February 14, 2024
Cristina Fernandez Kirchner
After having remained practically silent since Javier Milei’s inauguration last December 10, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) published a document that analyzes the arrival to power of the libertarian and the economic crisis Argentina is going through.
“On Valentine’s Day and, as always, in love with the Homeland I share with you the working paper ‘Argentina in its third debt crisis. Cuadro de situación’,” CFK wrote to present the text and added that it includes a quote from Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the writers that Milei mentions the most.
“Borrowing capital to replace the capital destroyed by the crisis, is not a remedy to poverty, but only aggravates it; someone else’s wealth is not the wealth of the country. Debt represents more poverty than wealth. To get into debt is not to get richer, but to expose oneself to impoverishment because of the ease with which other people’s wealth is always spent”, says Alberdi’s phrase quoted at the beginning of the document.
In the document Cristina traces the history of the foreign debt in Argentina and lists three crises in that sense: the first one between 1976 and 1989, arising from the dictatorship; the second one between 1989 and 2001, unleashed by Menem and convertibility, and the third one arising in 2016 during the government of Mauricio Macri that is still ongoing.
In this view, the former President defines Milei as “a showman-economist” and remarks that despite his campaign speech “he produced, as soon as he was elected, an unusual recycling of characters and former officials”, among whom she mainly points out Luis Caputo – “the architect of the serial indebtedness of Mauricio Macri’s government and of the return of the IMF to Argentina”- and Federico Sturzenegger.
Milei’s government
After criticizing DNU 70/2023 and the draft Omnibus Law as “a package of modifications to the Argentine legal system tailored to benefit the main business groups and what is even more serious, a covert reform of the National Constitution”, Cristina assures that Milei’s government cannot be defined as the fourth neoliberal experience in Argentina but a continuation of the third.
“The characteristics of the discourse and the political praxis of the new President, as well as that of his teams in the different areas, place the government in a plane that goes beyond the disruptive and takes it to a place where Argentina has never gone before”, she warns. “As soon as he arrived in the Government, hecarried out a 118% devaluation, thus constituting the largest induced devaluation in our history”, added CFK.
The former President made clear that it is “more than evident that in the President’s mind the only stabilization plan is that of dollarization”. “The measures adopted in any other theoretical framework cannot be explained”, she said when questioning the “planned chaos” generated by the “fierce adjustment program that acts as a real destabilization plan”.
In her document, Cristina points to three fundamental reforms that Milei’s government wants to impose:
At the same time, the former President warned about “the climate of insults, attacks, disqualifications and stigmatizations that developed during the debate and increased exponentially since the return of the Omnibus bill to committee”. She said that this “foreshadows a scenario of violence that, as we already know, begins verbally and then becomes physical”. “Unfortunately, the undersigned can testify to this in first person,” recalling the attack against her.
Dollarization, deficit and inflation.
“The dollarization of the Argentine economy will imply the definitive closure to the possibility of developing our country with social inclusion”, warned CFK and analyzed: “The country will not have more dollars. On the contrary, we will have fewer dollars because we will affect the competitiveness of most of the productive sectors that generate foreign currency and will increase the weight of the foreign debt in our economy, which is already burdensome, becoming a real Sisyphean ordeal”.
The former President added that she does not share Milei’s diagnosis that the fiscal deficit is the only reason for inflation and the crisis. Instead, she states that “the shortage of dollars is what stresses the economy and triggers inflation” and warns that “the excessive indebtedness in dollars is poison for our bi-monetary economy”.
Elections, Congress and provincial funds.
“The present working paper does not intend to disregard the legitimacy that President Javier Milei is vested with by virtue of the 56% of the votes obtained in the ballot”, Cristina clarifies in her text. But at the same time she warns that before that second round in which he was elected, the libertarian “in the general election where the parliamentary representation is voted, he only obtained the same third of votes that he had obtained in the mandatory preliminary round in August 2023”.
In this line, CFK reminds Milei that the legitimacy arising from the vote must be added to “the legitimacy of the exercise of government management, which can only be achieved by improving the quality of life of the Argentines”. And she recalls the case of other experiences that “could not finish their mandates when they failed to give society the quality of life demanded by the Argentines”.
CFK also points out that the electoral result gave rise to a fragmented Congress in which Peronism is the first minority and states that “the situation of the country and the responsibility of those who have been elected to govern and legislate will require the construction of a system of parliamentary agreement”.
In this line, Cristina warns that the political negotiation “cannot have a Persian market logic or an unworthy give and take for positions, resources and who knows what else”. And she goes on to criticize the withholding of resources that correspond to the provinces according to the 2023 Budget: “This is not “punishing the governors”, but harming all Argentine men and women who, except in Buenos Aires, live in the 23 Provinces”.