MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

What a couple: “lefty hearts”, right wing pockets and can’t stop loving the poor

A most ironic column from novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dedicated to the Kirchner couple and their love for personal capitalist success.

What can bring together an Argentine farm leader and one of the most outstanding writers of the Spanish language: the Argentine presidential couple, “what a couple!”, and their personal wealth which skyrocketed in a few years.

The Kirchners love the poor so great, they can’t stop making them”, said Alfredo De Angeli, probably the most vocal and mediatic of farm leaders who have been in conflict with the Argentine Kirchner couple for more than 18 months over export taxes on windfall earnings.

“We farmers emphatically say that unemployment is the mother of poverty, and the Kirchner policies towards camp have only helped increase unemployment”, insisted De Angeli interviewed by a newspaper from his home province Entre Rios.

“The Kirchner couple did not become rich out of greed, but rather as an ideological lesson to the Argentine people”, said Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

In his Sunday column in Lima’s main newspaper El Comercio the novelist writes that the Kirchners are “two exemplary extraordinary capitalists that not only managed to successfully overcome the crisis which destroyed colleagues, but went even further in times of tragedy and bankruptcy, they managed to multiply their assets (from 2003 to 2008) seven times”.

The Kirchners fortune has become a national controversy in Argentina since opposition members of congress filed a complaint in court alleging “illicit” enrichment since the couple’s assets soared 158% in 2008 to 12,.1 million US dollars.

The Argentine couple’s assets soared following the sale of 16 plots of land in their hometown province of Santa Cruz for 3.8 million US dollars, which had been purchased to the provincial government for rock bottom prices.

“While the Kirchner couple made succulent deals, capitalism in Argentina was melting”, said Vargas Llosa adding ironically that this happened while the “ruling couple applies that peculiar philosophy which argues there’s no contradiction between practicing and taking advantage of a hateful system, while at the same time they operate from government promoting its ruin and extinction”.

In his column Vargas Llosa insists with the irony: “you tow-bit, mediocre and coarse capitalists, Madoff style, who like him should spend the rest of their lives in jail for ineptness, why don’t you learn”.

Learn from the Kirchner couple who “are real capitalists, audacious, ingenious, creative that when all those round them lost what they had and didn’t have, they were able to skyrocket their incomes showing that the system has resources and its ways to sort out the worst calamities and even make a profit out of the situation”.

He also criticized the fact that the Kirchner couple have a “lefty” heart while their pockets and the wardrobe of “Doña Cristina” are clearly “right wing” temptations, as well as the fact that a couple of “ordinary politicians” can become millionaires “in a whiff of time in spite of all the inclemency and foundering in their country”.

“Heroes and martyrs of capitalism, what a couple!!!” concludes Vargas Llosa.