MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bielsa blends politics and literature with K's blessing

Argentine Foreign Affairs minister Rafael Bielsa made his official debut Tuesday evening as head of the list of candidates for the Lower House of the City of Buenos Aires in the coming October mid term elections.

President Nestor Kirchner was present at the launching ceremony of Mr. Bielsa who is running under the banner of "Front for Victory", the political grouping which the Argentine president has created to compete with rival leaderships inside the ruling Justicialista party.

In his speech, Mr. Bielsa a lecturer in Philosophy and Literature appealed to his language mastery to attack previous administrations and praise the new country vision which Mr. Kirchner is trying to impose.

The time for "neat, peripheral, excluding capitalism is over", he said emphasizing that "taciturn democracy" has come to an end, "nobody comes this far just to manage bits and pieces".

"We've paid dearly to see smoke bulging chimneys of factories replaced by the puffs of cigars coming from offices where Argentine money is laundered to fiscal havens", stressed minister Bielsa.

Attacking his main competitors, both from the left and right, Mr. Bielsa said they wanted a return to the "merry years" of "sweet money" and blatant corruption of the sadly emblematic nineties of former president Carlos Menem, but this time proposing a "new moral contract" to launch Argentina.

"What moral contract was needed three years ago when a country in flames managed to keep moving on the imagination, solidarity and courage of its people?" "Who wants to walk next to those who preach a return to the nineties, saying that money is all you need; with money anything can be achieved?"

Mr. Bielsa said that as a proud Argentine he preferred the Argentina of (Nobel Prize winners) Cesar Milstein, Federico Leloir, Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Bernardo Houssay and Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and fiercely condemned former presidents Carlos Menem for his privatization policy and personal vanity; Fernando De la Rúa for the killings of December 20 and the helicopter (in which he fled Government House) and Rodriguez Saa, for defaulting and negligence.

Finally Mr. Bielsa praised some of Argentina's great writers, artists and scientists such as "Marechal, Borges, Bioy Casares, Coprtazar, Jauretche, Sabato, Piazzola, Favaloro and Almafuerte".

The "Front for Victory" is the same grouping behind Mrs. Cristina Kirchner's bid for a Senate seat in representation of the province of Buenos Aires, where she's competing with the wife of the other ruling Justicialista party's leader, former president Eduardo Duhalde, Chiche Duhalde.