The 64-year-old leader dashed off a terse letter to the president of the Argentine Senate late Thursday afternoon. Then he ascended to the roof of the ornate 19th-century presidential palace known as the Pink House and, accompanied by a lone military aide who held him by the shoulder, walked slowly towards an azure-and-white Argentine Air Force helicopter for the final flight back to his official residence in a suburb of the capital city.
Not since 1976 had a sitting Argentine president choppered out of the palace from its rooftop. And on that occasion, the chief of state was Isabel Martinez de Peron, the widow of Gen. Juan Domingo Peron, who had been freshly toppled by the military coup that would usher in the disappearances and atrocities of the Dirty War era.
The decline and fall of Fernando de la Rua came as swiftly as that of Isabel Peron, but on this occasion the nation’s armed forces played no role in the ouster. The catalyst instead was the smoldering rage of millions of Argentines who could no longer stomach a full-blown economic depression and the harsh austerity measures that de la Rua and his cabinet had prescribed for the country. That grass-roots rage had surfaced a week ago in isolated outbreaks of looting in a few major provincial cities. But in the two days leading up to de la Rua’s departure, the mounting fury exploded in a fireball of pillaging and riots that swept across the country and left at least 26 people dead.
Angry mobs poured into the Plaza de Mayo to demand his resignation and challenge the president to show his face from a balcony of the Pink House. By the time de la Rua surrendered to the inevitable and wrote out–by hand–his letter of resignation, Argentina had become an inferno of lawlessness where roving mobs of looters ransacked private homes, stripped bare supermarket shelves and engaged in running battles with outnumbered police. By midweek, his early departure from office–with nearly two years remaining in his tenure–had become a foregone conclusion. The final straw came when provincial governors belonging to the opposition Peronist party snubbed his invitation to discuss a proposed government of national unity on Thursday afternoon.
A gray, indecisive politician who was prone to bouts of depression during much of his 740-day presidency, de la Rua became the latest in a series of Latin American chiefs of state to be chased from office in the past two years. The unpopular economic policies of Ecuador’s Jamil Mahuad triggered a military coup in January 2000. Ten months later, a deepening political scandal forced Peru’s Alberto Fujimori to fax in his resignation from Tokyo barely a year into his third term as president. But unlike those two ousters, the downfall of de la Rua is likely to precipitate fundamental changes in economic policy that will extend far beyond Argentina’s borders.
His resignation brings back to power the opposition Peronist party in the person of Senate leader Ramon Puerta, who was sworn in as interim president Friday morning. That appointment is a temporary measure until the party chooses a replacement over the weekend. Throughout the de la Rua era, the Peronists had called for a suspension of payments on Argentina’s $132 billion foreign debt. Their sudden return to power guarantees an imminent default that will send shock waves rippling through Latin America and the international financial community. “This is an important country,” says Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin America and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. “If Argentina defaults, it will send Brazil into a huge crisis.”
But the ramifications do not stop there. De la Rua inherited an overvalued Argentine peso that was pegged to the dollar on a one-to-one parity basis and rendered the country’s exports too expensive to compete in international markets. With the peso already trading at a rate of $1.40 to the dollar on the black market, the Peronists are expected to devalue the national currency in the coming weeks and possibly convert dollar-denominated savings accounts and loans into pesos. That would decimate the life savings of millions of ordinary Argentines and threaten the viability of local businesses that have taken out loans from foreign creditors in dollars, but collect their revenues in pesos.
The fiasco of the de la Rua government may also sound the death knell for his centrist Radical Civic Union party. Under the shaky economic stewardship of Raul Alfonsin, the party had fallen from grace with voters after a hyperinflation crisis in 1989 sparked a wave of food riots and unrest and forced the president to step down six months ahead of time. But the Radicals ended a 10-year hiatus from power two years ago, when de la Rua led a center-left coalition to a landslide victory as Argentines registered their disgust over the unbridled corruption of de la Rua’s Peronist predecessor, Carlos Menem.
Argentina was already sliding into recession when de la Rua was sworn in two years ago this month. His stubborn refusal to devalue the peso against the dollar sharply limited the country’s ability to boost exports and pull itself out of the economic tailspin. Matters only worsened when a desperate de la Rua invited Menem’s former economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, to join the cabinet last March. With unprecedented powers to put Argentina back on the road to economic growth, Cavallo tried to reduce the government budget deficit by cutting public-sector spending and salaries. But his austerity measures only managed to breed more unemployment and lower living standards. The match that set the nation alight was furnished by Cavallo earlier this month, when he imposed draconian limits on the amount of cash Argentines could withdraw from their bank accounts. His goal: to halt the billions of dollars that jittery businesses and individuals were spiriting out of the country.
Hailed as the economic magician who cured Argentina’s four-digit inflation rates under Menem in the early 1990s, Cavallo also resigned as economy minister on Thursday, just a few hours ahead of his nominal boss. “This is the implosion of one of Argentina’s two historic political parties, and the Radical Party is dead,” predicted Pamela Starr, an Argentina expert and professor of international relations at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “You can’t drive the economy into the ground twice and recover from that.”
Like a Greek tragedy, history has a way of repeating itself in Argentina. Blessed with an abundance of natural resources and human talent, the country that once ranked as the richest nation in Latin America seems doomed to relive endless cycles of boom and bust. In the aftermath of Raul Alfonsin’s abrupt resignation in 1989, de la Rua–then a senator in his 50s–praised the president’s decision to leave office early in the face of what the legislator termed social “chaos.” Twelve years later Alfonsin, now an eminence grise in the ranks of de la Rua’s Radical Party, is adding his voice to the swelling chorus of opposition leaders baying for the president’s head.
There remains, however, one crucial difference between the country that Alfonsin left behind at the end of the 1980s and the Argentina of today. Back then, president-elect Carlos Menem was poised to take over the reins of power and deliver on his promises to jump-start the economy and tame its roaring hyperinflation crisis. Today there is no messiah on the horizon armed with a popular mandate. There is only a gaping political vacuum and vivid memories of the days of rage that sent another Argentine president fleeing the seat of power by helicopter.
