MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Malvinas meant the end of the “military party” - Argentine VP stresses

“The homeland is not a question of ideology. The homeland is defended from all sides, from the right, from the left, from below, from the center”, CFK explained.

Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) and Lower House Speaker Sergio Massa presided over Congress' ceremony Saturday marking the 40th anniversary of the Falklands / Malvinas war.

 During the event in the Senate's Blue Room, the Argentine Parliament gave commemorative diplomas to the 17 war veterans who now work at the Legislative Palace.

“What did Malvinas mean?,” CFK wondered. “You, the ex-combatants were finally together with the Mothers [of Plaza de Mayo] the ones who gave birth to democracy and it was precisely Malvinas that put an end to the history of the military party in Argentina,” she pointed out.

CFK was referred to as “President” and not as “Senate Speaker” by Deputy Aldo Leiva, a war veteran himself who delivered a speech of his own due to that condition. “I am going to call her 'President' and not 'the President of the Senate.' For me she is my President,” said Leiva, thus stirring an already conflictive spirit among leaders within the ruling Frente de Todos (FdT) coalition.

Fernández de Kirchner, who was in fact Argentina's President between 2007 and 2015, Saturday addressed her gift to the incumbent Alberto Fernández on the day of his birthday and criticized Presidential aide Gabriela Cerruti, “so that later the spokeswoman [Cerruti] does not say that I don't give him anything.”

“I am going to recommend a book that I recommended to [Massa], who has not read it yet. It is a book called Diario de una Temporada en el Quinto Piso [”Diary of a Season on the fifth floor“ by Juan Carlos Torre]. It is a historical chronicle, it is not a literary work.”

The book -CFK went on- describes “the experiences of the first democratic government of '83, of President [Raúl] Alfonsín and the different economic teams” that succeeded each other in that administration, which led the country to its first hyperinflationary crisis in 1989.

The text “has to do with the packaged concepts sold to Argentines,” CFK added. Torre's work explains that when then-ministers Juan Sourrouille and José Luis Machinea intended to privatize the petrochemical pole, the World Bank replied that the United States would oppose it because it was against its interests that Argentina became competitive in that field. The US defends its interests. “The problem is us,” she stressed.

“What the United States does is to defend its interests,” CFK pointed out. ”I wish we all had the same attitude - In this world (...) we see that international law is applied selectively, where the great powers in the Security Council, with a permanent seat and the right to veto, apply the law if it suits them,“ CFK went on.

”[It] happened to us with the TIAR (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance) which obliged all countries in the continent to come to our defense when we were attacked in our territory by an extra-American power... None of that happened, because the world and geopolitics are not divided between good guys and bad guys. That's for Netflix,“ CFK underlined.

”We have to place ourselves in the reality of our homeland and from there look at the world and from there make decisions. And not to believe that there are good and bad guys: there are interests,“ she insisted.

”The homeland is not a question of ideology. The homeland is defended from all sides, from the right, from the left, from below, from the center”, she added.