MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

The Lady out of control: appeals to “Nazi, Mengele and anti Semitism” to attack the media

A big unanswered question CFK did not reply: where are the 2.4bn dollars invested in Aerolineas

Argentine president Cristina Fernandez used the words “Nazi, Mengele and a scent of anti-Semitism” to describe a couple of articles in Buenos Aires leading newspapers which revealed the ups and downs in ‘palace intrigues” and a second critical of the expanding power of her son Maximo Kirchner with the youth organization La Campora.

Coming from a proven and sharp solicitor, extremely careful in her wording as Cristina Kirchner has shown along her political career, the use of the terms, more appropriate to some of the ‘brown shirts’ picketers organized by her late husband, comes as a surprise.

“When the (conservative) right says your are Marxist and the alleged revolutionary left calls you right-wing, it means you are a consummate Peronist (Argentina’s hegemonic political movement)”, said the Argentine president in reference to the La Nacion article which describes a young economist, Secretary of Economic Policy and with direct access to her, Axel Kicillof as a “Marxist” and “great grandson of a rabbi originally from Odessa”.

“I felt an anti-Semitic scent”, said the president. “I don’t ask my staff what they think but rather what they think about the country. I ask from them capacity, contraction to work and honesty” she added.

Actually La Nacion column only referred to Kicillof’s academia background and his meteoric rising star in the president’s bunker, clearly displacing Vice-president Amado Boudou, once the darling boy who ascended by helping the Kirchner model to get hold of funds (i.e. plundering the private pensions scheme treasury) to keep the machinery working but now heavily involved in a major scandal over the recovery of a printing plant under administration, which allegedly has been or was to be contracted to print bills for the Central bank, tickets for the national lottery and ID and passports for the Interior Ministry.

Kicillof, 41, says the column, has direct contact with the president anytime; he is a brilliant thinker and workaholic, who has specialized in economics theory history and argued in his graduation thesis that Lord Keynes was a radical thinker “appropriated by the bourgeois analysts”. He believes that the teachings of economics in Argentine universities, as in the rest of the world, are but a technical façade of the ‘domination apparatus’ and thus all programs in Argentine economics academia should be modified.

Apparently Kicillof arrived at the Argentine Finance ministry’s second level with a team of economists who think similarly, but “quickly became the inspirer of presidential economic speeches” particularly the argument that the last military dictatorship was responsible for the dismantling of Argentine industry, only turned back with the arrival of the Kirchner couple in 2003.

La Nacion as part of this presentation also mentions his rabbi background, but more importantly argues that his growing presence and protagonist role in the conflicts with YPF (trying to take the company back from the private sector) and the nationalized pensions funds demanding government representative in the boards of those companies where the funds has shares, marks an end of the ‘ambiguous game’ of the Kirchners, particularly under the deceased president: wooing the private sector and big Argentine corporations while implementing a strong nationalist policy in those areas considered strategic (natural resources, transport, communications, public utilities).

With Kicillof ‘ambiguity is over’, writes La Nacion, and the old guard of heavy weights and their good contacts with the private sector are loosing predominance such as Federal Planning minister Julio De Vido and top officials from the ministries of Finance and Industry more adept to pragmatism and entitled to a strong quota of “corruption claims”.

La Nacion goes further and says that Kiciloff could mean the end to the equilibrium between the pragmatism and the more ideological wing of the Kirchners’ model, which he represents and looks ahead to a scenario of a “planned economy” for Argentina.

The loss of influence of Vice president Boudou because of his problems with the ongoing investigation was evident when “the rock guitar player was not invited to be present when President Cristina Fernandez met with Roger Walters”. Furthermore the president of the Central bank, Mercedes Marcó del Pont had taken advantage of the situation and replaced several of Boudou faithful with her people and had her way in the reform of the bank’s charter.

Likewise when Cristina Fernandez addressed congress on March first, the main auditorium was flooded with clouds of sky blue and white papers, some with the image of the president, some with ‘Malvinas Argentinas’ others with ‘YPF back to Argentina’ but also, many with the face of a smiling Boudou in what looked like 100 Pesos fiduciary bills.

Given the tight security and political control it is hard to believe that any group but from the palatial intrigue could have been involved. The Central bank president is known to be dragging her feet with the 100 Pesos bill contract and Interior minister Florencio Randazzo openly rejected signing a new contract for the printing of Argentine passports and IDs.

As to the Clarin piece, the heading reads the ‘callow from Aerolineas Argentinas’ and refers to the growing influence of La Campora the youth movement commanded by her son Maximo and which among other things has control of Argentina’s flag carrier. The carrier, says Clarin has received between 2008 and 2011, a total of 2.4 billion dollars ‘to take off’. However only 10% of those funds were used to renew the fleet and it seems more likely it has become the “great cash box” for La Campora, the emblematic grouping of ‘Cristinismo”, the more ideological version of “Kirchnerism”

Today the ‘young callow’ have 10 members in the Lower House; 6 members in provincial congress; 3 provincial senators; 15 national councillors; three city mayors and two Deputy ministers, Kiciloff in Economy and Julian Alvarez in Justice, plus control of the government’s news agency Telam and members in the boards of several private corporations including Techint, one of the country’s largest

Clarin points out that this accumulation of power is only possible because of President Cristina Fernandez through her sponsored “generation decanting”, many of them the children or relatives of the Montoneros (Peronist inspired guerrillas of the seventies) and which can be identified by “the same gene as their fathers”: certainly not the courage of their parents, in their historic error when they even defied General Peron, but in their arrogance.

Sitting over piles of government funds, such is the case of Aerolineas, they exercise their ‘desk militancy’ but unlike their previous generation that sent to the slaughter house thousands of convinced youngsters, this new version of the Montoneros ‘marvellous generation’ can be said to be leading with ‘an unarmed arrogance’.

“They don’t kill but indoctrinate unsuspecting youngsters and intoxicate them with a false epic”. They bawl annoyed, always with privileged access to public ceremonies, even the most solemn. They yell from power in support of power, and nobody knows what they are protesting about or who are they defying.

Maybe it is because Aerolineas is their great operational base: they don’t run, they fly and are they fast!!! They preach power and business, with no violence involved. Poor comfort for the heirs of the ‘epic story’ and managers of the flag carrier which continues to run with huge losses for the country. And they think that is pride, concludes Clarin.

Cristina Fernandez in her reply during a political rally said that the “best place for youth is politics” underlining that youngsters militancy such as La Campora “is the best thing, marvellous thing, that could have happened to this national and popular model”.

And in reference to the passage where it states that the young militants are self identified by “the gene of their Montoneros parents”, the Argentine president argued “it sounded very much like Mengele, very much Nazi”. (The Nazi doctor who experimented with prisoners in concentration camps.)

“The truth is that in another time (these newspapers) would have inspired fear, now it’s just pitiful”, she emphasized adding that is sounds like in the time of (former military dictator) Videla who’s policy was “to take the babies away so they wouldn’t be brought up by their (Montoneros) parents. They (Clarin and La Nacion) should know quite a lot about that”.

Cristina Fernandez argued that La Campora is not a “strong organization”, they only have 29 out 21.332 leading jobs in the administration of Argentina: “they will have to work much harder to be powerful”

“I’m telling the young militants not to worry about what they say of them from these centres that broadcast releases from big power that justified the military dictatorships and repression; you are the most marvellous thing of this national popular movement”.

Finally Cristina Fernandez criticizes the two pieces that say the young militants “don’t know what or who they are defying”. But, “they are wrong, they are defying those who have destroyed this country, those who want to monopolize the right to expression, who want economic concentration, misery and inequality”.