“Yeah, we’ve got to come back here,” Mart said. “This is a really good place.”

THE MORE I watched the government prepare for privatization the more impressed and interested I became. It was as though each move had been planned as part of some grand strategy and any possibility of error had been covered. Soon, the telephone system and the national airline would be for sale. At the beginning of 1988 I attended meetings at various ministries to discuss how the last months of the campaign would be handled. It was decided that I would attend a number of conferences where prospective investors and, more importantly, journalists covering the oil industry would be. There was a public relations firm in New York and in London employed to deal with day-to-day matters. There would also be civil servants from the oil sector available. My job was simply to translate for Argentinian officials and to talk to as many people as possible at conferences, to make sure that nothing negative about the privatization would circulate for very long and to report back to the New York firm and to the ministry.

There was a man from the New York public relations firm at the first of the strategy meetings which I attended. I took in his pale green linen suit, his white shirt and pale green tie, his tanned skin and white teeth, his blond hair and winning smile, and he looked back at me and nodded his head and curled his lip in friendly amusement. He talked in a lazy, easy sort of way as though he knew all the tricks, and believed that the world could be relied upon not to do anything strange. I hoped that he was going to come to one of the conferences with me. I liked him.

He talked about how to deal with journalists and opinion-formers: we should make clear to them that we needed nothing from them. He saw no reason to offer free trips or other inducements to journalists, but once anyone was prepared to take the trouble to write about us, we should pull out all the stops and be open and hospitable, simply state our case in the best possible environment. We should not be seen to be craven or Third World in the way we operated. We must behave like a large, rich country selling something that people wanted to buy. Anything that smacked of Third World inferiority must be kept out of the picture. Most of this had to be translated for the civil servants, one of whom was frantically keeping notes for a memo which would be read personally by Menem. I could see them becoming tense when “Third World” was mentioned. I made a note to suggest to the American that we find a euphemism.