When Air Force One landed
outside Buenos Aires on
Wednesday, Barack Obama became the sixth US president to visit Argentina – technically
speaking, that is, for reasons to be explained below. In the last year of his
presidency, Obama’s schedule-makers arranged a trip to follow his path-breaking
visit to Cuba this week, but that caused something of a kerfuffle because the
date of his visit to Buenos Aires – March 24 –
coincided with the 40th anniversary of the coup that toppled the
government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón in 1976 and started a reign of terror that
became known as the Guerra
Sucia (Dirty War) – for which many Argentines have blamed the United
States.
With that as
background, it could be helpful to provide a short chronology of those
presidential visits – the first of which was Theodore
Roosevelt in 1913 – or was he? By that time, Roosevelt was an ex-president whose term had expired in
1909, and he had lost as a third-party candidate in 1912. He did visit Buenos
Aires, but his heart was in Patagonia,
where he met the pioneer Argentine
conservationist Francisco P. Moreno in Bariloche (in the photo
above Moreno, dressed in white, stands to Roosevelt’s left).
In truth, then,
the first US president to visit Argentina officially was Dwight D. Eisenhower,
who spent four days in Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata and
Bariloche in February of 1960. Hosted by then President
Arturo Frondizi, he even addressed the Argentine Congress but, at the same
time, police tear-gassed demonstrators loyal to the exiled Juan Domingo Perón. In
Bariloche, though, Eisenhower fished and golfed while staying at the classic Hotel Llao Llao (pictured above).
It was another
30 years before President
George H.W. Bush’s visit coincided with a military uprising by so-called carapintadas, rogue junior officers
who had staged several rebellious incidents in previous years. Bush, to
his credit, did not cancel or postpone his trip at a time when many still
considered Argentine democracy a fragile flower. He did, however, play tennis with then President Carlos Menem (pictured above).
President
Bill Clinton’s October 1997 visit included a breakfast with Menem, where
(in retrospect) he overstated the success of Argentine economic reforms that
ended in the economic collapse
of 2001 and their reversal under the populism of Presidents Néstor Kirchner
and his successor/wife Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner. Clinton also met with Jewish leaders concerned about
Buenos Aires terrorist bombings in 1992
and 1994 – neither of
which has been solved – and participated in a televised town hall. Like
Eisenhower, he stayed at the Llao Llao, indulged himself in golf there, and also
went for an excursion on Lago Nahuel Huapi (pictured above) and spoke about global
warming.
All those visits
were congenial, but the 2005 visit of
George W. Bush – for the fourth Summit of the Americas in the seaside resort of
Mar del Plata (pictured above) – was a disaster. It may not have been so catastrophic
as his Iraq invasion but, as
the New York Times editorialized, "he and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like [President Hugo Chávez] of Venezuela to steal the show." There was no thought of a recreational breather - the widely despised Bush Jr. left with his tail between his legs.
Most recently,
last week, President Obama received a warm welcome from newly elected Mauricio Macri, who succeeded
Fernández de Kirchner (whose relations with the US were tense at best). Obama’s
arrival put the conservative Macri in the awkward position of having to
acknowledge “Dirty War” crimes of a period he’d probably rather ignore. One stop
was the riverside Parque de la
Memoria, dedicated to victims of the dictatorship, where the US president
tossed a wreath into the water. The wall depicted above registers names of the
victims, one of whom was my brother-in-law’s first wife.
Obama took some
flack for his arrival at this sensitive time – in fairness, presidential
itineraries are not easy to arrange – but he responded by announcing the release
of confidential documents about US encouragement of the 1976 coup. That was
not enough for large
crowds of the previous president’s supporters, who seemed to think he was a
coup-mongering second coming of George W. Bush.
Obama had made
some untimely public
criticisms of Fernández de Kirchner, but the visit still seems to mark the
end of her
administration’s international isolationism. Following the meetings with
Macri, the Obamas headed for Bariloche – now the traditional destination of US
presidents in the country – where they stayed at the Llao Llao, took a
boat trip on Nahuel Huapi, and Obama himself sipped a brew at the Cervecería Berlina (pictured above).
