Champagne, luxury cars and massive street protests are among the dominant images featured in a new series about Argentina’s late former president Carlos Menem, which premieres Wednesday on the streaming platform Prime Video.
President from 1989 to 1999, ‘El Turco’ – as he was nicknamed due to his Syrian heritage –had a well-known love of luxury, women, sports, fast cars, watches and sparkling wine.
He serves as something of an inspiration too for Argentina’s current head of state, Javier Milei, who is one of Menem’s most vocal supporters.
Milei, who took office in December 2023, has described Menem’s administration as the best “of the last 40 years” due to its liberal economic reforms.
He visited the former president before Menem’s death in 2021, while in 2024 he unveiled a bust of the former leader at the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires, the seat of the Executive branch.
The new miniseries, Menem, began filming in June 2023. It consists of six episodes and portrays his rise to power, along with the ups and downs of his presidency.
During his time in office, state-owned companies such as oil firm YPF (currently in legal dispute over the 2012 expropriation of 51 percent of its shares), flagship air carrier Aerolíneas Argentinas and the ENTEL national telecommunications company were privatised.
In 1991, Menem established by law that one US dollar equalled one Argentine peso – a fixed exchange rate that brought about a brief period of abundance, but ultimately collapsed in 2001, leading to the worst economic crisis in the country’s history, under his successor, Fernando De la Rúa (1999–2001).
Reforms such as trade liberalisation had a detrimental impact on local industry. Unemployment surged to 18 percent, in a country where it had rarely reached double digits.
Actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, who plays the former president, said in an interview with local radio station Urbana Play on Thursday that “the series is fundamentally about how one manages something as monstrous as power and how it can consume you.”
“Portraying Menem changed my perspective,” said Sbaraglia, who had been critical of Menem’s government during the 1990s.
The series premiere – it is being launched on July 9, Argentina’s Independence Day – was delayed due to a dispute over image rights raised by Menem’s heirs, which was resolved in June when the production company submitted a signed release from the former president.
Menem was born northwest Argentina, in La Rioja Province, where he served as governor from 1973 to 1989, with an interruption during his imprisonment between 1976 and 1983 under the last military dictatorship.
He was also briefly under house arrest in 2001 during a trial for illegal arms exports to Croatia and Ecuador. He was released weeks later by order of the Supreme Court, and ultimately acquitted after the case exceeded the statute of limitations, having dragged on for 25 years.
Menem served as a senator from 2005 to 2021. Parliamentary immunity protected him from imprisonment in several cases, including one involving the cover-up of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre, which killed 85 people and injured 300, and another involving embezzlement.
– TIMES/AFP
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