The Brief Time With...Mauricio Macri

He’s under pressure from the g-20 and the IMF, but Argentine president Mauricio Macri is used to tight spots.

- Karl Vick

THE TOPIC IS ACCOMMODATIONS, SPECIFICALLY the midtown Manhattan hotel where the President of Argentina finds himself for the United Nations General Assembly, a few blocks away. His shrug says the Langham is perfectly adequate, hardly a fleabag at $645 a night. But it’s not where Mauricio Macri would be staying if he were not President.

“The Regency,” he says, with a small smile and a distant look. “Or the Plaza, beside Central Park.”

The scion of an Italian-Argentine tycoon, Macri spent his first three decades living in luxury. He studied civil engineering, with an eye toward a career in business. His first marriage was to the daughter of a race-car driver and his second to a model. But in 1991, when he was 32, a group of rogue police officers kidnapped him, bundled him into a coffin and held him in a 3-by-3-m room for two weeks until his family paid a multimillion-dollar ransom.

“That changed my view of life,” Macri, now 59, tells TIME in a hotel meeting room, empty but for an Argentine flag. “It was like I was born again. I decided to do something more than running the family business and earning more money.”

That “something more” turned out to be politics, a word historically synonymous with populism in Argentina. The country has been dominated for decades by the legacy of Juan Perón, though his second wife Eva, known as “Evita,” remains better known, thanks to the Broadway musical. The economic nationalism known as Peronism was grounded in emotion—“The masses don’t think,” Juan said, “the masses feel”—and embraced by successors including another husband-and-wife team, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, who held office, consecutively, for 12 years before Macri’s ascension to the Casa Rosada in 2015.