Francis, Pope of Good Promise by Jimmy Burns

Author:Jimmy Burns [Burns, Jimmy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Battle Lines

Not even the main actors involved could say with any certainty the precise moment when the engagement between the Argentine president Néstor Kirchner and Archbishop Bergoglio turned from coexistence to confrontation.

However, the Te Deum service in the Cathedral of Buenos Aires on 25 May 2004, a traditional service marking the anniversary of Argentina’s independence as a nation state, attended by the newly elected Peronist Kirchner and celebrated by Bergoglio, marked a turning point. During it, Bergoglio made a thinly veiled attack on the falsehoods emanating from the propaganda machinery of the new Peronist government. He criticized a strategy of ‘exhibitionism and strident announcements’ before adding: ‘The people are not taken in by dishonest and mediocre strategies. They have hopes, but they won’t be deceived by magical solutions emanating from obscure deals and vested political interests.’

Just two years after his discreet efforts to rescue Argentina’s discredited political class from oblivion by brokering a cross-party consensus around a root-and-branch package of social reforms, Bergoglio felt badly let down by the re-emergence of bad government. It was the last significant State event at which President Kirchner and Bergoglio the Archbishop, soon to be designated Cardinal of Buenos Aires, would stand side by side, after which a growing political chasm opened up between them.

A year earlier Kirchner had been sworn in as the new president. He inherited an exhausted nation and a people disillusioned with politics after the record debt default in 2001, the collapse of the peso and the biggest financial crisis in Argentina’s history. Of mixed Croatian and Swiss descent, Kirchner was born in Río Gallegos, a small coastal city in southern Argentina. He joined the Peronist party there as a fledgling lawyer. In 1975 he married Cristina Fernández, a fellow lawyer and political activist. Soon Fernández allowed her own career to be subsumed by that of her husband.

Initially, Fernández balanced her family life – she gave birth to a son, Máximo, and a daughter, Florencia – with political ambition, helping her husband run a successful private practice and helping him climb the ladder of the Peronist party machinery. Her official biographer rather vaguely refers to Néstor Kirchner gradually building up a local power base by working discreetly among Peronists sympathizers from ‘neighbourhood to neighbourhood’. Other less hagiographic accounts, including a detailed unauthorized political history of Kirchner, written by three political opponents – Julio Barbaro, Oscar Muiño and Omar Pintos – provide a more sinister narrative. This is that in its network of personal favours, graft and intimidation, the rise and rise of Néstor Kirchner owed more to the tactics usually associated with the Mafia than with a Western democratic political party.

Meanwhile, his wife’s days as a law student in La Plata, the city where she was born, were overshadowed by the growing conflict between left and right armed groups which intensified after Perón died in 1974. The extent to which Fernández, like her husband, dabbled in the radical politics then being pursued by those who had supported Perón on

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