Codes of mischief and morality: for decades, cartoonist Hermenegildo Sabat has depicted Argentina's turbulent political life in biting and humorous drawings.

• Author: Footer, Kevin Carrel

The last fifty years have not been easy on Argentina. The court try has seen its promise--so glorious at the start of the twentieth century--crumble in a morass of dictatorships, human rights abuses, economic crises, and shocking levels of political corruption. All the more reason then to give thanks for Hermenegildo Sabat, the brilliant political cartoonist, who has always been able to coax a smile from weary Argentine lips.

"Rather than make people laugh," Sabat says from hiss studio in Buenos Aires's colorful San Telmo district, "I try to make them smile."

Over time, his caricatures of those who presided over the country's volatile political life have become a sort or iconography of individual personalities and their times: Juan Domingo Peron as a mummy being unwrapped when he returned from exile to begin a third presidency; the military junta as grieving widows in black; former president Carlos Menem, desperate for an unconstitutional third term, drawn with the presidential throne clutched around his waist; or current president Nestor Kirchner always appearing with two faces drawn on his single head.

Sabat's pithy political chronicle has run for decades in Clarin, the country's largest circulation newspaper. Wise, inventive, and decent even when the times weren't, Sabat, born in Uruguay in 1933, as served his adopted country well.

Forced by the times to be more than a cartoonist, he has managed to keep a part of the country's conscience safe: During years of political repression, when too many journalists lost their lives for saying what they saw or were forced into exile; and while others dared not write what they knew, Sabat drew without respite, investing the lines of his caricatures with a thousand subtleties and innuendoes that the dictators overlooked or failed to see.

Because Sabat kept an incorruptible sense of right and wrong--even when many Argentines, blinded by fervor, condoned violence on one side or the other--in 1988 he was awarded Columbia University's prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize, the oldest international award in journalism.

Looking back, Sabat says it was fortunate that he had decided long before the dictators arrived against putting captions to his cartoons. "How important it was that I didn't use words during that time! If not, I wouldn't be here," he says.

Historian Felix Luna says in his introduction to a collection of Sabat's drawings spanning four decades (La casa sigue en. orden, 1999) that he is put to...