Argentina began to attend in recent days a power laundering. Order and certain transparency of the system that allowed Alberto and Cristina Fernández to dethrone Mauricio Macri. It was phenomenal electoral engineering. He respected the forms of the hierarchies until well into 2020. The first untimely irruption of the vice president, with that letter where he denounced the “officials who do not work”, charted a new time. Such a situation is now visualized with the rear view mirror pointed to October last year. When the first epistle was born.
Other interventions by Cristina followed. It was always interpreted that they were motorized by their disagreement with the situation of their causes of corruption in the Justice. He forced Alberto to hand over his right hand, former Minister Marcela Losardo. There is evidence that the former president progresses at a rapid pace in taking the administration. Their own ministers do not fully illustrate it. The lines of political action and thought that it imposes on the Government are much more important.
The imbalance at the peak of power would thus logically occur. Because the President has stopped having his own criteria on the public stage. At another time in his political life, he would have withdrawn from Cristina’s advance against Justice. Now he makes it his own. Last week he confessed to the head of the World Bank, David Malpass, the will of his government to “honor the debts” and order the macroeconomy. It was unfortunate that, simultaneously, during an act with a campaign tone in full memory of the tragedy of 1976, Cristina communicated that there is no money to pay the enormous debt to the International Monetary Fund. In reality, it is not just bad luck: it represents the structural disorder that reigns in the Government.
The decision to freeze negotiations with the IMF has multiple meanings. It does not only concern the direction of the economy. Nor, in the open air that Minister Martín Guzmán will have felt during his tour of New York and Washington, where he met with the head of the organization, Kristalina Georgieva. It hides a strategic sense of foreign policy and, in particular, of possible relations with the United States.
The President was enthusiastic about Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. He was the first president of Latin America to recognize his victory and to greet him when he took office. The same enthusiasm did not exist in the Instituto Patria. Cristina does not commune with the Republicans. But during his second term, he also had a traumatic relationship with Barack Obama. According to vision K, there are permanent interests of both that would not fit in with the world reordering or with the hope of a progressive comeback in the region.
Cristina even dabbled in the last few days in a matter that she doesn’t like at all. In that same act, where he brought together only the rancid Kirchnerism of Buenos Aires, the pandemic flew over. He said that thanks to multilateral foreign policy they had achieved vaccines from Russia and China. Would that be your conception of multilateralism? His displeasure can then be understood when former minister Ginés González Garcia signed the agreement with the British-Swedish laboratory AstraZeneca for the production of the Oxford vaccine. In those same folds the obstacles could be discovered, never clarified by the government, to close a deal with Pfizer-Biontech, an American company with a contribution from Germany.
If other details were accounted for, the landscape would be complete. The vice president reserved diplomatic headquarters in Moscow and Beijing for ambassadors of her trust. He did the same, of course, with those of Caracas and Havana. He still tolerates Jorge Argüello in Washington, because he is an official appointed by the President. Belonging to its historic brotherhood. Although he can never forget that he was once on the list of candidates for Buenos Aires deputies of the macrismo.
Alberto always considered the relationship with the United States key. Also, private investment to boost the economy. Maybe it was another Alberto. As Chief of Staff, he maneuvered in two complicated instances of the bilateral relationship. One was in 2005, after the Ibero-American Summit in Mar del Plata, due to friction (the rejection of the FTAA) between Néstor Kirchner and George Bush. The other in 2007 for the famous suitcase with 800 thousand dollars that the Venezuelan-American businessman, Guido Antonini Wilson, tried to enter the country surreptitiously. It was confiscated. A Miami prosecutor had assured that the money was destined for the Kirchnerist electoral campaign. Cristina exploded.
In both cases, Alberto unraveled the conflicts by hanging out with the American ambassador, Anthony Wayne. His trades turned into a miracle. An audience that Cristina in 2008 granted the diplomat. There the many were clarified: Wayne said that the interest of the United States was to know what Venezuelan businessmen were doing with money in their country. Not in others.
From that time the President was left with contacts that he never let forget. Republican Elliot Abrams, undersecretary for Inter-American Affairs with Ronald Reagan. Also Thomas Shannon, a Democrat who worked with Bush (h) and Obama. He spoke with one of them as soon as he assumed the Presidency. It was to know how Washington would see the departure of the Lima Group from the country. He preferred to stay.
Last week the Government, after ten months of those consultations, resolved to separate Argentina from a Group that was born in the time of Macri to try to find a way out of the Nicolás Maduro regime. The Foreign Ministry estimated that the entire search for solutions had failed. The President seems determined to grant that role to the Puebla Group, a conglomerate that emerged in 2019 with progressive leaders from 12 countries and two presidents. Besides Alberto is Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But the Mexican is focused on other things. The pandemic and the ordering of ties with Biden, after the almost carnal relations sustained with Trump.
The Democratic president was clear from his arrival at the White House. Consider Venezuela a dictatorship. After Argentina’s resignation from the Lima Group, he reiterated that the Venezuelan case requires a negotiated solution with free and fair elections. He urged to strengthen coordination with his international partners. Alberto has been pushing a mediation action together with López Obrador and Pope Francis. Biden would have other plans. A diplomatic action in the making under the auspices of at least three of the main nations of the European Union.
The government’s position before the Maduro regime is imposed by Cristina and Kirchnerism. It ignores highly sensitive issues, such as human rights violations. He snubs the reports of the United Nations, whose delegate for the issue is the former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet. The first work of 2021, released this month, recounts the murder of more than 200 people by police forces.
The Venezuela case has a correlation in other foreign policy moves that appear minor. They wouldn’t escape Washington’s radar, either. For example, the president of the Development Bank for Latin America (former Andean Development Corporation), the Peruvian Luis Carranza, had to resign a year before the end of his term. In his opinion, due to pressure from Argentine directors. One of them is the Secretary of Strategic Affairs of the Government, Gustavo Beliz, to whom they assign the intention to remain in office. Hard.
Carranza bore various reproaches. But the trigger was his decision to dispense with an official who is the mother of one of Evo Morales’ children. The government ended up getting involved in the maneuver at the request of the Bolivian leader. The ruling party is always attentive to lending a hand to the progressive forces: it also does so with Andrés Arauz, Rafael Correa’s dolphin in Ecuador, who plays his luck in the second round of April 11. Such solidarity and submission cannot be seen with other countries of a different political color. It was noticed in the bravado with which Alberto crossed his colleague from Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou.
Beliz planted another landmark during its participation in the IDB Annual Assembly. He developed a message of striking virulence against the current administration. He even called it shameful. It is in charge of the Cuban-American Mauricio Claver Carone, placed by Trump, against most of the countries.
The government’s course seems to be beginning to keep pace with the election year. The distance from Washington, the maintenance or promotion of progressive regimes, the hardening of creditors. The blame for the decaying state of the country only poured out on the opposition. Nothing that Argentina has not seen or heard in the so-called “decade won.”
The objective seems to be the consolidation of the electoral clientele. That religious third illustrated by the latest Isonomy survey. The favorable assessment of Alberto’s economic management is today at the same levels as Macri’s epilogue. Between 29% and 33%. It sounds like a miracle, with the pandemic involved.
Kirchnerization made the differential that Alberto knew how to contribute to reach La Rosada disappear for now. The pro-government experts at the polls trust in two things: that the economic improvement – very uncertain – will allow us to recover some of that; that the public return of Macri disrupts the opposition’s construction. An exaggerated bet to the limit.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/cristina-kirchner-already-governs/
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