MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Menem will appeal sentence to seven years in prison for smuggling weapons

The former president and La Rioja Senator listening to the sentencing

An Argentine court sentenced former President Carlos Menem to seven years in prison for smuggling weapons to Croatia during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s, and to Ecuador. Last year Menem was acquitted along with 17 other defendants, but the Cassation Court convicted 12 of them and urged the judges to change the verdicts.

A federal court in Buenos Aires will ask the Senate to lift the 82-year-old Peronist leader immunity from imprisonment so he can serve out the sentence. Menem’s spokesperson anticipated he would appeal the sentence to the Supreme Court

Menem pegged Argentina’s currency to the US dollar in 1991, ushering in an almost decade-long boom in foreign investment. Within three years of his departure from office in 1999, Argentina had defaulted on 95 billion in bonds and abandoned the peso peg.

That didn’t stop Menem from running for office in 2003, when he defeated Nestor Kirchner in the first round, but then dropped out from the run-off, or being elected to the Senate for La Rioja province in 2005.

As a Senator, Menem has sided with the government in key votes. Last year, he voted in favour of the nationalization of the oil company YPF SA by President Cristina Fernandez, who said that its Spanish owner Repsol SA had failed to invest sufficiently in the country. Menem had sold the company during his time in office.

In March, a court found Menem and his former Defence Minister Oscar Camilion guilty of orchestrating the sale of tons of weapons to the former Yugoslavia and Ecuador, in violation of international embargoes. The weapons were officially destined for Panama and Venezuela.

Menem, who was placed under house arrest in 2001 in the case, has denied any wrongdoing. The ruling can still be overturned by Argentina’s Supreme Court, and, given Menem’s age, it’s unclear whether he would serve out the sentence in jail should lawmakers vote to lift his immunity.

Former Defence Minister Camilión was also sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison.

Argentine troops were part of the United Nations peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Buenos Aires was a guarantor of the peace process in a border conflict between Ecuador and Peru.

President Menem’s foreign policy, under the helm of Guido Di Tella closely aligned with Washington and NATO, and is believed to have reciprocated US support with several favours to the George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton administrations, such as contributing to the 1991 Gulf war, secretly allowing the family of deceased Colombian drug-lord Escobar to reside in Argentina and helping to ‘balance’ regional conflicts.