MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Uruguayan senator said that Argentina's crisis is “because it is full of Argentines” and caused a controversy

Left-wing senator Caggiani said that Mercosur “has a kind of brain death” due to the “problem of thinking strategically”.

The Senator for the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio (Broad Front), Daniel Caggiani, was interviewed by local Channel 12’s Desayunos Informales about the regional situation and the negotiation for an eventual Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Uruguay and China, which has generated tensions between Mercosur partners.

While analyzing Argentina's political situation and the evolution of its position on the subject, a journalist asked him “why Argentina has reached this point”, to which Caggiani replied: “Because it is full of Argentines”.

“Tough. It's going to happen to him like it happened to [former President] Jorge Batlle”, predicted the journalist, evoking the famous words of the former president, who in an interview with the international agency Bloomberg TV said that “Argentines are a bunch of thieves, from the first to the last”.

Meanwhile, Caggiani laughed and answered: “No, I don't know. Argentina's situation is complex because it is a very complex country from the point of view of its political structure”. The senator said that he travels “quite a lot” to the neighboring country, “especially to Buenos Aires and to the interior as well” and added that it is “super rich; it has all the natural resources, it has oil, it has gas”.

According to Caggiani, Argentina has reached this point because there are “very complex interests”, besides, “sometimes they do not know how to manage tensions”.

The phrase crossed the River Plate to the Argentine main media outlets: “A Uruguayan senator said that Argentina is bad 'because it is full of Argentines,'” Infobae headlined. “'I believe that we are two twinned countries, but we have important differences that are good to keep in terms of political culture and relationship', added the legislator for the Frente Amplio Daniel Caggiani”, adds the Argentine digital newspaper.

However, he underlined that sometimes Uruguayan politics “is Argentineized by some Uruguayan actors”, which “is not good”. On the other hand, he compared the relation between opposition and governments in both countries and said that his political party and empathized: “We [opposition] vote for laws when the ruling party does not even have a majority, where did you see that? Imagine that in Argentina”.

Likewise, when asked about the eventual opening of Mercosur in the event that Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva becomes President of Brazil, he stated that the regional integration process “has a kind of brain death” due to the “problem of thinking strategically”.

“The change of government in Brazil can achieve in a certain sense a strategic vision of the regional bloc and also of the region. That would be important, because today Brazil is a hollow: there is no political leadership and it is in a situation of very serious economic and political crisis,” he said.

He added that “as long as Brazil and Argentina do well”, Uruguay will also do well. However, “this is not what is happening today”, said the senator, referring to employment levels in neighboring countries.