It was quite an occasion in a country which relishes lavish occasions. For 24 hours last week, hundreds of thousands of people assembled in the historic Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and filed past the coffin of Néstor Kirchner, their former president, who succumbed to a heart attack on October 27. His body lay in state at the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace which gets its name from the reddish stone of which it is built and which occupies one whole side of the square. A state funeral was held the next day, attended by dignitaries from all over, including eight South American leaders. The following day, throngs gathered once again in the square to form a gigantic procession which accompanied his remains to the metropolitan airport from where his body was flown to his power base, the city of Río Gallegos in the far south. More throngs greeted his remains at the airport there and accompanied them to the cemetery.

Presiding over the solemn events was his widow, Cristina Fernández, who succeeded him in the country’s highest office when he decided in 2007 not to seek re-election even though he was enjoying a 60 per cent rating in popularity polls. In his 60 years of life, Kirchner had made an enormous impression on his compatriots and is already being ranked among such respected Argentine leaders as an early president, Juan Manuel de Rosas; Hipólito Yrigoyen, who ruled early in the last century; the mythical Juan Domingo Perón and the more recent Raúl Alfonsín, who had the unglamorous task of digging his country out of the hellish pit a succession of tyrants had dug the country into.

Kirchner was born in Río Gallegos, capital of the province of Santa Cruz in the far south of Patagonia. He met Cristina at the National University of La Plata, where both studied law and joined the Justicialist Party, the core of the Peronist movement. He entered elected politics in 1987 when he squeaked in to become mayor of Río Gallegos. By 1991, he had built up enough support to comfortably win the provincial governorship. By this time Cristina had become a member of the provincial legislature.

The president of the day, the flamboyant Carlos Menem, had generated controversy and Opposition over many of his policies. In 1998, when he tried to run for re-election a second time by an arcane interpretation of the constitution, Kirchner sided with his chief opponent, Eduardo Duhalde, who was governor of Buenos Aires province. Menem backed down and Duhalde won. Duhalde championed Kirchner but they later became opponents. These men, by the way, were all members of the same party, but Peronism is not so much an ideology as a kind of religious movement.

Duhalde didn’t last long and was succeeded in 1999 by the mayor of Buenos Aires, Fernando de la Rua, partly as a rejection of the antics and corruption which characterised Menem’s last term in office. He introduced a regimen of austerity, but economic conditions continued to get worse and de la Rua resigned in 2001 after a series of protest riots. A string of interim presidents followed, the last of which was Duhalde. His draconian measures to stem the economic bleeding caused only more suffering and engendered the popular sentiment Que se vayan todos (Away with them all).

Enter Kirchner. For him, the key was economic growth based on domestic production and fighting deficits through careful budgetary management. Although Menem beat him by two percentage points in the first round of the election of 2003, it was obvious that disaster lay ahead in the second round and after some reflection Menem stood down, granting Kirchner the presidency.

Although he had gained a mere 22 per cent of the votes, Kirchner was now president and governed accordingly. He cancelled the foreign debt and negotiated a new payment schedule at a significant discount. He shifted the foreign-policy stance, reformed the Supreme Court and concentrated on social policy. He regarded the parliamentary election in 2005 as a kind of referendum on his policies and was amply rewarded when candidates for his faction of the party won 40 per cent of the vote.

Then he surprised everyone by announcing he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2007. That’s when his wife came into the presidential picture and, like the Clintons in the US, they were a team. He reverted to the backrooms, cutting deals with political allies and opponents alike to keep her administration functioning and managing prickly relations among the various factions which constituted his (and her) power base.

After he died Fernández announced that nothing would change, she would continue the struggle. But she has neither the interest nor the aptitude for his political manoeuvrings and that could prove disastrous. Argentina, which well into the last century was among the wealthiest countries in the world, now has to face up to some stark realities. It needs to build a modern economy based on industry as well as intensive agriculture which can hold its own with the new technological upstarts like China, India, South Korea, and especially, its forward-looking neighbours, Chile and Brazil.

And Brazil is where another fascinating development is taking place. Last Sunday, Dilma Rousseff of the governing Workers’ Party eased her way through the run-off round of the presidential election, beating her opponent, José Serra of the Social Democratic Party, 56 to 44 per cent. When she takes the oath of office on New Year’s Day, Rousseff will become the first woman in Brazil’s history to become head of state and government. She is not new to politics, being chief of staff for the outgoing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and energy minister in his Cabinet and before that a political activist. As a young woman, she joined a Marxist group which carried out violent acts against the military government which ruled from 1964 to 1985, and she was jailed and tortured for her efforts.

Not wanting to overshadow her historic achievement, Lula stayed away from her election-night victory party. He says he’ll try to leave as rich a legacy for his successor as he can in the remaining two months of his term. He wants, for example, to nail down an oil reform bill and secure approval for a tightened budget for 2011 as well as a multi-billion dollar deal to buy fighter aircraft from France.

Rousseff comes to office under the most auspicious circumstances: in the past eight years, per capita income has grown by 23 per cent; a programme called Bolsa Familia now covers about 13 million families and has made a significant dent in illiteracy; hundreds of thousands of families are benefiting from a new scheme which subsidises home ownership; since 2003, more than 19 million people have risen above the poverty line: and with recent discoveries of oil in the Atlantic, Brazil is set to be among the top 10 oil-producing countries.

There is still much to be done, of course, as Brazil remains among the ranks of developing countries. It’s left to be seen just how much Dilma Rousseff can emerge from Lula’s extremely strong shadow and become her own woman.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca