He has been a fearsome gorilla since his high school years, as one of his classmates said once. He's the son of a low middle class Italian immigrant in the "pampa gringa" (the area settled by Italians by 1900) region of Cordoba. There, by the early 20th. Century, the Argentine born peones had to learn Piamontese in order to be able to communicate with the Italian chacareros (something like a farmer) that they worked for. In this area, centered around the city of San Francisco, Cordoba, there is a word to name people of Argentine Creole stock: "fuin", they are called (pron. fween). This is a Piamontese word, and it means something like "rat".

Cavallo was true to the worst traditions of the area (for example, the chacareros of Eastern and Southern Cordoba were mild Fascists during the 30s, out of heimweh for Italy). Racist (though, like every true Argentine racist, he will never acknowledge to be racist), antiPeronist, staunch defender of the myth of the self-made-man. His father had a small craftman's kind of workshop where he made brooms, and one of his father's main customers was Fulvio Paqani, a local bourgeois who during the early 50s had founded a company of low quality delicacies, Arcor, that would eventually become a very large enterprise.

Pagani kept an eye on the smart, reactionary young boy who was one of the few who would defend the exploiters in the burning atmosphere of Cordoba of the 60s. He helped him with his studies, and created a Foundation, the Fundacion Mediterranea, which became a think tank for reactionary economists under the leadership of Cavallo. When the military took power in 1966, Cavallo obtained a post in the Municipality of Cordoba (by those times, the city was one of the most dynamic ones of Argentina, and had long ago surpassed the half million people mark). There he made his first attempts as a reactionary economist. It should be noted that the 1966 government was the government that presided the change from Britain to USA as the local hegemon, and that the economists like Cavallo were the main task force in the landing. After this experience, expelled by the country together with the regime he had served, he attempted to do graduate work in Harvard. But poor chap, Argentines were suspect of excessive leftism by those times, and he had to get the support of true heavyweights to get admitted. He then knew what do you feel when you are ashamed of the country you were born.

Once he left Harvard, the climate in Argentina had changed again, for good (as seen from Cavallo's point of view). He entered the Central Bank of Martinez de Hoz and Videla, and was one of the main responsibles of our foreign debt, having taken the decision to statize the private debts (maybe people in the First World need some explanation: you got some money lent by a foreign bank, OK? Then you resend that money outside the country, and remain in debated with the bank. Then, there comes Cavallo, who decides that it is not you who is in debt any more, but the Argentine Republic!).

During the South Atlantic battles, Cavallo was carefully in the shadows, though publishing books like _Volver a crecer_ (Growing again), where he stated his views: in order to grow again, Argentina had to return to the policies it had followed up to 1930. After that, he was part of the conspiration of the Establishment against the weak and petty bourgeois government of Alfonsin. His advice to American investors as well as his political practice in Argentina helped to bring about the two hyperinflations of 1989 and 1990, at the end of which he landed in our Ministerio de Economia.

In words of one of his head collaborators, they were coming to the Ministerio in order to command a "crash landing" for a country that was flying without destiny. And they made us crash, indeed!

Before he got to the Ministerio, it was believed that he was for some kind of "Korean", strongly industrial-export model. In fact, he turned out to be the destroyer of our local industry, which concentrated and de-integrated at the same time. The keystone of his building, the same keystone he is trying to offer the Russians, is the currency board schema. The kernel of the schema is simple: you cannot have more money in the local currency than the reserves of dollars in the Central Bank allow. Thus, you tie your exchange rate to the dollar, and resign monetary sovereignty.

This is like Procust's bed, of course, and Argentina has been ravaged through this legislation.

Cavallo is, in fact, a representative of the American Corporate interests that Camdessus and the IMF have agreed to send to Russia, since he is "famous" because he stopped Argentine inflations. The price of that feat is not told to the Russians: if they feel wrong now, they will feel in hell next year, or the year after...

I am forwarding this to you, personally, as well as to the lists, to make sure it reaches you ASAP. It is 12:30 AM in Buenos Aires now, so if you read your mail early in the morning, then you can resend it to the Russians by Saturday noon, Moscow time (or something like that). I am sending it to L-I and Marxism also, because I think it may be of interest to people on those lists too.

Your idea of translating my sketchy piece of biography is useful. But there is something I want to put clear, since it may be misunderstood in Russia:

I do not say that Cavallo himself was a fascist in the strict political sense. When I mentioned fascism in the "pampa gringa" I wanted to stress the historical origin of the white, European and antiPeronist middle class that gave birth to him. They were fascists during the 30s because they felt nostalgia for the "mother Italy" (a country that had, in fact, vomited them away due to the painful conditions of urban middle classes in little North Italian towns). Funnily enough, this "fascism" led them to support a local politician of Cordoba, Dr. Amadeo Sabattini, who confronted, though in a limited way, the abjectly pro-British Federal Government of the Conservative party. Sabattini profited this longing for Italy of the chacareros, who voted him against the "ally of the enemy of Italy". Once the Duce was killed, and with Italy alligned with the Western powers, the recalcitrant ones became pro-American. The recalcitrant, I say, because those who had supported Sabattini because of the patriotic calling of his speech entered Peronism while, at the same time, they formed much of the nucleus of the new working class, as highly trained artisans and technical cadres.

Cavallo is Fascist in the sense I said Yeltsin is Fascist. And, of course, in his absolute support of the military governments of 1976 and onwards.

But he would protest against anyone calling him "Fascist", because he -as all the gang of criminals bred by the "Revolucion Libertadora" of 1955- considers himself a democrat (as opposed to "fascist/authoritarian"). In his mind, Peron was a Fascist, Videla a democrat. The test lies in whether you are against imperialism (fascist or communist) or for it (democrat).

Cavallo is a right-wing, rancorous, sepoy. This would be a proper technical definition.

As Lissagaray said, "those who tell lies to the workers are the worst criminals", and of course none of us wants to mislead the workers in Russia. BTW, since much of what has been written on my mail comes from the core of Cavallo's entourage (I knew the schoolmate personally, and the metaphor of the "crash landing" was made by one of the main economists in his team to another economist, who -alas- was married to a talkative woman who works with me), he may be puzzled by these little pieces of personal info, and he may also deride them as ungrounded. But I think it's wonderful to have the leaders of the KPRF informed. I can try to gather more meaty materials, but I need time.

On a separate mail I send something else.

Lists, Mark:

_Clarin_ of Buenos Aires informs that, according to the New York Times, there were only three possible outcomes for the Russian situation. [My translation]

"a) To establish the control of currency exchange, and to reverse all the reforms, including renationalization of what has been turned private.

b) Setup of a mighty plan of international help, but conditioned to drastic cuts in fiscal deficits.

c) Argentine-style currency board. Although this has until recently been accepted as valid for small economies, this kind of exit is increasingly winning adepts, among them Michel Camdessus, the head of the IMF"

As seen from Argentina, this is crystal-clear. Let us talk of Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C.

Plan A implies a long term defeat of Western powers by victorious Russian forces (see that I am not allowing my heart to force me to write "Russian workers", I am trying to keep very sober).

Plan B implies that the Russian workers and their objective allies will not be able to defeat the Western powers, but they will not be defeated either. To get out of the stalemate, some kind of Marshall plan, of unheard-of dimensions, should be generated.

Plan C simply means that once the Russians are defeated, or their nerves weakened to the last, or a military dictatorship in the Videla-Pinochet style is implanted, or any combination (and improvement) of the three takes place, then Russia will be ready to be covered with the steel chains of the currency board schema. If the country is thirsty for foreign currency, and you tie the amount of roubles within the country to the foreign currency you can have in the Central Bank (this is _exactly_ what the Argentine currency board is), then you can starve everyone almost to death legally, and at the same time kill the inflation. This doctor is not intending to heal the ill person, Cavallo is intending to kill.

There is an anecdote, not of Cavallo, but of an economist of the World Bank (or the IMF) whose name I do not know -and does not matter, anyway- that casts a strong sidelight on this.

Julio Fernandez Baraibar, a film script-writer and independent producer, a comrade and friend of mine, went to a Film Festival in Fortaleza, Brazil, during the great Brazilian inflation. He is the source of this anecdote.

With him travelled other Argentines of the film industry, particularly Fernando Solanas. With Solanas was his lawyer, Julio Raffo. Both are Left wing Peronistas, anti-imperialists and eternally leaning towards Socialism (though never falling into it!).

Julio Raffo, by chance, met in Fortaleza an old friend of his, who had obtained a degree in Economics and was then working for the IMF (or the World Bank). There was the usual emotion of the encounter, etc. After that, Raffo began to talk on more serious things. The dialogue, such as Julio Fernandez has told it to me, ran more or less like this:

[Raffo] And how do you see the Brazilian situation?

[IMF economist] Ah, fine!

[Raffo] No, I am serious. How can you describe this inflationary scenario as "fine"?

[IMF economist] I am serious, too. Once people have suffered a hyperinflation, they will stand anything!

This is the wisdom behind Cavallo's trip to Moscow, under the blessings of Camdessus.

I think that Louis Pr, right as he sounds in general, has missed something important: every major uprising in a heavyweight country implies immediate response from the Third World. The Russian Revolution was immediately followed by a wave of inchoate though interesting revolts. Most had a petty bourgeois or peasant character, or of isolated proletariats like that of Buenos Aires during what was finally known as the _Semana Tragica_, and so on; I admit, however, that the Buenos Aires working class of the late 1910s was very bound, ideologically and somehow also materially, with Europe and European politics rather than with local politics. But those were the times.

The weakening of the grip of imperialist countries on the colonial world during the WWII strengthened and encouraged a very large wave of new struggles (in Asia, BTW, the image of a yellow-skinned army defeating white British and French stalwarts was no little encouragement for the oppressed).

This was the age of Nasser, Sukarno, Peron, Gandhi (who was a master of politics, and chose to fight through "peaceful resistence" because the British Raj had left the Indians without even the strength to engage in another kind of struggle, IMO), the now overtly nationalist Vargas, Peron, Gaitan, the Ba'ath, the Phillipino guerrillas, Villarroel in Bolivia, and so on. And, of course, last but by no means least, of Mao and Ho. All of these were anticolonial fighters (and I am forgetting many, of course) who thrived in the relative weakness of the colonial powers after the crisis and counted with the objective backing of the USSR.

I do not mean that the USSR gave so much effective support to Third World revolutions, an issue that would deserve deep debate. Since I am no chicken, but please let us not begin a flame -not even a thread yet- on this, I will state this bluntly: pacific coexistence meant, among others, that the USSR would _not_ help revolutions and would try to engulf within its own "area of influence" those that would, in spite of everything, eventually triumph. There are many examples of national liberation movements, even socialist movements, that the USSR tried to dissuade or simply let down, and even betrayed, due to "greater politics".

But the very _existence_ of the Soviet Union was an objective counterweight, and with this you had more chances to struggle and win.

Now, if Zyuganov attempts to reassert the place of the SU under the Sun, it will be an inevitable consequence that the Third World will enter in turmoil sooner than anyone imagines. The ingredients are all ready, including some of a subjective character. I will -as boringly always do- give an example of Argentina, nay, two examples.

The first one is the report on a recent strike of the railwaymen. The second is a conversation I had with a taxi driver.

Thursday last, the suburban line of the former Mitre railroad became chaotic. Some train conductors had been fired by the American-owned railroad, and the conductors decided to demonstrate. They simply organized a sit-in on the tracks, at San Isidro station (the detail is meaningful). The trains were stopped, and a judge in San Isidro yielded to the immediate claims from the company, and ordered the Federal Police to disband the conductors (in this, please recall the article by Pozzi et al. on the tendency to resort to police or military police to confront with demonstrators). The policemen began to charge, along the tracks, against the conductors. But all the public there, the passengers in the first place, began to boo them and the conductors discovered that they were supported by the customers of the railroad. The meaningful detail is that San Isidro station serves an area of well-to-do bourgeoisie or higher petty bourgeoisie, one fraction of the Argentine's privileged 3 million people (10% of total pop.) who have benefitted with the model! The conductors stood firm, and they forced the arch-corrupt Jose Pedraza, the national leader of the railway union, to head the demonstration! So, the idiotic and repugnant decission of the San Isidro judge had to be annulled (to give formal coverage to what had been annulled in the facts), and the company had to conciliate, hire the conductors again, and bow to the hate of both conductors and passengers.

This would not have happened a few months ago. The passengers would have certainly put the blame on the conductors, and would have applauded the decision of the judge as well as police repression. The fact is that the crisis is beginning to haunt the lower ranks of the privileged: their young children, professionals with titles of private universities that cost thousands of dollars, cannot find jobs, and business is getting tougher by the hours!

On Friday, I was late to get to the office, so I took a cab. It should be noted here that taxi drivers in Buenos Aires are mostly people who have lost their lifelong jobs, and who are now eking out a living by hiring themselves as taxi drivers. You can easily find engineers or architects driving a taxi (well, not so easy now: this was more usual years ago, and in the meantime all these professionals have been leaving the country), or -as the case was- a high rank employee of a factory that went bankrupt and paid no indemnizations to the people they laid off (the bankruptcy law that Cavallo had passed allows this). So, the guy was driving a taxi for a filthy living. We began to talk while he drove me to my job.

"Did you see what happened with the train yesterday?", he said, watching me on the car's looking glass. "Yes", I retorted, expecting some hollow comment on the consequences this had had on the city's traffic. "Well, it's like in Russia", he said. "People don't stand this any more. This is too much".

"It's like in Russia". The most timid of the movements, made by a SOB as Chernomyrdin, has immediately been captured by a half-unemployed, middle class taxi driver in Buenos Aires, as a sign of the new times.

Imagine another kind of gesture, by Zyuganov or whoever. I believe that if he adopts a bold path, he will find out that the whole world will be set in turmoil, and that (oh, never forget dialectics!) this that today _is_ a problem may suddenly become a blessing. IMO, there are thousands of millions in the world waiting for the Signs of the Times.

The question is not whether Zyuganov can lead such a struggle. The question is what scenario will imperialism have to confront if Zyuganov and his people timidly begin to restore some of the power of Russia. Zyuganov himself may very probably be surprised by this. He (or whoever follows if he does not) will _have_ to head this movement, foster it and help it to gain momentum. Even if only to finally sell us out!

Because some years of exposition to international politics, and to the Soviet Union world policies, have made me very careful:

He can sell us out, of course, but unless he does first blow the flames high in order to scare the West the sell out would be of no avail. So that perhaps we shall also keep an eye on what will these Russian leaders do if they get to power and we begin to show that we are fed up, on massive terms. Who knows, the old wheels of the machine of history are already stopped in their backward movement, and they are going to turn clockwise again.

Sorry, friends, I can't stop finding parallelisms between Russia and Argentina.

Eduardo Luis Duhalde is the current Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires (Argentina is a federal state, and our Provinces are more or less like American or Mexican states). He became Vice-President with Carlos Menem in 1989, and then was forced by Menem to resign as the 1994 Presidentials approached. He ran the Buenos Aires formula (the "minor prize" in the race) and won.

Now, there are many geographical entities called "Buenos Aires" in Argentina. First, you have the Province of Buenos Aires, then you have the large Buenos Aires agglomeration. This includes the City of Buenos Aires and what is known as the Gran Buenos Aires. The City is the Federal District of Argentina and has some 3 million inhabitants. The Gran Buenos Aires, the outskirts of the city, politically belong to the Province of Buenos Aires.

The Federal District is sternly anti-Menemist, and is the greatest asset of the Alianza. It is a middle-class area, traditionally anti-Peronist and thus anti-Menemist (one is tempted to say "for the wrong reasons", but this would be to oversimplify). The Gran Buenos Aires, conversely, is overwhelmingly made up of working class and marginalized people. The destruction and disintegration of the Argentine industrial sector after 1976 took one of its largest tolls here.

The rest of the Province is (save for some large cities, some equally affected by the neoliberal policies, some less) a vast expanse of agrarian petty bourgeoisie (chacareros) with a longing for the gone-for-ever Argentina of the first quarter of the 20th. century. They are, consequently, mostly voters of the Radical party (now, in the Alianza).

The distribution of population is, more or less:

That makes 17 million of Argentines, in a country that totals some 36. Moreover, the province and the city are ageing populations, so that their electoral weight is somehow larger than that of other districts. The City + Province vs. Gran Buenos Aires balance is the keystone of Argentine presidential elections.

The agrarian side of the Province takes care of itself, or almost. And, since no Peronista will imagine him winning over a massive wave of votes from the chacareros (in this, they reproduce the blindness of Peron as regards the petty bourgeoisie and its political needs), the great bet is to drown the anti-Peronist voters with Peronist voters from the Gran Buenos Aires.

But, how can you get the Peronist workers vote for you massively when your policies are the opposite of the policies that made Argentine workers fully support Peron?

The stupid -but inevitable- answer is "through social policies". This is conservative populism, not Peronism. But people like Duhalde think that they are faithful to Peronism in so doing. Since Menem needs the votes of the Gran Buenos Aires, he agreed (and the IMF agreed also) to grant the Province of Buenos Aires a "Fondo de Reconstruccion del Gran Buenos Aires" that is used by Duhalde to carry on these policies. Menem hates to strengthen Duhalde, and Duhalde hates Menem. Each one would stab the other's back. But both depend on each other, too.

The Fondo spills some hundred million dollars every year, and one must reckon that in this task, Duhalde has been a wise spender. His timing as well as his blackmailing work very smoothly, and in the desperate situation most Argentine workers and marginalized are, he thinks, they will always rally to Peronism.

But, alas, in October last year these very Peronist workers voted against Peronism (for the Alianza, but as a negative vote essentially), or rather and more accurately, against the consequences of the neoliberal model. Duhalde discovered he had to enlarge the gulf between Menem and him.

Moscow, Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, approved on Friday, said he intends to build a ``socially oriented'' economy by increasing the government's role in regulating the market and by supporting domestic producers.

(snip)

And -not to enlarge the gulf too widely- Duhalde also describes his plans in very general terms:

``This government will continue economic reforms but will correct mistakes of previous years,'' Primakov said. ``It's very good to have a banking system and financial and macroeconomic stabilization, but it should serve the development of national industry -- so that there would be employment, wages paid and not such'' wide gap between rich and poor.

These words would be copied by Duhalde, and what's more, if he knew that Primakov has uttered them, he would immediately show the whole country that "the current international scene now favours such measures".

The situation of Duhalde, however, is not Primakov's. Argentina has no nukes, there is a ruling bourgeoisie with the closest ties to foreign capitalism, all the banking, financial, and strategic resources have been put in the hands of imperialism. So Duhalde has to woo the establishment, and he would never define the Argentine financial policies after 1976 as what they actually are, "a pyramid of Treasury bonds'' as Primakov -in a more pressing situation- has.

And this, because, like Primakov, how an eventual Duhalde's government treats investors and lenders and its plans for improving tax collection and reducing spending are expected to be key factors in the International Monetary Fund's decision on Argentina. They feel they are safer with the Alianza, in spite of all the "progressive" chatter of the latter. Rome does not pay traitors, and in the following Presidentials the Peronist politicians will learn this.