MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

School comic strips to depict the turbulent IMF/Argentina relation

Francis (IMF) conquers Patricia (Argentina), ruins the family business until the Kirchner couple come to the rescue

Argentina high school students are enjoying four comic strips, part of the official program, which satirizes the turbulent relation of the country with the IMF, presenting one of the works under the attractive name of “An intruder in the family”.

IMF is pictured as a US ladies man named Francis who takes advantage of Patricia, the young daughter of a successful entrepreneur, and finally takes control of the family’s business which he inevitably conducts to disaster and ruin.

The comics and scripts have been drawn by the Foreign Debt Museum, which depends from the University Of Buenos Aires School Of Economics and has the purpose of showing adolescents the risks which are implicit in taking too much debt.

The script of “An intruder in the family” is very simple and straight, an evil-motivated Francis who conquers Patricia, they marry, he gets rid of the father in law and under his leadership sends the company over the cliffs…until 2001 when the couple divorces.

At that point takes place the Argentine massive default followed by the strong IMF recommendations and recipes for ‘strangling’ belt tightening policies, which are definitively ‘buried’ when Argentina under the Kirchner couple pays in one lump all the pending debt (9.5 billion USD) with IMF in 2006, thus ending the evil submissive relation of decades.

“There are things we simply can’t allow them to happen again in the future, and new generations must be aware of the consequences if we allow the foreign debt to keep growing”, explained Alberto Barbieri, Dean of the School of Economics.

Another of the comic strips presents the evolution of sovereign debt in Argentina beginning in 1824 when Baring Brothers lend the Buenos Aires government £ 700.000 and concluding in 1976, when the military coup that opened the way for seven years of a ferocious dictatorship.

A third comic describes the indebtness saga from the military dictatorship (1976/83) to current days while the fourth enumerates the different education and social projects made possible, both in Argentina and Brazil with the sovereign bonds’ exchange and ignoring IMF sponsored policies.

The comics with the Argentine debt chronology are presented as the accounts of extra-terrestrial beings that arrive in Buenos Aires in the year 3668, erased by the “great nuclear holocaust” of 2268 which exterminated all human life on earth.

Aliens then discover that the annihilation of mankind was not only caused by the nuclear disaster, but a systematic “process of self-elimination” launched by the nations of the northern hemisphere in the last quarter of the XX century through the implementation of erred economic policies.

The account also points out to the fact that when the military dictatorship is forced out of office in 1983, it leaves a foreign debt legacy of 45 billion US dollars, six times the volume when they usurped power in 1976.