes decreed by Menem to pave the way for his privatization program. In 1998, a deadlocked congress approved a government-sponsored labor flexibility initiative after a congressional deputy who was allegedly filmed by state intelligence agents in a gay bordello operated by the agents changed positions on the measure and voted for it.

Menem's authoritarian ways and manipulation of the judiciary resulted in the undermining of the country's separation of powers and the rule of law. In 1990, Menem pushed a bill through the Peronist-controlled senate that allowed him to stack the supreme court with an additional four members and to fill the judiciary with politically loyal judges. He used the supreme court to uphold decrees removing the comptroller general and other officials mandated to probe government wrongdoing. Overall, the judicial system is politicized, inefficient, and riddled with the corruption endemic to all branches of government. The politization of the judiciary and the tenure of scores of incompetent and – it is widely believed – corrupt judges remain grave problems.

Public safety is a primary concern for Argentines, who just a generation ago enjoyed a country with one of the world's lowest rates of violent common crime. Within a decade, crime in Argentina has doubled and, in Buenos Aires, tripled, a reflection of high unemployment levels and a widening gap between rich and poor. Criminal court judges are frequent targets of anonymous threats. Police misconduct, during the Menem administration often seemingly promoted by senior government officials – including the president himself – resulted in a number of allegedly extrajudicial executions by law enforcement officers. The Buenos Aires provincial police, in particular, have been heavily involved in drug trafficking, extortion, vice, and, at least until 2000, the collecting of political funds for the ruling Peronist Party. Arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment by police are rarely punished in civil courts owing to intimidation of witnesses and judges, particularly in Buenos Aires province. There the newly elected governor, Carlos Ruckauf, has pursued ironhanded anticrime policies, exhorting a police force already heavily criticized for excessive force to shoot at criminals' arms and legs without prior warning, "pumping them full of bullets." Ruckauf named to top provincial justice posts a former military coup leader and a former policeman accused of systematic torture in detention camps during a previous armed forces dictatorship. In August 2000, the provincial supreme court declared its "deep preoccupation" with the abuse, including torture, meted out by the police to adolescents, saying that the "recurring problem" had been "consistently" brought to Ruckauf's attention. The Center for Legal and Social Studies noted in early 2000 that in the previous two years the number of civilians killed by the police had risen in the greater Buenos Aires area by 78 percent, from 113 to 202. In October 2000 the reformist stewardship of Federal Police chief Ruben Jorge Santos was tarnished somewhat when 11 officers, including two senior officials, were charged in connection with a prison escape the month before in which two men held for the 1999 assassination of the Paraguayan vice president escaped.

Prison conditions are generally substandard. In 2000, it was revealed that prisoners in a federal jail ran a workshop to strip stolen cars and paid wardens who smuggled drugs into the prison for them. Witnesses at a trial told how mutineers in a recent prison riot killed seven fellow inmates, cooked their bodies, and fed them to their hostages.

The investigation of a 1994 car bombing of a Jewish organization, in which more than 80 people died, has languished because of sloppy police work at the crime scene and the alleged complicity by members of the security forces with the terrorists. Six policemen believed to have served as accomplices in the crime are scheduled for trial in 2001. The Roman Catholic majority enjoys freedom of religious expression. The 250,000-strong Jewish community is a frequent target of anti-Semitic vandalism. Neo-Nazi organizations and other anti-Semitic groups, frequently tied to remnants of the old-line security services, some of whom retain their posts, remain active.

A study released by the United Nations Children's Fund in 2000 showed that child prostitution was a serious problem, exacerbated by a growing number of hungry children.