PHOENIX, Feb. 14, 1998 - Who can forget the hauntingly beautiful "Don't cry for me Argentina" melody from "Evita?" It was a song of a passionate love for one's country. The patriotic flame burned fiercely in Eva (Duarte) Peron's heart despite turbulent times and grave illness which snuffed out her life at age 33. It was also a story of an "American Dream" the Argentinean way - a poor girl from the pampas countryside makes good and rises to become Argentina's First Lady at the age of 27.

But "Evita" is also a love story which only a jolted lover, or an exiled patriot, could understand. It is a tale about things spiritual which can never be replaced by matters material...

"Don't cry for me Argentina

The truth is I never left you

All through my wild days

My mad existence

I kept my promise

Don't keep your distance.

And as for fortune, and as for fame,

I never invited them in

Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired.

They are illusions

They are not the solutions they promised to be

The answer was here all the time

I love you and hope you love me.

Don't cry for me Argentina..."

It is a supreme irony that the latest deliverer of the mind-and-heart-over-matter lyrics, written by Tim Rice reinforced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, should be none other than Hollywood's "Material Girl" - Madonna. That's like Bill Clinton preaching celibacy. Yet, despite the distractions which sometimes occur when real life interferes with art, the larger-than-life story of "Evita" can still break every patriot's heart. Especially on Valentine's Day.

[For those not intimately familiar with Argentina's history, Eva ("Evita") was born in 1919. She died in 1952 of cancer. Her husband, Juan Peròn, for whom she campaigned tirelessly before marrying him, was elected president in 1946. He was deposed by a military coup in 1955. After 18 years of exile, Peròn was again elected president of Argentina in 1973. But he died 10 months later. So it goes...]

That "Evita" was about the future and not just the past became evident in the 1990s. Carlos Saul Menem was elected president of Argentina in 1989. It was the year the Main Street started paying for the West Side Gang's victory in the Cold War over their Kremlin East Side rivals. Ever since, Menem has ruled like a czar, issuing over 300 decrees, according to a Jan-Feb 1998 FOREIGN AFFAIRS article about the pitfalls of globalization without corresponding constitutional democracy and social liberalization.

During the last nine years, Menem's globalization of the Argentine economy - read privatization and sale of former state-owned assets to foreign interests - has caused millions of Argentineans to become exiles in their own country. They were disenfranchised by their own elite in the name "free trade" and "progress." Just as were the millions of Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Koreans, Thais... later on.

In the province of Jujuy, for example, some 42% are unemployed or doing menial work, according Bishop Marcelo Palentini. "They used to ask for raises; now they ask for jobs," he told the New York Times which printed a surprisingly candid condemnation of the New World Order elite's mantra - the "free trade" a.k.a. "globalization" - in a front page February 6 article, "Argentina Grapples With Downside of Globalization."

"Menem thinks that by putting our country at the service of the International Monetary Fund, he brought us into the First World," Carlos Santillan said, a union leader in Jujuy province. "But workers have lost in a few years rights they fought for over a century. We're a colony here. All that is missing is to have Clinton come here and plant the American flag."

Clinton won't have to disgrace our flag any more that he has already done, because Wall Street did it for him. The "megabankers" have already seen to it that the Almighty Dollar is the currency of choice in Argentina, fully interchangeable with the local pesos. Any time you see that anywhere in the world, you know that the New World Order has claimed yet another colony in the name of the "Princes of the 20th Century," the multinational corporations.

The New York Times article explained how the multinationals' profits drove many of Argentina's small entrepreneurs out of business. And how some of the American globalist NWO elite, as epitomized by Ted Turner, George Soros, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzeneger and others, have moved in and taken over the lands where ones gauchos freely roamed.

"There are more fences going up in Patagonia as the internationally wealthy install themselves on newly acquired estates," the New York Times reporter, Roger Cohen, wrote from Buenos Aires. "I used to go and camp or fish but now I hear that Ted Turner is here, Rambo there, the Terminator somewhere else. And I say, no, this is not my Argentina," Orlando Mendes, a proud Argentinian, told the New York Times.

Meanwhile, YPF, the former state-owned Argentinian oil company that used to employ 5,000 people, now has only 500 employees. But YPF made a $900 million profit in 1996. "Whoopee-do" for its foreign scavenger-investors! A sad outcome for the Argentineans.

Mario Acosta, a YPF manager, explained that when the old "semisocialist" system was dismantled, everyone who was not a professional was laid off. "Before," he said, "uneducated people had a certain basic security. But that's finished in the modern world."

Nevertheless, deceitful chameleons that the globalists are, at the Wal-Mart in Buenos Aires, an Argentine flag flutters in the store there is a sign reading, "Proudly in Argentina." Families stroll down the wide, bright aisles, past displays of Paul Newman's salad dressing.

"What is clear is that it is changing the Argentine way of life: families buy their bicycles here, sometimes using dollars; the corner bicycle store is no more," the New York Times reported.

But, of course, Wal-Mart is not impervious to the risks of "divided societies," a New York Times term for Brazil, Argentina's bigger neighbor which has until recently mostly resisted the globalization pressures. In the last few months, five Wal-Mart stores in Brazil have been attacked and robbed by assailants operating in large groups armed with assault rifles.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is bigger than 161 countries including Poland, Israel and Greece. Mitsubishi is larger than Indonesia, according to Maude Barlow, a Canadian activist who does not want to see her country's culture wiped out by the likes of IBM or General Motors. "General Motors is bigger than Denmark," she railed in a Jan. 22 speech at the University of Toronto. "The Top 200, with a combined revenue of $7.1 trillion, have almost twice the economic clout of the poorest four-fifths of humanity, whose combined income is only $3.9 trillion.

And, if we may interject with our own parallel, IBM had spent more than $18 billion between 1995 and 1997 on stock buybacks - almost five Albania's GDPs, unconscionably transferring that much money from the Main Street taxpayers to the Wall Street pockets - WITHOUT CREATING A SINGLE JOB OR A PRODUCT!

But, in spite of their enormous wealth and clout, the Top 200 multinationals, the "Princes of the 20th Century," as we had dubbed them in our reports, are the net job destroyers, according to Ms. Barlow. All together, they employ less than one third of one per cent of the world's people."

And yet, according to the thus far secret two-year negotiations of the 29 OECD nations in Paris over the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), a New World Order elite's attempted home run against all nations of the world, the MAI Treaty would basically do away with the idea of the national sovereignty, including our own, in America.

And so, if there is a song to be sung by the patriots the world over on this Valentine's Day 1998, it should be the song of Evita: "Don't cry for me Argentina."

Or America... Or Canada.... Or Russia... Or Germany... Or France... Or Iraq... Or Iran... Or Serbia... Or India... Or China... Or Japan...

Maybe the love song of the Valentine's Day 1998 should be - "Evita: Vive la difference!"

"And as for fortune, and as for fame,

I never invited them in..."

We know. But Carlos Menem did. Sorry, Evita.

Also, check out... "Brazil: From a Rising to a Shooting Star", "Argentine Judge Says Four IBM Execs Are Suspects", "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina", a Djurdjevic Feb/98 Integration Management (IM) column (IM is a Washington Post publication).