Today’s mid-month date has had a special significance for over two millennia – ever since the assassination of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 BC. A Roman superstition that Idus Martiae was something of a doomsday was thus confirmed with its insistence appearance in the William Shakespeare play – “Beware the Ides of March” in the soothsayer’s words, followed by the interchange of “The Ides of March are come” (Caesar) and “Aye, Caesar, but not gone” (Soothsayer).
More than two millennia later the Ides of March struck again – here in Argentina exactly 30 years ago today. On March 15, 1995, Carlos Menem Junior, 26, perished in a helicopter crash near the delta town of Ramallo together with the racing-driver Silvio Oltra. Like Caesar in 44BC, President Carlos Menem was then arguably at the height of his power – just seven months previously he had secured a constitutional reform permitting presidential re-election for only the second time in Argentine history until then with every confidence in being able to load the dice in his favour in the upcoming elections (as in fact happened). Menem could cover a multitude of sins with a supreme trump card similar to the current Javier Milei administration facing this year’s midterms – an even more impressive record in holding down prices without controls with an annual inflation of just 1.7 percent in all 1995 thanks to the dollar-peso parity of convertibility. And almost needless to say, the sympathy vote from his personal tragedy helped to boost Menem’s 20-percent margin, as in the recently widowed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s 2011 landslide.
Not surprisingly in this land of systematic suspicion, this shock accident triggered all kinds of conspiracy theories, of which probably the wildest was that Menem had bumped off his only son and heir precisely in order to clinch that sympathy vote. But before trotting out the various conspiracy theories, this columnist would like to present his own humdrum verdict that the crash was nothing more than an accident.
First and foremost, helicopters are a notoriously risky means of transport – one need look no further back than the former two-term Chilean president Sebastián Piñera little over a year ago or the Macro banker Jorge Brito in late 2020 among many other examples over the years. Add to that a totally reckless pilot and you have the classic accident waiting to happen. The kid was a lifelong speed freak – his death was only the last in a long series of accidents. A would-be Franco Colapinto, his fledgling racing career featured crashes in every single year between 1990 and 1994, he broke one limb riding a motorcycle and another aboard a speedboat with current Sports Secretary Daniel Scioli and a few months before his death he even crashed a helicopter taking off from his father’s home in Anillaco, La Rioja. These facts are usually omitted by the conspiracy theorists.
The latter sometimes rest their case on the bullet marks to be seen in what remains of the Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter crashing exactly 30 years ago today. But helicopters are thus pockmarked rather more often than might be expected, especially if passing over territory where hunters shoot at birds with the scene of the accident falling into that category. Yet quite apart from that, there is the fact that with Bell extremely jealous of their reputation, whenever there is an accident, the remains of the craft are taken to the United States for an exhaustive examination by experts in order to detect what went wrong and avoid any repetition. Their report made no mention of bullets, which appeared almost 20 years later in a Border Guard forensic investigation, presumably instigated by somebody trying to prove a point with the possible complicity of those guarding the helicopter.
So what happened on that late summer day with perfect visibility three decades ago? According to the few witnesses, the helicopter was flying at low altitude and flew into some high-tension power lines. Interestingly enough, his bodyguards were on the scene almost immediately – such proximity leads this columnist to the conclusion that a playful presidential scion suddenly spotted their car on the road and decided to buzz them, fatally failing to take the power lines into account.
The conspiracy theories are perhaps headed by the notion that Carlos Menem Jr’s death was the third terrorist attack following the destruction of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and the car-bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in 1994. Although those horrors were real enough, there was some flawed logic behind probably the right suspect being named for the wrong reasons. The attacks were widely assumed to be Iran’s revenge on Menem for joining the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein when the latter had only recently ended the 1981-1988 Iran-Iraq war claiming almost a million Iranian lives – what possible cause could Tehran have for anger? A more plausible argument for Islamic terrorism would be a fundamentalist vendetta against Menem for having abandoned the Muslim faith of his fathers (and his son is buried in the Islamic Cemetery on the insistence of his mother Zulema Yoma, who in these three decades has never wavered in her insistence that her boy was murdered).
Other theories centre on rogue intelligence agents (also strongly suspected in the more recent death of AMIA prosecutor Alberto Nisman in 2015). Then there are those who point to mafia elements in the presidential entourage sending Menem a message not to expose them in the form of his son’s death – it was around this time that then-Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo began to complain increasingly about corruption, leading to his dismissal the next year. Drugs are always going to surface in such speculation – one such theory even had Menem owing Pablo Escobar US$800 million for some reason but there were various other such conjectures about the President somehow getting on the wrong side of drug-traffickers and his son paying the price. These theories tended to be somewhat abstract with little forensic content although Zulema Yoma argues sabotage on the basis of an empty fuel tank since the helicopter did not blow up. In 2014 her suspicions of murder were echoed by then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner following the Border Guard report (was CFK chicken or egg there)?
Space does not suffice for all these hypotheses but in conclusion, while conspiracy theories are wildly fashionable in today’s world, accidents can also happen.
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