Forced Marriage Between Argentina and the IMF Turns into a Fiasco
NOVEMBER 9, 2018
by JÉRÔME DUVAL
While the discontent of the Argentine people grows day by day, President Mauricio Macri flees to the United States. In New York, he continues negotiations with the IMFto revise the already outdated agreement signed in June, intervenes in the UN Assembly, and receives an award for his leadership. Meanwhile, the fourth big general strike of his mandate, after that of the 25thof June against the agreement of the IMF, paralyses the country. This is the summary of a historic week forArgentina at the heart of the turmoil.
Macri the liar and “zero poverty”
On the 20thof September, during his speech at the 71stUN General Assembly, Macri reiterated the goal of moving towards “zero poverty”, an objective that is in total contradiction with his own policy and the IMF’s injunctions in a food-exporting country marked again by famine, a country where 11 million people are considered poor according to the INDEC National Institute of Statistics. Significant political choices were made in this regard, such as the purchase last August, in the midst of the financial crisis in Argentina, of five Super-Étendard fighter planes at Dassault Aviation for 12 million euros. Completely unafraid of contradictions, later in his speech, Macri says that “Argentina makes the empowerment of women a state policy.” This almost distracts us from the Senate’s vote in early August against the legalisation of abortion that results in women incurring between one and four years of imprisonment if their abortion is considered illegal; that is to say for any abortion apart from cases of rape or risks to the life or health of women. As a reminder, in Latin America only two countries, Cuba and Uruguay, allow the voluntary termination of pregnancy without conditions, to which must be added the Federal District state of Mexico.
The price of shame
After the current Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau last year, Matteo Renzi in 2016, Ukrainian billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, or Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, it was the turn of Argentine President Mauricio Macri to receive the “Global Citizen Award”. A few months earlier, awarded by the same American think tank, The Atlantic Council, George W. Bush was honoured to receive the Distinguished International Leadership Award along with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
A New York Times article, published in September 2014, tells us that the Atlantic Council organisation received donations from over twenty-five governments, in addition to the United States, since 2008. According to its latest annual report, this think tank receives multiple donations, the most significant of which are those from the United States Department of State, the Lithuanian and Norwegian Defence Ministries, various companies including HSBC, Lockheed Martin and Thales, Chevron, BP, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Tüpras and ExxonMobil, the well-known international business law firm Baker McKenzie, the investment fund Blackstone, Airbus, Ford and Google.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/09/forced-marriage-between-argentina-and-the-imf-turns-into-a-fiasco/