Argentina

Cristina in the land of make-believe

May 1st 2008 | BUENOS AIRES
From The Economist print edition

Dashing hopes of change, Argentina’s new president is leading her country into economic peril and social conflict

EPA

SHE romped to an easy victory in last year’s presidential election by promising to maintain Argentina’s impressive economic performance while easing its social tensions and rebuilding its foreign relations. Yet just five months after Cristina Fernández succeeded her husband, Néstor Kirchner, in the Casa Rosada, Argentina is worse off on all three counts. Already, her government looks in disarray. It has provoked a tax revolt by farmers. On April 24th, it lost its most important new face when Martín Lousteau resigned as economy minister over a policy disagreement. The price of Argentina’s bonds has plunged as investors show little confidence in the government.

With the economy having grown at over 8% a year since 2003, when it began a vigorous recovery from an earlier financial collapse, Mr Kirchner basked in popularity. He was helped by record prices for Argentina’s farm exports but pumped up the economy further, with dollops of public spending and an undervalued currency. He brushed off worries about inflation, strong-arming businesses into freezing prices and ordering an underling to doctor the consumer-price index.

During her campaign, Ms Fernández led some analysts to believe that she would be more moderate than her combative husband. But any such hopes have been quickly dashed. She has kept most of his ministers, his policies and his rhetoric. According to unofficial calculations, inflation has reached 25% (officially, it is 9%).

Ms Fernández shows little sign of curtailing the dash for growth at any price. Mr Lousteau’s mistake seems to have been his intention to act on her campaign promise to restore credibility to official statistics. His replacement, Carlos Fernández, is a non-entity. In practice, Mr Kirchner himself seems still to be in charge of economic policy. “We don’t want a cooling of the economy because that always brought us unemployment, poverty, exclusion and economic concentration,” he told a recent rally of the ruling Peronist movement.

But overheating and inflation are already bringing Argentines some of these woes—and if unchecked will in time bring all of them. The statistics agency has stopped releasing poverty figures. Using an independent estimate of inflation, the poverty rate has risen from 27% in 2006 to 30%, with 1.3m Argentines descending into poverty last year, according to calculations by Ernesto Kritz, a labour economist in Buenos Aires.

To tame inflation and stabilise the economy, the government needs to allow the peso to appreciate, curb spending growth and energy subsidies, and raise interest rates. The longer such measures are postponed, the more painful and unpopular they will be.

Ms Fernández is already in a weaker position than her husband was. Several recent opinion polls give her an approval rating of only 35%. Mr Kirchner used lavish fiscal transfers to buy the support of provincial governors and mayors. But it is getting harder for his wife to match that.

To compensate for Mr Kirchner’s pre-election spending binge, in March she raised taxes on agricultural exports. Buoyed by record world commodity prices and a favourable exchange rate, farmers had hitherto grudgingly accepted the levies. But the tax increase, together with rising inflation, cut the profit margin on soyabeans to just 6%, for example. The farmers launched an unprecedented campaign of strikes, roadblocks and pot-banging protests in city centres.

Taken aback, Ms Fernández’s response was tellingly authoritarian and unstatesmanlike. She accused the farmers of greed and, improbably, of seeking a military coup. Government rent-a-mobs of piqueteros (unemployed protesters receiving state welfare payments) were unleashed against the farmers and their supporters. That backfired. “Cristina managed to do in three weeks what Argentina’s farmers couldn’t over 50 years: unite them,” says Gustavo Martínez of Salvador University in Buenos Aires. The farmers suspended their protests to allow talks to take place. The government seems to be seeking a way to back down.

Even in foreign policy, in which Mr Kirchner showed no interest, Ms Fernández has had little success. Her expressed desire to improve relations with the United States foundered on a complicated campaign-finance imbroglio. Last year customs officers at a Buenos Aires airport impounded $800,000 in cash being brought in by Guido Antonini Wilson, a Venezuelan-American who had arrived on a private plane rented by the Argentine government. Two days after Ms Fernández’s inauguration, American prosecutors charged five men who they said threatened Mr Antonini, who lives in Miami, and claimed to have evidence that the money was for her presidential campaign.

The president seemed to blame the United States government, rather than its courts, for what she called “a garbage operation” against her. A planned visit to Europe last month was curtailed because of the farmers’ protests. While foreign investment pours into neighbouring Brazil, Ms Fernández has done nothing to assure investors that they will enjoy predictable policies while she is in power. The government signed a contract this week for a $3.7 billion high-speed train from Buenos Aires to Córdoba, the first of its kind in Latin America, but it will be paid for with debt.

Ms Fernández still has plenty of time to correct her mistakes. She is blessed with a weak and divided opposition. Her husband has installed himself as president of the Peronist party, still Argentina’s most formidable political machine. But the first couple’s support is narrowing to not much more than the urban underclass organised by that machine.

After her bumpy start, Ms Fernández is being compared to Michelle Bachelet, the similarly hapless president of neighbouring Chile, with whom she is friendly. But at least Ms Bachelet is making her own mistakes. The suspicion in Buenos Aires is that Cristina is paying the price for her husband’s pigheadedness, even if that is something she shares. “The Kirchners’ golden age is over,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political consultant. “Now they’ll have to get used to it.”

editorial del diario The Economist (Gran Bretaña) del 2 de mayo de 2008

Fuente: El blog del doctor Lecter

Un pasito más, un pasito más……

Como la ciudad Gótica del hombre murciélago, con el 2008 se inicia por estos lares un nuevo ciclo, un país bajo el símbolo K, que se proyecta a lo largo y a lo ancho de los cielos argentinos. A la cabeza estará la bati-chica Cristinaque promete una lucha sin cuartel contra los viejos y conocidos personajes del mal: la bati-corrupción, la bati-inflación, la bati-pobreza, la bati-ignorancia, la bati-injusticia y las bati-enfermedades

En la foto se ve claramente las muestras de solidaridad de estos “piqueteros de la abundancia”  del hermano país de Tanzania.

En Lotería Nacional quisieron fumigar cucarachas y casi “exterminan” a los niños cantores

Cinco personas, entre ellas tres niños cantores, resultaron intoxicados y sufrieron problemas en sus vías respiratorias a raíz de la propagación de gases tóxicos por los conductos de ventilación en el edificio de la Lotería Nacional.

“El humo que provocó una pastilla de fumigación en una de las dependencias se propagó por todo el edificio”, explicó a la prensa el jefe de bomberos de la Policía Federal, comisario Alejandro Paz.

Paz precisó que los gases tóxicos “se expandieron a otros planos a través del sistema de ventilación”. El jefe de bomberos confirmó que como consecuencia de las emanaciones resultaron afectados en sus vías respiratorias cinco personas, entre ellos tres niños cantores, que fueron derivados a hospitales de la zona.

Fuente: www.perfil.com 4-4-08

Muy PRO: el macrismo quiere que los empleados públicos se vistan mejor

El legislador porteño del bloque macrista del PRO, Jorge Garayalde, presentó un proyecto de ley que pide que se obligue a los empleados del Estado a vestirse “correctamente, cuidando su indumentaria y aseo personal”. Todo por considerar a la “Administración Pública como una empresa de servicios”, y al ciudadano, como un “usuario”.

La parte más polémica de la iniciativa dice que los empleados deberán “utilizar trato y lenguaje correcto, respetando los derechos de los usuarios” y para saber qué es lo correcto, habrá que atenerse a ciertas ”obligaciones”. Quien no las respete, “será fácilmente reconocido” por las autoridades y, de esa manera, las quejas no serán hacia la “Administración”, sino orientadas hacia un posible “mal empleado, que a la sazón no la representa dignamente”.

Para el jefe de la bancada opositora del kirchnerismo en la legislatura porteña, Diego Kravetz, se mostró irónicamente “conforme” con la medida, “siempre y cuando la cumplan todos los funcionarios y diputados del PRO”. Incluso en el propio Gobierno porteño hay quienes consideraron “desafortunado” el proyecto.

Fuente: www.criticadigital.com 4-4-08

Fuente : www.danielpaz.com.ar

* El gobierno no es la Argentina. El gobierno gobierna la Argentina. Está, temporalmente, a cargo del Estado. Debe cumplir con una serie de obligaciones para hacerlo: respetar el resto de los poderes, no influir a los jueces, no gobernar por decreto de necesidad y urgencia en el legislativo, etc., etc.

—Cristina lee demasiado los diarios –me decía un amigo al finalizar el discurso.

—Haría mejor en leer algunos clásicos. Viviría más tranquila.

—Puede ser –le dije yo