BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
As the Argentine national elections approach May 14, the government of president Carlos Menem is facing a serious banking crisis. Scores of financial institutions have closed and dozens are teetering on the verge of collapse. The Argentine central bank recently suspended five banks, allowing them 30 days to regain solvency or face bankruptcy. Argentine stocks have dropped almost 40 percent since the devaluation of the Mexican peso on Dec. 20, 1994.

Customers have withdrawn more than $7 billion from Argentine banks since December. Argentine bankers have nearly stopped making commercial and personal loans. "Companies are afraid of giving credit to their buyers because you just don't know who's going to be around a month from now," remarked Guillermo D'Andrea, a professor at the Institute of Higher Business Studies.

The curb in lending has left many large enterprises without the capital for production or expansion. Many businesses are delaying paychecks, slashing wages, and laying off workers. Small and medium-sized companies have told workers they cannot afford to pay them because times are so hard.

"My boss tells me he can't pay because he needs more time, but it's been four weeks already," Raúl Manuel García told a New York Times reporter. "I need money to pay my rent and buy food."

'A measure of panic'
"There is uncertainty, even a measure of panic, in this country," said Times reporter Calvin Sims, May 1. Economists and financial analysts say Argentina is approaching a recession this year with zero economic growth. More than 30,000 businesses have gone belly up in the first three months of 1995. Unemployment has reached a record 13 percent.

"What we are starting to see are the long term effects of the Mexico crisis in Argentina," said Juan Luis Bour, chief economist at the Latin American Research Foundation in Buenos Aires. "It's not over yet."

To stem the crisis, Buenos Aires raised taxes, cut government spending, and pressed bosses to slash workers' wages in order to woo international investors frightened by the Mexican peso crisis.

Signaling the regime's intent to continue its drive against working people, an article in the Wall Street Journal stated, "The push for austerity and efficiency will intensify" should Menem remain in office after the national elections. Economy minister Domingo Cavallo says he will press to weaken the country's labor laws. "We also must tackle the lack of flexibility in the labor markets," he said.

Dirty war resurfaces
Meanwhile, ghosts from the Argentine military's "dirty war" against the working class and student activists during the 1970s continue to haunt the regime.

On a television talk show April 25, army commander, Gen. Martin Balza, acknowledged that the military tortured and murdered many political opponents two decades ago. The army "employed illegitimate methods, including the suppression of life, to obtain information," he said.

The statement came on the heels of confessions by two former officers who said almost 2,000 people, primarily political prisoners, were thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean from military aircraft. The "death flights" and other methods of repression took the lives of more than 30,000 people, according to human rights campaigners, after a military junta seized power in a 1976 coup.

Menem has urged former military torturers and killers to confess privately to priests and not "rub salt in old wounds" by publicly admitting to the atrocities. New evidence of church collaboration with the military regime has come forward from the dirty war confessions. An Argentine Catholic bishop said April 29 that his church was a cowardly accomplice of the military during that time.

Adolfo Scilingo, an ex-navy captain, said chaplains were on hand to comfort officers involved in the barbarities and the church was consulted on how to "dispose of detainees." Rights groups assert that chaplains were made available to help extract confessions from prisoners in the torture chambers.

Menem granted amnesty in December 1990 to military officials for their role in the dirty war, and has also praised the military for its conduct in that episode and urged the country not to look back.

But feeling the heat of the revelations, Menem now contends that he will study the possibility of rescinding laws proposed by his predecessor, Raúl Alfonsín, that pardoned military personnel and civilians. Menem's running mate, Carlos Ruckauf, concerned that the atrocities could become a big electoral issue, deepening the political crisis facing the regime, complained that "the assassins are only ready to confess 20 or 30 days before the elections."  
 
 
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