Kirchner and history

HIGHLAND PARK, N. Jersey
Borges used to say that the writers must be constructed like personages and who that image, sometimes, is as much or more important than his books. He thus expressed it in the class on Coleridge whom he by the end of gave in the University of Buenos Aires 1966: "One of the most important works of a writer - perhaps most important of all it is the image that leaves of itself the memory of the men, beyond the pages written by him".

To register in history, to imagine for himself a monument species that is constructed with the great acts of the life, is a project that, nevertheless, seduces less the writers than to the politicians and generals. They executed with masters Charles de Gaulle, both Roosevelt, Churchill, Mao and until some Argentine presidents.

In August of 1987, Raul Alfonsi'n, who then governed the country, touched the subject of I avoid during a conversation in Olive trees, when I told him that Juan Perón, when talking about to the origins of his movement, used to be proud of the contribution of the radical young people who had added themselves to him. The data seemed to incomodar to Alfonsi'n and it took one to him of more intense the spontaneous confessions of that encounter that, by the others, lacked intensity: "To me Perón is not going to me to gain history".

To surpass to Perón, to create a movement that survived it, seemed the greater dream of the president of those years. More far the successor arrived, Carlos Menem, who during one decade whole elaborated a model from country to image and similarity of his style of life, took it ahead with tenacity, and until he gained the elections of 1995 noticing that, outside that one, there was no another option for the future. "I or the chaos" she was one of the most effective slogans of its campaign.

The politicians rare time see themselves themselves like pieces of chess in the enormous game of history. Few notice that everything what they do and they say has an importance that exceeds the one its own people.

He is peculiar that that characteristic, the conscience of the being in history, has been so alive in some of the most abominable tyrants of century twenty, like the Hitlers, Stalin and Mussolini, and however is almost invisible in discreet men who, nevertheless, truely modified the course of their nations, like the Spanish Adolph Suárez, the Chilean Patricio Aylwin and the Australian Robert Menzies, no of which constructed a personage.

Perón was extremely careful in the election of its movements and their words, and in any encounter with him it was easy to notice that it was carving his own statue. History began to him to go in the end of the hands, when it allowed that the threads of their power were moved by the police end that celebrated to him of valet.

Menem, that never trusted the power at the hands of anybody, history began to leave it two years before its mandate finished, without he himself realized. The other way around of Perón, that never let weave the network of its historical image until it obstructed the oldness, Menem supposed that, later to play soccer with the national selection, to run in the Ferrari to two hundred kilometers by route 2 and to elbow themselves with Madonna in Olive trees, any thing that did it would widen his monument. Their omnipotentes speeches convinced many Argentineans that there were no more options than the chaos or he, until the reality began to contradict it and history devoured it for always.

Perhaps the image of their last pathetic night in the hotel President, 27 of April, surrounded by ghosts, is also the image of their posterity.

To his turn, Adolph Rodriguez Saá reached to be constructed a brief, but uproarious personage, whose outlines include default, the image of the untiring president who worked the twenty-four hours without he was understood why, and the one of the captain to the rudder of a boat without crew, in the solitude of Chapadmalal.

In the personage of Rodriguez Saá there was a will of historical construction, but there was no history. In that Néstor Kirchner began to design the 25 of May, the vindication of history seemed to be more decisive than then ignoto personage.

"I comprise of a decimated generation", said in the last part of its inaugural speech. "I added myself to the political fights believing in values and convictions that I do not think to leave in the front door of the Pink House (…) I dreamed all my life that this one, our country, could be changed for good. We arrived without resentments, but with memory. Memory not only of the errors and horrors of the other. But that also is memory on our own mistakes."

There is no doubt on which it was the past to which the president did not allude either nor on the ideals that he was invoking - to create "a country of equal", as he said in a later paragraph -; also it is clear that the errors about which he thought they could not be other that the useless deaths and the militarization of the revolt. History is not constructed through personages, seemed to indicate Kirchner, but of conducts.

Everything what did since then tends to indicate that, for him, more important that the men who govern are the style whereupon does it.

With a speed that no of its predecessors had, it began to fight in so many fronts that nobody knows how until now it left almost windy in all. "Those fronts already were open when I arrived - it said -. What I do is to try to close them." Some distan of to be easy, as the demolition of the automatic majority in the Supreme Court of Justice or the corruption installed until in the bones of the social work of the pensioners and of some bottoms that are given to the provinces.

Also Fernando Henrique Cardoso arrived at the presidency of Brazil with the intention to ahead take the dishonesty buds that showed in almost all the levels of the public administration, and when it left the government him to Lula, later, it had eight years not obtained great thing. The knot of accomplices was so thick that it was impossible to disarticulate it to him. The advantage of Kirchner on its Brazilian pairs is that it arrived at the power with the free hands, without commitments with political lobbies, corporations or allies. Its only greater debt is with Eduardo Duhalde, but there are no indications that Duhalde is receiving it. It will not be able either to do it to expenses of some action of Kirchner that has been applauded by the community.

A considerable step is also is the one that already has occurred in the foreign policy, where Argentina for the first time seems to think more about its national interests that upon which it agrees to them to his creditors. And, against which anyone would be assumption, the most frightful creditors are reacting not with hostility but with respect.

During several decades, Argentina was to the delay of a nation project that gave back the faith to him in the future and opened again the doors of the work, the health and the education. He is premature to affirm that the government of Kirchner can incarnate that project, that so many other times was defrauded soon after starting.

What nevertheless it can glimpse or it is that Kirchner has deposited its conscience of history not in its person nor so at least in which says or does, but in the idea, almost trivial, from which it is arrived at the government of a country does not stop to be brilliant but to serve and to administer.

Whenever their ministers do not take care of the telephone to the lobbistas or demands the industralists to them who, before renewing its contracts, they fulfill which did not do, is indicating an understanding of the historical thing which she is perhaps more modest, but more adapted to the yacencia state in which still it is Argentina.