Hector Mendez former president of the Argentine Industrial Union (UIA), died at 84 this Wednesday after spending several days hospitalized in the Otamendi Sanatorium in the City of Buenos Aires. SME businessman in the plastics industry, grew up in the industrial environment, diversified, came to the world of auto parts and led the UIA in three periods coinciding with the years of Kirchnerism.
He began his career as an SME businessman in the plastics industry, where he forged a great friendship with the trade unionist Jorge Alberto Triaca, Carlos Menem’s Minister of Labor between 1989 and 1992. The son of an accountant and a lawyer by profession, Méndez began as an industrialist in the plastic in the province of Neuquén. Then, he moved to the promoted San Luis and there the Conarsa company was born.
Méndez manufactured the containers that were seen on many corners of the City of Buenos Aires, the giant garbage cans for businesses and the plastic trays and harvesters. Thus, he became president of the Argentine Chamber of the Plastic Industry (CAIP) and that position catapulted him to lead the Argentine Industrial Union.
In his youth, Méndez lived for a time in Italy and that experience was useful for a strategic alliance with the Jcoplastic firm that supplied him with 40 special molds, which allowed him to differentiate himself. Thanks to a special machine that it acquired from the German company Krauss-Maffei, it became the leader in four-wheeled containers.
As the years passed and he became friends with the owners of the Brazilian arms factory Taurus, Méndez expanded to Curitiba. In the neighboring country, the businessman is an equal partner of Taurus in a firm that represents 25% of its income, about US$ 7 million annually.
With the economic crisis of the Macrismo, in 2018 its auto parts company ITEC closed, which at the time was the second largest company in San Juan, which left 359 workers unemployed. Méndez had acquired the company in 2015 from the Brazilian Delphi, then controlled by the investment fund Elliot, owned by financier Paul Singer, who litigated against Argentina to collect bonds in default. The challenge was great: the company had monthly losses of $2 million and had not renewed machinery.
Father of four children, Méndez was characterized by making several criticisms from his position, without breaking relations with Kirchnerism despite the strained relationship with the Casa Rosada.
In 2013, he was invited by the Casa Rosada to an event in Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, where the then president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner would speak. Before attending, Méndez said: “We must make the President see that the reality is different from hers.”
With Kirchnerism defeated and before the change of government at the end of 2015, Méndez anticipated that Cristina Kirchner’s administration was leaving “bombs everywhere” and they pointed out that this phrase was against the then Minister of Economy, Axel Kicillof. But Méndez clarified: “I didn’t say it was a bomb plan by (Axel) Kicillof: it was from the Government in general. They blamed it all on Kicillof and that is an injustice. They placed bombs everywhere and not only in the economic areas.”
During the first year of Mauricio Macri’s presidency, Méndez made a surprising mea culpa.”I have also been complicit in many things. Silence is complicity, he who remains silent grants.” On the radio he stated that the payment of bribes was “vox popular” among businessmen and that, when he took office “for the first time (at the head of the UIA), 10 or 12 years ago, they called public work ‘Movicom’ because it was with the ’15’ in front”, in reference to the extra price in returns that was paid to officials.