MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Hawks & hooligans, the Kirchners' anti inflation plan

Hardliners have taken over the Argentine administration of President Mrs. Kirchner determined to a complete victory over the farmers in the current conflict, while pickets of hooligans have taken to the streets to intimidate businesses to moderate prices thus helping to combat the country's spiraling inflation.

This is the crude diagnosis of one of Argentina's main political analysts who regularly writes in the Buenos Aires press, Joaquin Morales Solá. "Moderates are an endangered species in the Kirchners' administrations; hawks have taken over the initiative and decision", writes Morales Solá who anticipated that together with the legions of (contracted) pickets "Kirchnerism" is ready to write a new manual on how to combat inflation. During the last round of talks with farmers the head of the "doves", cabinet chief Alberto Fernandez admitted errors in the controversial export taxes system and promised to have a solution in the following hours. This was said before twelve farmers' representatives, as well as repeating three times he had the express support from President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to decide on the issue. Timing of the possible agreement became then the issue: not before or on May 2nd, when the farmers' truce ended because the government couldn't appear yielding. Fernandez proposed May 25, the most significant date in Argentina's calendar and when Mrs. Kirchner is scheduled to make important political announcements. "Too distant, we have to give our people something before then" was the farmers' reply. "Let me see what I can do". However he later admitted he had no margin for such a decision. "I must consult at the highest political level". A few hours later he publicly denied any review of the export taxes and even the conversation with the twelve farmers' representatives. He bluntly blamed farmers for current inflation. The strategy of former president Kirchner and leader of hardliners was prevalent: he wanted farmers again blocking highways and trucks, causing food shortages and a hike in inflation. Morales Sola attributes this attitude to Kirchner's "ideological prejudice" towards camp which he visualizes as a small group of greedy, absentee landowners socializing in Buenos Aires elegant places conspiring against him and his wife. "A conspiracy approach" to history forgetting how the camp helped to recover Argentina, and his administration, and more important Argentine farm production has changed radically in the last thirty years, point out Morales Sola. "No moderate can possibly last in the Kirchners administration or immoderate can leave", confessed a member of Congress from the ruling coalition. Morales Solá anticipates that farm leaders will have to "discipline their grass root groups' emotions" so as not to endanger their overall soft strategy in search of public opinion support, or fall prey of Kirchners trap. Meantime in Buenos Aires the rented pickets (brown shirts) took to the streets to intimidate and force prices down as it did a couple of years ago with Shell and Esso and fuel prices. Morales Solá finally reveals that last March 25 when the people took to the streets of Buenos Aires to protest banging pans, "Federal Police was given precise instructions to abandon Plaza de Mayo so that "law and order" was left to the whims of Kirchners' pickets" who then beat up peaceful marchers. As the "hawks" gain positions, politics further twitches and Argentina is headed for an even more serious crisis, with the "brown shirts" as new, inevitable protagonists of daily life, concludes Morales Solá.