MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CFK warns of Argentina's third debt crisis

CFK also mentioned in a 33-page report the danger of Argentina's foreignization over the control of land, water, and natural resources.

Former Argentine two-time President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) described Javier Milei as a “showman-economist in the [Casa] Rosada.” In a 33-page document released on St Valentine's Day, CFK also spoke of the incumbent head of state's “failed officials” and warned that dollarizing the country's economy “would mean losing forever the possibility of development.”

“Borrowing capital to replace the capital destroyed by the crisis is not to remedy poverty, but to aggravate it; someone else's wealth is not the wealth of the country. Debt represents more poverty than wealth. To get into debt is not to get richer, but to expose oneself to impoverishment due to the ease with which other people's wealth is always spent,” CFK quoted Juan Bautista Alberdi, who is believed to be the Argentine version of Publius inspiring the wording of the 1853 Constitution.

Her study entitled “Argentina in its third debt crisis. Situation picture,” CFK argues that Argentina “is going through the third debt crisis incubated in the government of Mauricio Macri due to the brutal indebtedness contracted with investment funds, aggravated by the return of the IMF to our country with a loan of unprecedented and scandalous volume and conditions.”

“So far, the new government has only deployed a ferocious adjustment program that acts as a real destabilization plan and that not only feeds back the inflationary spiral placing society on the brink of a shock but will also irremediably provoke the increase of unemployment and social despair in a sort of planned chaos,” she also pointed out.

“It is more than evident that, in the President's mind, the only stabilization plan is that of dollarization. The measures adopted in any other theoretical framework cannot be explained,” she went on while voicing her concerns about the “unusual recycling of personalities and former officials” in Milei's administration, particularly Economy Minister Luis Toto Caputo, who was “the architect of the serial indebtedness of Mauricio Macri's government and of the return of the IMF to Argentina,” and adviser Federico Sturzenegger, a ”former president of the BCRA (Central Bank) during Macri's government and protagonist of the 'Megacanje' (swap) of the foreign debt together with [then-Economy Minister] Domingo Cavallo in [President Fernando] de la Rúa's government,“ CFK stressed. ”Recycling failed officials to re-edit failed policies can only lead to bad results,“ she foresaw.

Citing press rumors of a possible understanding between Milei's La Libertad Avanza and Macri's PRO in Congress, CFK warned that ”If the news is confirmed, we would be in the presence of the fourth government coalition due to the merger of Macri and Milei.“

Milei's vision about ”privatizations, indiscriminate openings, and deregulations” disregards the fact that the current world differs from the one Carlos Menem faced when he took office in 1989. Regarding Milei's failed Omnibus Law bill and his Emergency Decree (DNU) that is still in force pending Congressional and judiciary reviews, CFK said that “both instruments constitute a package of modifications to the Argentine legal system tailored to the main business groups and, what is even more serious, a disguised reform of the National Constitution” which could result in the “foreignization” of Argentina “over the control of land, water and natural resources.”

On the parliamentarian front, the “electoral result and the subsequent political divisions built up an even more fragmented Legislative Power,” CFK also underlined as she warned that every measure “adopted so far are repetitions of policies already implemented in the past, including some of them applied with the Parliament closed by the dictatorship.”

“All of them have failed miserably, causing only poverty and pain,” she heralded.

Interior Minister Guillermo Francos said CFK's remarks were “outrageous,” especially “after the disaster they have made.” In the Minister's view, CFK “has the nerve to express herself as if she were not responsible for anything.”

“Now it turns out that Milei is a creation of the press. In fact, he is a creation of 20 years of Kirchnerism in Argentina, which has plunged it into a situation of poverty and inflation,” Francos argued.

Fellow Minister Caputo was even harsher on social media: “Madam, it is never too late to learn,” he wrote in a message addressed at CFK. “Debt is only taken when there is a fiscal deficit, all the fiscal deficit of the last 16 years was generated by you in your 12 years of government, 8 as president and 4 as vice president.”

“Mauricio Macri managed to reduce that deficit during his term of office and Javier Milei directly eliminated it in one month,” Caputo went on. “I invite you to have a little dignity and remain silent while good Argentines make the enormous effort to endure and overcome the economic disaster of your last 4 years of government, undoubtedly the worst in Argentine history,” he went on.