South America

[blindpig]

Elections in Argentina: A Working Class Perspective
OCTOBER 31, 2023


Argentina's flag. Photo: Flickr.

By Taroa Zuñiga Silva – Oct 27, 2023

Constant debate, collective analysis, and organisation bear fruit, as the country prepares for the next round of polls on Nov 19.

A few days before the October 22 elections in Argentina, almost 90% of the polls indicated that the winner would be Javier Milei, the “insane” candidate of the Right—as described by Estela de Carlotto, president of the legendary human rights group Abuelas de Plaza Mayo (Grandmothers of Plaza Mayo). As it turned out, Sergio Massa (of the coalition Unión por la Patria – UP) prevailed over Milei by almost seven points. Massa and Milei will face off on November 19 in the run-off for the presidency of the country with South America’s second-largest economy.

On August 13, Milei prevailed over all the other candidates in Argentina’s primary. In the months between that election and the one in October, Massa—who is the Minister of the Economy in the current government—added three million votes to his tally.

Georgina Orellano, National General Secretary of AMMAR (Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina) told me how this phenomenon was experienced in Constitución, the area of Buenos Aires where the main headquarters of her organisation is located.

Sex workers organised themselves to monitor both electoral processes in the schools where it was their turn to vote. “In the PASO [primary elections],” she told me, “the worrying result was that the UP force came in third and Milei in first place.” However, this time, “we won in almost all the schools in the Constitución neighborhood.” In fact, “in all the polling stations where sex workers supervised the elections, Massa won.”

The Practical and the Theoretical
Elsa Yanaje, marketing director of the Instituto Nacional de Agricultura Familiar, Campesina e Indígena (National Institute of Family, Peasant, and Indigenous Agriculture) and member of the Federación Rural para la Producción y el Arraigo (Rural Federation for Production and Rooting) believes that the result of the PASO (primary election) was linked to two things: on the one hand, Milei’s communications success in being the only candidate who reflected underlying anger or weariness with the country’s economic situation. “It was about saying what is not said,” Yanaje said. That is, “what a citizen angry with the management [of the central government] could think.”

Yanaje said that in the PASO a vote to warn (more than to punish) was given to the current government. A vote that asked: “What kind of methodology are you going to use to reverse the situation or somehow guarantee some basic services?” Argentina is currently facing a strong economic contraction and high inflation rates, which have especially affected “those who were already below the poverty line,” says Yanaje.

In this context, Milei’s proposals “were somehow charming,” but in practice, Yanaje adds, “we knew that [they were] difficult to maintain.” Between the two choices, the leader explains, “What was reversed [with the new election results was]… a decision between the practical and the theoretical.”

The theoretical “was what Milei promised with his proposal of dollarisation, privatisation, etc.” When these promises were analysed by communities, it was evident that they were impossible to execute. This exercise of analysis, reflection, and debate was what led people to take their votes towards the practical: the candidate who was linked to the popular sectors was Massa, with more egalitarian proposals that appealed to more sectors of the population.

On the other hand, Orellano considers the results of October 22 to also reflect a popular rejection of Milei’s proposal to “take away rights.” “Many of us were born with a basic right to public health, to public education and we cannot conceive of living without them,” Orellano said.

During the last weeks of campaigning, Milei railed against these fundamental rights, including state subsidies to public transportation. “We learned that if the subsidy is removed,” Orellano told me, “we workers could go from paying 70 pesos to more than 1,000.” This type of data generated an awareness that was reflected in recent electoral results.

The Ballot
The second round of elections in Argentina will be held on November 19. Milei, in his first statements after the last elections, declared that his objective is “to put an end to Kirchnerism.” For Orellano, this call seeks to summon the votes of Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change), the extreme Right-wing coalition whose candidate, Patricia Bullrich, took third place in the elections. Milei’s campaign, Orellano explains, was built against Kirchnerism and “against [the] working class and trade unionists.”

Both Orellano and Yanaje are proud of the political work carried out during these elections. In the family, peasant, and indigenous agriculture sector, of which Yanaje is a member, there is no political campaigning, out of respect for the diversity of thought of the people it brings together. However, constant debate, collective analysis, and organisation bear fruit. “There was a reflection on what was coming,” she tells me. “We are defining the course of the country, so we had to stand firm. There was a lot of militancy.”

For AMMAR’s women, they campaigned in their neighbourhoods, talking to everyone. “For the second round, we are going to be active in all the provinces where we are organised,” says Orellano. They plan to increase the number of election observers in the schools of the municipalities where AMMAR has a presence.

Sex workers are aware of what is at stake with these two antagonistic proposals for the country. “We know what this denialist, fascist, violent, xenophobic, racist discourse represents being against diversity, against women, against feminism, and against the victories of the working class,” Orellano tells me. “So, we sex workers are going to do everything in our power to make sure that the next president of Argentina is Sergio Massa.”

https://orinocotribune.com/elections-in ... rspective/

Colombia’s Right Wing Wins Regional Elections
OCTOBER 31, 2023


Voting booths in Colombia. Photo: AP News.

The right took a step forward in most cities and departments in Colombia’s regional and local elections this Sunday. Despite the results, President Gustavo Petro stated that he will work with the elected governors.

The right won in Bogotá and Cundinamarca with the candidates Carlos Fernando Galán and Jorge Rey and in Medellín and Antonio, where Federico Gutiérrez and Julián Rendón were elected.

Meanwhile, in Barranquilla and Atlántico, Alejandro Char won as mayor and Eduardo Verano ascended to the governorship. In Valle del Cauca and Cali, Clara Luz Roldán and Dilian Francisca Toro were elected, respectively. Finally, in Cali, the Colombians elected Alejandro Éder as mayor.

Gustavo Petro’s Historic Pact party triumphed in Nariño, Cauca, Casanare, Puerto Carreño, Puerto Carreño, Magdalena, Chocó and Quibdó; Vaúpes and Mitú; and Amazonas and Leticia.

Petro stated that despite the results, his duty as ruler is to respect and abide by the popular will. He highlighted that “the Colombian people voted in peace.”

“They speak about my political defeat, and I only tell you one piece of information: the political forces that triumphed in my presidential campaign won in seven departments. Four years ago, we only affected one,” said Petro.

In addition, he congratulated the newly elected governors and urged them to work to jointly build a country that combats corruption and injustice. In that sense, he announced that they will meet in the coming days.

“Today, democracy spoke out and it is our duty as leaders to abide and respect the voice of the people,” said President Petro.

https://orinocotribune.com/colombias-ri ... elections/

[blindpig]

Libertarian Javier Miley came to power in Argentina

November 20, 8:32



In Argentina, far-right Javier Miley won the elections.
Of the promised innovations.

1. Argentina will not apply to BRICS.
2. The Argentine Foreign Ministry is going to sever relations with China and Brazil.
3. Argentina will develop relations with the United States and the “free world.”
4. Argentina will undergo radical banking reform.
5. Abortion will be banned in the country.

Thus, it was experimentally established that the 3rd pink tide in South America is officially over and another rollback has begun.
However, given the deplorable state of Argentina's economy, all this populism will face the same reality that Bolsonaro faced in Brazil.
For the Russian Federation, this only means that Argentina will temporarily drop out of BRICS projects. The US will try to play this card as much as possible.

As a forecast, Miley is a one-term president.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8777445.html

China just loaned Argentina $3B dollars......

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Álvaro García Linera: ‘In Turbulent Times, Moderation Means Defeat for the Left’
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 19, 2023
Iván Schuliaquer and Álvaro García Linera



Álvaro García Linera is an essential reference point for progressive politics in Latin America — as an intellectual for his writings on the state, revolution and plebeian politics, and as a politician for serving as Bolivian vice-president under Evo Morales between 2006-19.

Iván Schuliaquer interviewed García Linera for Anfibia’s podcast, “Batalla Cultural”. Garcia Linera discussed the current deadlock in the struggle for hegemony, the failures and horizons of progressive politics in Latin America, and the growth and limitations of the right, insisting: “There is always a progressive way forward.”

Latin America has mostly centre-left or left-wing governments, even in countries such as Mexico and Colombia that were not part of the first wave of left governments at the start of the century. However, this second wave seems a long way away from generating the kind of hegemony the left had a decade ago. Why is that?

Yes, we had a so-called first wave at the start of the 21st century, with the emergence of progressive governments in Argentina with Néstor Kirchner, Ecuador with [Rafael] Correa, Bolivia with Evo, Lula’s first term [in Brazil]. This wave began in 2003-2004 and included Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Paraguay. This progressive wave was largely sustained through huge social mobilisations. Such waves of mobilisation are decisive for understanding how societies behave, because they help break down pre-existing ideas regarding what is possible, what is credible, what is up for discussion. If a progressive government is able to ride the back of such a wave, then the chances for transformation are much greater. This was followed by a moment of retreat and exhaustion, and the return of conservative governments in Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. From 2018-19, a second progressive wave began, one that is more extensive, geographically speaking, because it encompasses Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina but also Mexico, Chile and Colombia. This second wave is more expansive territorially, but it has different characteristics. While more expansive, it is more superficial in its density.

There are several reasons for this. One is that this wave is perhaps more exhausted. The first wave was very intense and filled with hopes for great reforms. This is not the case with the second wave, where the left has turned up to the fight in an already exhausted state. It faces a more cohered right that has reorganised after the defeats of 2003, 2005, 2010. It is a more arrogant right: it takes to the streets, wages cultural battles on its own terms, mobilises, takes over social media, is more aggressive and pokes at the wounds left behind due to mistakes made by the left and progressives when they were in power. This was something it was not able to do previously as the left was largely spotless because we had not been in government. But once in government you are always going to make mistakes and miss things. And the right is always there to rub salt into those wounds and try to ensure they never heal. This second wave was also not accompanied by large mobilisations (with the exception of Colombia, which is also where the most radical steps have been taken). This is not a wave that emerged on the back of mobilisations. For example, what we saw in Chile was a complete retreat from mobilisation; what we have today is a hangover [from previous mobilisations], there is nothing to push Boric.

What we have are somewhat tamer progressive parties and more moderate leaders. We are dealing with progressives that seek to administer rather than transform. During the first wave, progressives sought to rupture the status quo. Everything revolved around the left: there was a new political system, a new system of ideas, a new economy. The progressives that make up the second wave seek to administer the status quo: “Settle down guys, let’s administer what we have and just tweak a little bit here and there”. They want to be part of the political system, while the first progressive wave did not want to be part of any political system; back then, progressives were the political system. Everything revolved around them. In contrast, the second progressive wave has as a medium term goal of carving out its own space within the political system. These progressives have become more timid, more calculating and more compromising. They are more easily placated. Because of this, because of its leaders’ lack of strength to push forward, because of the absence of mobilisations, it is a left that wants to preserve what exists rather than conquer new gains.

And, of course, the right never forgives: if it sees that you are weak, if it sees that you have stopped to take a rest, it goes for the jugular. It has always acted like that. Some leaders do not see it that way, they believe it is possible to coexist in a civilised manner with the right. No, the right never forgives; they want to bury us. When you are strong, they put up with you. But when you are no longer strong, they go after you and start dancing on your grave.

This second progressive wave is weak, lacking in density and, I would go as far as to say, temporary. My hypothesis is that, in these liminal times, we are going to have short-lived lefts and short-lived rights: we are going to have short-lived hegemonies, left and right, until at some point our destiny realigns itself with one side or the other, and a long 20-30 year cycle begins.

These waves seem to coincide less in time across nations. By this I mean the shift between (hard or extreme) right-wingers and more timid progressives. Where do you think all this will be resolved and how? I assume this has to do with the capacity to come up with political responses based on generating a correct diagnosis of the situation and proposing some kind of solution, but my question also has to do with whether that solution will necessarily be democratic.

I believe that we are in a moment of global structural transition. Latin America inaugurated this transition with the model it began developing for accumulating wealth, distributing it, producing it, and legitimising these new relations. The free market neoliberal model was inaugurated in the ’80s, replacing the welfare state (or developmentalist) model that began in the ’40s. Now, the neoliberal model has entered a period of turbulence: it has not disappeared, but it is beginning to crack. It no longer generates the enthusiasm it used to. This was the context in which the global crisis of 2008 occurred. Then came Covid. Then the war in Ukraine. So, now you have economies around the world feeling around, looking at what’s on the horizon and introducing hybrid policies. You had [former US president Donald] Trump who advocated for protecting America — “America first” he said. Then along comes [US president Joe] Biden, a “progressive”, who says: “We are going to build American bridges, roads, mobile phones, electric cars, with American raw materials and American labour.” This would have been viewed as madness 20 years ago, as failed Communist archaism. Now Biden is subsidising the economy; the Europeans are also dedicating 3, 4, 5% of their GDP to subsidising energy and industry.

A search has begun for new alternative models. For now we are in a hybrid period: free trade policies are mixed with protectionist policies, globalisation policies with subsidy policies. It is confusing. Latin America is in the middle of this vortex, this global rearrangement. We still do not know what the new model of accumulation will look like. Some say: “Let’s go back to the palaeolithic laws of the free market, let’s go back to the glorious ’90s where everything was privatised and borders were open for trade.” Others say: “No, let’s do a mix, let’s have elements of both globalism and protectionism.” China says: “Wait a minute, gentlemen, what we need is free market policies with a single party system.” Given no one is certain what the best option is for the future, they are trialling things.

The collapse of the old regime and the search for a new economic and political regime will take another decade. This is normal. We have been immersed in a global systemic chaos since 2010. My guess is that we still have another decade or so until a new model of accumulation emerges. Will it end up being a hybrid of free market and protectionist policies? That seems to be at least what most developed countries are aiming for. Will it be the Chinese model of free market policies with less liberal-democratic freedoms? Will it be another Latin American-style progressive model? Or will it involve a return to free market policies, though now no longer relying on seduction but rather the stick to keep down the insubordinates? Which one will triumph? Ultimately, it will be the one that gains the most vigour, the one that wins the broadest social support, and the one that stabilises the economy in the long term. Whoever manages to provide certainty in a world that has become uncertain and taken away people’s ability to plan their future will have the greatest chances.

I think the solution will be planetary. You asked me at the beginning about the first wave: Latin America emerged with a lot of strength, but we were not accompanied by the rest of the world, which was still busy glorifying the free market. These things are not solved regionally. Latin America will not be able to go it alone. Just as in the ’40s and ’80s, this will be resolved globally. Any new model of accumulation that generates stability, growth, wealth distribution and political legitimacy will obtain a global reach. What will it look like? There are all kinds of possibilities. Some neoliberals are even advocating an authoritarian neoliberalism that borders on fascism — solve problems and guarantee stability by privatising everything while ignoring social demands.

For quite some time now you have been saying that all this is going to be resolved in the sphere of the economy. Given this podcast is called “Batalla Cultural” (Cultural Battle), I want to ask if you think that sometimes there exists a somewhat voluntarist idea that everything can be resolved through cultural battles (as if this could be separated off from the economy), leading to a loss of sight of more material issues. To what extent do these progressives you were talking about see material issues as their core priority? Should the new agenda they need (and perhaps do not have) be linked to this?

Resonating in my head is a powerful phrase uttered by a Russian revolutionary 100 years ago: “Politics is concentrated economics.” Culture, and the cultural and political battle, is concentrated economics — with other symbols, other gestures, but the economy is ever present. The economy is also sublimated politics and culture. It is one and the other: they are intertwined. It is not the case that if you solve the economy you automatically solve politics. To solve the economy you need politics, ideas, intellectual frameworks, foreseeable prospects. Politics is fundamentally a dispute over foreseeable prospects; over the monopoly of foreseeable prospects.

What do I mean by foreseeable prospects? I mean the ability to imagine what’s likely to happen in the next year or two: are you going to be able to save, to travel, to buy a bike, to be able to buy better clothes for your daughter, to be able to feed her better. That’s what makes the economy work: belief in what will happen in the future enables you to save, to make sacrifices at work, to put up with a reduction in your salary or look for another job with a higher salary. Whether you buy more or less at the supermarket is driven by people’s beliefs. We need to see this as a dynamic combination. We need to fight for ideas, for foreseeable prospects, but for this to have a solid basis, to have credibility and practical feasibility, it must be accompanied with more money in people’s pocket, lower inflation, savings in banks, good salaries. If there is no correlation, my foreseeable prospects vanish. And vice versa: if my salary, income and savings are not accompanied by a vision, it will be ineffective and not last. Both are needed. The cultural battle is itself an economic battle and the economic battle has components of a cultural battle. Solving one helps solve the other, and vice versa. You will never carry out transformations if you do not walk on both We had the pleasure of interviewing you three years ago. It was a different time as we were amid the pandemic. Much of your theoretical reflections then had to do with the role of the state and the centrality that the state was regaining. Market fundamentalists all of a sudden turned to the state to beg it for help. We also saw a revival of people’s primary impulse to ask the state for protection. At that time, you said a phrase to me that has to do with what we are talking about: “A temporary moment of creativity and social articulation has opened up across the world. If left forces do not do their job, do not make an effort to take this seriously, a saviour-like or authoritarian scenario could easily impose itself over time in these cracks. Authoritarian outcomes, as we are seeing in some Latin American countries, could well spread and expand throughout the world”.

We had the pleasure of interviewing you three years ago. It was a different time as we were amid the pandemic. Much of your theoretical reflections then had to do with the role of the state and the centrality that the state was regaining. Market fundamentalists all of a sudden turned to the state to beg it for help. We also saw a revival of people’s primary impulse to ask the state for protection. At that time, you said a phrase to me that has to do with what we are talking about: “A temporary moment of creativity and social articulation has opened up across the world. If left forces do not do their job, do not make an effort to take this seriously, a saviour-like or authoritarian scenario could easily impose itself over time in these cracks. Authoritarian outcomes, as we are seeing in some Latin American countries, could well spread and expand throughout the world”.

Almost visionary (laughs). I maintain the general spirit of that idea. When the old systems of political legitimation and organisation of the economy start to collapse, to stumble, as has occurred with neoliberalism, elites and societies start to look for options of all kinds, including progressive ones. Bold leaders who understand the moment can seize such moments and take courageous steps in the economy: nationalise, distribute and lift people out of poverty.

But also present are reactionary proposals that say: “No, if neoliberalism is currently not working it is because it has not been implemented correctly; it has been perverted. We have to return to the original core of true neoliberalism, which is absolute market and zero state.” If a progressive government administering the state not only fails to resolve people’s anxieties and even exacerbates them, then of course you will find people willing to listen to those reactionary proposals and think that maybe the solution is to go backwards. That is what, in his own way, [Jair] Bolsonaro represented [in Brazil]. He privatised what was left of Petrobras and the electricity company, but found that the crisis had still not been resolved. It is logical that in these times of uncertainty, where the old global model no longer works, even more authoritarian proposals will emerge. These responses will gain greater strength if progressives in government do not solve people’s problems. This will encourage the palaeolithic neoliberals to say: “Hey, zero state, zero taxes, zero subsidies, let’s go back to the original model. Because, look, when there was a state, inflation doubled, the currency lost its value. Let’s go back to what we had before.”

In general, conservative, authoritarian and racist proposals will emerge in this interregnum. Why authoritarian? Because neoliberalism tells us: “It is someone else’s fault that we are in bad shape, it is because of the state, because of taxes. We are going to have to turn our backs on those who advocate protection and the state. There are too many rights for women, too many freedoms for trade unionists, too much disorder and too many migrants taking our jobs.” Neoliberalism today views the problems through a repressive framework and sees a return to the market as the solution. It is a different neoliberalism to that of the ’80s, which said: “There is no alternative, gentlemen. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Come with us. This is the only way.” That was an expanding neoliberalism that sought to seduce. This one is different, it is coercive: “If you do not allow us to punish you, we will build a jail for you like [El Salvador President Nayib] Bukele’s one”. Its language is different. The economic recipe is still the same, but its discursive narrative is one of punishment, hatred and repression.

This is occurring all over the world, but such proposals acquire a wider audience and tend to become more plebian (a curious phenomenon) when, on top of this, it is preceded by a failure of progressives, by a failure of statism. When the government that generated the unrest is right wing it is more difficult for them; they cannot justify their actions. Authoritarian neoliberalism exists, but acquires greater social presence if a progressive government has failed to fulfil its promise. That is why progressive politics cannot seek to be just another party of the moderate administrative establishment. In turbulent times, moderation means defeat and failure. Progressives are obliged to accelerate history, to transform and take risks. If they moderate themselves, the problems will not be solved. And then the “solution” will become dismantling the state, which means dismantling people’s rights because the state is what society has in common. It is the repository of what a society has built over decades and centuries of struggles and uprisings, of failures and mobilisations. That is why it is a hindrance to neoliberalism.

Neoliberals want to replace it with “the private sphere”. But no nation is a simple sum of private owners — that is a market. A nation is the sum of our victories, our sport, our struggles, our wars, our emancipations, our mobilisations, our concerts, our collective satisfactions, which have been sedimented and accumulated as rights, as historical narrative, as heroes, as national tradition. In a country solely composed of property owners, the biggest wins out. The biggest property owner will always abuse smaller ones. But a country with things in common finds in the commons a way to resist the voracity of the biggest, to place brakes on the most powerful. Without these commons, the biggest devour you, pulverise you, crush you in order to become bigger. Because the one who has more property has more options to buy you. What stops this voracity is the commons, which is not property and belongs to everyone. Ambiguous, abused, sometimes misused, but the state is the brake that societies have to stop large property from crushing them. At the continental level, we are in a very complicated situation and it will become even more complicated if progressives fail. Authoritarians will be welcomed into government.

And if these authoritarians arrive and implement their agendas from the state, what is left for supporters of a progressive, left-wing, national-popular agenda to do?

These authoritarian, repressive neoliberals represent a kind of Jurassic Park. The world is moving in a different direction. Look at how Biden is governing: he has passed laws to subsidise industry and ensure the US has the power to challenge China in areas of biotechnology, microchips, artificial intelligence and national security. I’m not talking here about a subsidy of 0.1% of GDP, I’m talking about 3, 4, 5% of GDP a year. The US is implementing protectionist policies in order to compete with China. This is not a type of Keynesianism, but the US has realised that in geopolitical terms, if it does not boost its industry, it is going to become little more than a Chinese-run supermarket. Europe is also doing the same, dedicating 3.5% of its GDP annually to subsidise industries and planning to ban certain products. Europe and the US are turning towards protectionist policies while continuing to support their own capitalists. In Latin America, some countries (such as Brazil under Bolsonaro) wanted a return to the ’90s, but this proved to be archaic. That is why they are a kind of Jurassic Park: if authoritarianism comes to power, it will mean three or four years of extravagance that can do a lot of damage. They are a time warp back to the past. But I do not see much future for them. Structurally and globally, these Jurassic Park experiences have no future in a world that is combining free market policies with protectionism.

What is left therefore for progressive forces? To do what they have always done but more boldly. They need to understand that it is time to fight, to struggle for what they consider their rights. I think Latin America has to understand that the third wave cannot be a melancholic memory of the first. The first wave fulfilled its function. Those of us who were part of it did our job. And that’s that. We need new leaders, with different ideas, with different proposals, with a different audacity. Because the world we faced at the start of 2005 is very different from the one we face now. What we did changed our countries, but we cannot keep repeating the same speeches, singing the same tunes. A colleague said to me: “We need new tunes.” I like that. We need another melody for the coming wave. That means new leaders who respect what we did in the past, but who can move on and go further. They can not be the same as us, they need to go down in history with their own personality.

Those of us from the first wave who are alive should support them, because we are dealing with a new generation, a new historical moment, new needs and new anxieties. We understood what country we were in and we did what we could. People will remember that we did good things. But the country is different now. In Bolivia, we came to power with 60% poverty. Now we have 35% poverty. It is a different country with different expectations; a new generation of youth with different experiences. They have the internet, they have social media; I did not have that. The young people who are now between 15 and 20 years old do not know who I am. Their parents, who were very poor and could not afford to eat two meals a day, now eat three meals a day and have other expectations. The new leaders have to understand these young people who are looking for other things, different paths for social advancement, different types of consumption.

Societies have improved recently in terms of rights, but they have regressed in terms of formal employment status. We have to take these informal workers, who make up 50% of the workforce, into consideration. Inflation affects them. The new wave of progressives will have to speak to those who do not have formal employment, who do not have a union, who do not have a fixed income; to those young people who do not know what we did 20 years ago.

If conservatives and authoritarians return to power then we will have to fight, once again, from below and for all, just as we did before. But the “all” of today is different from that of 20 years ago. We need leaders who understand these new people and their most concrete anxieties when it comes to their dreams, recreation, food, remuneration, and we need to organise to build struggles, resistances, mobilisations around these. I am certain that authoritarian neoliberals are not going to solve people’s problems. They failed to do it 20 years ago and ended up having to flee in helicopters, so why would they be able to solve them today? What has changed in the neoliberal recipe book? Nothing. They will simply generate more suffering and injustice. We need leaders who have the capacity to bring together that suffering and convert it into collective action.

People will probably give these new rulers a blank cheque for one or two years. But that blank cheque has an expiry date. I am not talking here about a communist conspiracy — I am talking about ordinary people’s common sense.We will need to be there, at that moment, when the people tear up that bad government’s blank cheque and start expressing their desires for collective, rather than individual, improvements. The new leaders must be there to bring these struggles and expectations into a new program of progressive reforms. I believe my hypothesis that any rise of authoritarianism will be short-lived, like Bolsonaro’s, will remain true for this decade. This should allow space for the emergence of a new progressive project, one with new faces, new discourses and new organisational forms. The new generation of leaders must have the courage to assume these new challenges, without melancholy or nostalgia for the past. Respecting the past, but with enough audacity and creativity to undertake necessary transformations in the present that point towards the future they imagine.

That is why I am optimistic in the medium term. Because neoliberalism, even if it builds a lot of prisons, is not going to solve people’s problems. We already know that it failed before. People need to go through this experience, but they need to know how to find ways to channel their resistances and disappointments towards a new historical optimism, a new progressive wave that can resolve people’s anguish. Is it possible to resolve these anxieties with progressive solutions? Of course it is. Inflation in Bolivia (“we are populists, we are Indianists” they said) is 2% a year. Do you know at what rate our economy grew for 17 years? 4.5% a year. This is what populists and progressives can do. We reduced poverty by half. Populisms can solve people’s problems. That is what they exist for: to solve the real problems of the people, of the poorest, the most humble, the abandoned people. There is always a progressive alternative. We nationalised industries, we raised taxes, we took profits from the banks and invested them in industries. There will always be technical issues regarding political economy to resolve, but if you take the side of the poor and say, “It is not that the rich are my enemy, but that in these times of crisis it is up to them to open up their wallets so that the poor can eat”, then there will be better times when it will not be so necessary to do this. But when there are problems, the solution to the distress of the poor lies in the wallets of the rich. There needs to be leaders who dare to do this with audacity and strength. Are there progressive solutions to inflation and informal employment? Of course there is. We just need to seek them out, to invent them. What we cannot say is that there is no alternative. In times like these, it should be banned to say thast.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/11/ ... -the-left/

[blindpig]

FIRST CARDINAL POINTS ABOUT MILEI'S VICTORY IN ARGENTINA

Franco Vielma

Nov 20, 2023 , 4:34 pm .


Just hours after winning the elections, Milei has promised to eliminate the Central Bank and privatize state media and companies (Photo: Télam)

According to the electoral results in the Argentine presidential elections this Sunday, November 19, the far-right economist Javier Milei won the second round of the vote by obtaining nearly 55.7% of the votes, with 98% of the tables counted. —at the close of this analysis—, and thus defeated the ruling party Sergio Massa, who added just over 44.3% of support.

Milei's electoral victory is clear across the board. This is a result that reaffirms the solid tendency that the character brought, dominating the public conversation. Indeed, it could be considered that in the final stages the presidential election of the southern country was based on whether Milei won or lost the election, since it acquired extremely polarizing nuances.

The defeat of the ruling party was immediately recognized by Massa, who said he had called the president-elect to congratulate him. He said that his country would make way for a "democratic transition" and a change of command.

In just a couple of years, Milei went from being an economist who attracted attention on TV shows with his libertarian ideas to being the elected president of Argentina.

He himself defined his short career and large victory in a presidential runoff as a "miracle." "Thanks to the team that has been working for two years to transform Argentina and to achieve the miracle of having a liberal libertarian president," Milei said in his first speech after being chosen.

He won without having government experience, but he has taken his place as an outsider and as a disruptive reference. Therefore, it is important to analyze some of the main causes of this result.

1. THE MATHEMATICAL TRANSFER
In the PASO, Milei obtained just over 7.1 million of the 35.4 million that make up the Argentine electoral roll, according to official results, which gave him 30% of the vote.

Milei retained the support achieved in the primaries and reached the first round of the presidential elections with some 7.8 million votes, growing just over 10% but obtaining 29.9% of the total.

Sergio Massa obtained 36% of the support in the first round and won that measurement by totaling some 9.6 million votes.

However, in the second round, even increasing his vote to more than 11 million, Massa could not match the more than 14 million obtained by Milei.

The far-right managed to double the amount he obtained in the PASO and that could be considered the most important statistical rebound recorded in Argentine presidential elections since the current democratic era. Indeed, Milei has become the candidate with the most votes in this type of vote in the history of the country.

The mathematical correlation makes it clear that there was an effective transfer of votes from Patricia Bullrich to Milei, after the right-wing agreement that occurred when Mauricio Macri decided to support him. Note the important flaw in the origin of Milei's "anti-caste" speech, who could now be considered to owe his victory to the support that "macrism" has given him, through the traditional party Together for Change.

This is an important element to highlight given that this is where the analysis of disruptive or outsider candidates lies . In the case of far-right figures, as has been the case with Milei, the decisive factor has turned out to be precisely the pact between the right and the effective transfer of votes through similar political affiliations and identities in the groups of voters, especially due to the rejections of the left or social democratic parties.

Although Milei is an electoral phenomenon in itself, it had a consolidated core of only 30%. Important, but not majority. Now suddenly the support of the Macrista "caste", but especially of its base, changed the correlation.

Argentina is a clear new example, just as Brazil and the United States were, that their disruptive leaders managed to be the majority by positioning themselves over traditional right-wing electoral forces.

The right, and even their own parties, traditional, conservative, quite "chaste", continue to win elections under ultra denominations with a fresh and disruptive appearance.

ARGENTINA IS A COUNTRY THAT IS CLEARLY ILLUSTRATING THE CRISIS OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

2. ALBERTO "THE LUKEWARM"
In Argentina, the general level of the Consumer Price Index registered a monthly increase of 8.3% in October 2023, and accumulated a variation of 120% so far this year. In the year-on-year comparison, the increase reached 142.7%.

For the economy of the southern country, these are quite high figures, they fall directly on the management of President Alberto Fernández and the official candidate Sergio Massa himself, who serves as Minister of Economy.

The Argentine economic scenario is also determined by a complex exchange system, with seven different types of official exchange rates for various sectors. This influences the chaoticization of price systems, which is contained by superficial and weak regulatory mechanisms.

These combined elements, in political matters, are understood in Argentine public opinion as features of a governance crisis and delay of adjustments, which have been postponed time and again due to the electoral variable.

The underlying issue in the current scenario of the Argentine economy lies in the debt that Macri inherited from the country to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Fernández did not achieve better agreements with the creditor body and the public budget is dealing with a high cost of debt service.

Outside the economic sphere, Cristina Fernández, who was the main official reference, ended up politically handcuffed by the lawfare against her. But she also failed to maneuver in her own government. Now the leader is dealing with a high level of delegitimization in front of large electoral segments.

In Argentina, the judicial institutions function as a political party and were never really intervened by the ruling party.

The transversal denomination of Alberto Fernández's government as "lukewarm" has many designations, and these are just some of the most notable.

From the left there is almost a consensus that the structural weakness in the political coordination of the "moderate" Alberto has taken its toll. The social democratic policy of the ruling party did not manage to reinvent itself, it did not achieve a disruptive or attractive political offer. They had little or nothing to offer, while the economic and political crises deepened the dysfunctionality in the representativeness of the ruling party.

One of the most illustrative phrases of the shortcomings of the Alberto Fernández era came precisely from Javier Milei when his victory was barely known:

"The situation in Argentina is critical. The changes that our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, for lukewarmness, for half measures."

Milei, who will apply an absolutely draconian shock scheme on the economy and institutions, has clearly decided to deploy from the right a political offer of forceful actions that was not seen from the political angle of the left in the Fernández government.

3. CRISIS OF REPRESENTATIVENESS
Argentina is a country that is clearly illustrating the crisis of representation that exists in political parties and social institutions.

This country has become electorally oscillating and now lurches between left-wing and right-wing governments. Ideological visions are not being imposed on politics and on the country, the electorate is leaning towards the best political offer, whatever it may be.

The accumulation of crises in the Argentine representative system has had Milei as its worst creation. He wins an election for making disruptive proposals and despite offering policies that, without a doubt, will unfold chaos and institutional crises.

Juan Elman, Argentine journalist, expressed a brief and lapidary assessment from his account on platform


In fact, many of these instances of influence in Argentine life were against Milei, but he managed to overcome and overcome them, not because of his own attributes but because of his "anti-caste" offer that he centralized in his political discourse, as he managed to interpret the crisis and exhaustion in the main representation systems.

Hence, the Argentine issue must be considered not as a simple crisis of parties: it is a crisis of uncertainty and general representativeness, an unequivocal trait of exhaustion of the model.

4. THE BREAKUP PROMISE
In addition to promises of economic liberalization, destroying the Central Bank, closing ministries or once again criminalizing abortion, Milei used an anti- establishment speech with harsh criticism of what he calls the "political caste."

"Milei managed since his emergence into the public arena, when he was elected deputy, to differentiate a very different political narrative, confrontational of the system," Argentine political scientist Sergio Berensztein tells BBC Mundo .

"They are the famous anti-establishment candidates that we have seen in different parts of the world: the most typical is obviously Donald Trump (in the United States) or Jair Bolsonaro (in Brazil)," he adds. "Milei can join that global movement, where there is a reaction to the established order."

That disruptive speech allowed the Argentine president-elect to attract voters fed up with the government and the political class, despite the uncertainty and fear that his proposals cause in many others. He managed to overcome fears, proposing revenge, messianic promises and daring actions.

Milei especially excited young people who were a key pillar of his victory. Different surveys during the campaign showed that the younger the age of the voters interviewed, the more support for Milei grew.

In reality, Milei is not "anti-caste", understanding that the real caste in Argentina is the economic, cultural and institutional powers that de facto govern the country. Many of these factors are not even Argentine, since they operate as transnational elements. Milei will rule with them and for them.

In addition, he has formalized his membership in the "caste" by achieving his election through the Macri party, in what will be a form of co-government that will be deployed in the parliamentary power, in a part of the Executive Branch and in the backstage of politics. real.

Milei has never been and will never be "anti-caste", but in this election that was not relevant. He managed to sell the disruptive story, positioned himself as an outsider and managed to interpret the discontent and anger formulated from the crisis of representation. All of this, as a combination, was a very effective vehicle to build narrative, strong ideas and electoral offer.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/pr ... -argentina

ARGENTINA: FIRST PRIVATIZATIONS ANNOUNCED BY MILEI AFTER HIS VICTORY
Nov 20, 2023 , 12:56 pm .


The president-elect has already advanced the first round of privatizations (Photo: CNN)

The leader of La Libertad Avanza, Javier Milei, won the runoff that took place this Sunday, November 19, with 55% of the votes against the official candidate Sergio Massa. During his first statements after the victory, he spoke about the privatizations of some state companies, as well as possible members of his cabinet.

According to Página/12 , he said that he will privatize the oil company Yacimientos Petrolófilos Fiscales, SA (YPF), Public TV, the Télam news agency and Radio Nacional and other public companies. On the other hand, he ratified his plan to close the Central Bank; Regarding dollarizing the country he said that it will not be an immediate measure.

In relation to the oil company YPF, he specified that "as long as these structures are rationalized, they are put to create value so that they can be sold in a very beneficial way for Argentines." Regarding the privatization of health and education, he also expressed that it will not be done in the short term.

"We are going to govern with the law. Those who want to maintain their privileges with violent methods will not maintain them and will receive the appropriate penalties," he said, predicting that there will be repression of social protest.

Throughout the campaign, Milei promised that he would apply a shock program to "recover" the economy. A few hours after winning the presidential elections, she already hints at part of this plan, which includes privatizations and conversations with the IMF. "We are close to 3 points of GDP in deficit. It is essential that it be corrected as quickly as possible. We have been talking with the [International Monetary] Fund for a long time," she said.

https://misionverdad.com/argentina-prim ... u-victoria

Google Translator

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The Far-Reaching Implications of Javier “the Wig” Milei’s Election Victory in Argentina
Posted on November 21, 2023 by Nick Corbishley

Clearly, a majority of voters have had enough of the status quo. What they want is a seismic shift in the underlying political and economic dynamics. And that is what they will get, for better or worse (my money is on the latter).

Sunday’s electoral victory of Javier Milei, an avowed libertarian with big sideburns, a fiery temper and far-right sympathies who claims to be on a mission to rid Argentina of its corrupt political caste (sound familiar?), was not much of a surprise. He had lead the polls leading up to the vote, had been endorsed by the country’s main right-wing party, and his opponent, Sergio Massa, is currently the economy minister in a country that is on the verge of hyperinflation (CPI: 148%) and where four in ten people live in poverty.

What was surprising is how emphatic the victory was. Milei, a political nobody just a few years ago, won 56% of the votes, compared to Massa’s 44% — one of the highest electoral margins of the country’s 40-year democratic era. Massa managed to win in only three of Argentina’s 23 provinces and federal district.


Clearly, a majority of voters have had enough of the status quo. According to a close friend living in Buenos Aries province, the word one keeps hearing is “change” (also sound familiar?), which is perhaps understandable given the dire state of the economy, the high levels of child poverty (67%) and the woeful performance of Alberto Fernández’s outgoing government. What people want is a seismic shift in the underlying political and economic dynamics. And that is what they will get, for better or worse (my money is on the latter). And the reverberations will reach far beyond Argentina’s borders.

The End of Argentina’s BRICS Membership (Before It Even Began)

On the campaign trail, Javier Milei said that as president he would cancel Argentina’s entry to the BRICS and align the country with the US and Israel — a move that will certainly be welcomed by Israel’s Netanyahu government, especially given that Buenos Aires is home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America, and one of the seven largest in the world. Until now, Latin American governments have lead the way in standing up to Israel during its “gazacide“, as Kurt Hackbarth recently reported for Jacobin. Bolivia has severed diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv while Colombia, Chile and Honduras have all recalled their ambassadors.

By contrast, Milei has stated that his first two trips before taking office on December 10 will be to the United States and Israel — the latter apparently for “spiritual reasons” (presumably a reference to Milei’s desire to convert to Judaism after his presidency is over).

Relations with China, meanwhile, are likely to be a lot more strained going forward. Milei has referred to the Asian nation as an “assassin,” telling a Bloomberg News in August:

“People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed. Would you trade with an assassin?”

Milei has since clarified that he wouldn’t stand in the way of private business deals between Argentine and Chinese companies. Diana Mondino, Milei’s pick for foreign minister, has also played down Milei’s statements, saying he never proposed formally breaking with China, which is probably a good thing given that China is Argentina’s second largest trading partner, providing much-needed foreign currency.

Now, China’s “comprehensive strategic partner[ship]” with Argentina (in the words of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin) is probably over (or at least on hold). And that could be a problem given that China is heavily invested in many of Argentina’s strategic sectors, including lithium and gas — sectors that the US government and corporations also have their eyes on. Beijing is also a major creditor since signing a currency swap in 2009 with then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchener, as Bloomberg recently reported:

Since then, China has invested billions in the country, in everything from lithium and solar power plants in the north, to a space station in the southern Patagonia region.

The ties have become even stronger in recent years, with Argentina joining Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road initiative in 2022. It announced plans to join the BRICS group of emerging markets, of which China is the largest, next year.

China’s investments in Argentina only reflect a fraction of its overall influence in Latin America, where it’s chipped away at the US’s dominance in recent decades. Through Belt and Road, China has poured billions into the construction of roads, bridges, trains, power grids and energy plants across the region. It’s also turned its attention toward governors instead of just national leaders, building relationships that have allowed it to invest in even the most remote areas, as it’s charged ahead to become South America’s No. 1 trading partner.

Special currency swap arrangements signed between Buenos Aires and Beijing in June and July this year have enabled the Argentine government to continue servicing its $44 billion loan package from the IMF, thus avoiding yet another default. That credit line could be at risk if Milei maintains his hard line toward Beijing. It is not hard to imagine, for example, his government blocking key Chinese investments in strategic sectors, including Vaca Muerta, an oil and shale gas reservoir in Patagonia that holds the world’s second-largest shale gas reserves and the fourth-largest shale oil deposits.

Milei has also said that his government would endorse and apply the Collective West’s sanctions against Russia, adding: “I would never support an autocratic government like Russia’s.”

In other words, on the off chance that Milei doesn’t cancel Argentina’s BRICS membership, its is unlikely that the BRICS’ founding members will continue to endorse the membership of a country whose government supports US and/or EU sanctions against a fellow member. In such an event, it will be interesting to see whether or not the founding members opt to invite another Latin American country to replace Argentina, with the two most obvious candidates being Bolivia and Venezuela.

South American Trade bloc, Mercosur, Also on the Line

Milei has also launched scathing verbal attacks on the four-nation trade bloc Mercosur, comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, even going so far as to threaten to withdraw from the grouping, which will probably be harder than exiting the BRICS given the role it has played in promoting regional economic integration. If it were to happen, though, the result would almost certainly be the disintegration of Mercosur, which in turn will spell the end of multi-decade trade negotiations between the trade bloc and the EU.

The hopes in Brasilia and Brussels are that pragmatism will prevail and that Milei will temper his policies toward Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva once he is in office. Brazil is Argentina’s biggest trade partner but relations between the two countries already soured during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. They could be about to get even worse. On the campaign trail, Milei described Lula as an “angry communist” and has formally invited Bolsonaro as Brazil’s “representative” at his inauguration.

In an interview with Reuters, Mondino tried to undo some of the damage, saying that while Mercosur must be modified, it should not be “eliminated” as Milei had previously suggested. Mondino also said Argentina will seek to increase trade with Brazil. But before that she will have to find a way of mending relations between the two governments, and that’s before the Milei government has even been formed.

For the moment, Lula is happy to leave Argentina’s relations with Brazil on hold, confident in the belief that Argentina’s crisis-hit, dollar-deprived economy needs Brazil as much, if not more, than Brazil needs Argentina. It is a fair bet: the volume of Argentina’s trade with Brazil is more than twice as large as its trade with the US. Meanwhile, Mercosur and the EU are speeding up bilateral talks on a long-awaited trade deal in the hope of signing along the dotted lone before Milei comes to power.

Death of the Central Bank and Dollarisation

On Monday, the day after his election, Milei reiterated his plans to eliminate the Central Bank (BCRA), which he described as a “moral issue” as well as establish a financial strategy to resolve Argentina’s growing pile of short-term “Leliq” bonds, which broke through the 1 trillion peso (around 18.2 billion) threshold in March. As Reuters reported at the time, “the Leliq debt, denominated in pesos and auctioned daily to mostly domestic banks, helps the central bank mop up funds in the market to bolster a weak currency and bring down stubborn inflation. But with sky-high interest rates it is also raising concerns that it could become unsustainable.”

Milei’s is also talking about abolishing the peso and replacing it with the US dollar instead. A milder form of this policy was already tried in the early 1990s, when the Menem government in Buenos Aires fixed the exchange rate at a wholly artificial and unsustainable value of one U.S. dollar. This gave the country a false illusion of prosperity while making the economy uncompetitive and depriving the state of having an independent monetary policy. It ultimately paved the way to the financial crisis, and currency devaluation and deep recession of 2001, from which Argentina’s economy has never properly recovered.

What’s more, Argentina, on its own, is not in a position to undertake dollarization since for two simple reasons. As Alejandro Werner, former director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told America Quarterly, “Argentina does not have the dollars to dollarize, and it does not have access to the financial market to obtain dollars.”

That is, for once, a blessing. After all, if Argentina were to fully replace the peso with the dollar, it would mean the end of any semblance of Argentinean sovereignty, as the South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang warned during a recent visit to the country:

If you want to adopt dollars as your official currency you should apply to become a colony of the United States of America because that’s what it makes you. This means your macroeconomic policies will be written in Washington DC.

That would, of course, suit the US government just fine. After all, Argentina has huge deposits of mineral resources that it already has its sights set on, including lithium and natural gas. And if a G20 economy like Argentina were to adopt the dollar, it may go some way to counteracting the BRICS’ efforts to reduce the dollar’s influence in global trade. Building stronger economic ties with Argentina will also help to erode China’s growing influence in South America.

But will Washington be prepared to pour significant funds into such a venture; according to estimates from the Spanish financial daily Expansión, the initial outlay alone could cost as much as $100 billion, for a project that is likely to take years to complete, and what’s more with a government that still owes the IMF $44 billion as well as billions to China. And right now, that is a lot of money to the Biden Administration, especially with Congress blanching at providing more funds for the Zelensky government in Ukraine.

Another Era of Privatisation and Plunder

Seventeen months ago, another political earthquake took place in South America. The former Marxist guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro made history by becoming Colombia’s first left-wing president since the country won independence in 1819. As I noted at the time, the election outcome, much like this one, could have important repercussions far beyond Colombia’s borders, particularly in terms of its relations with its long-estranged neighbour, Venezuela, as well as its military ties with the US, which has at least seven official military bases on Colombian soil.

Petro’s election has also had repercussions for Colombia’s relations with Israel, a close military ally that had trained and equipped many of Colombia’s soldiers and paramilitaries. The Petro government recently recalled its ambassador to Israel for consultations and its legal teams are preparing lawsuits to file before all international courts against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Petro is also threatening to halt all arms purchases from countries that voted against or abstained in the UN vote for a ceasefire in Gaza. That could, of course, include the United States, Colombia’s largest strategic ally in matters of defence.

Interestingly, the day that Petro won the election, Colombia’s stock exchange fell 6% — in response, no doubt, to his government’s proposed plans to reform the tax system, by introducing a more progressive system of income and wealth taxation, tackle agrarian reform and provide broader public access to healthcare. By contrast, Argentina’s MERVAL stock market finished the day up over 7%. It’s not hard to see why: what Milei is offering is another mass sell-off of state-owned assets to foreign multinationals.

The high risers included Argentina’s majority state-owned Argentine energy company YPF, which will be among the first of the state’s public assets to be privatised. The company was already privatised during the Carlos Menem presidency 1989-99 and then renationalised in 2010 by the Cristina Fernández de Kirchener government in 2012. Today, the idea of selling off the company, presumably to a US or European corporation, makes zero sense given that YPF is sitting on 40% of one of the world’s biggest oil and gas fields, the 8.6-million-acre Vaca Muerta (Dead Cow).

The new government will also be selling off Argentina’s public television and radio broadcasters and the state-owned news agency Telam. In the size of the government’s public debt (almost $400 billion, equivalent to roughly two-thirds of GDP) as well as the challenges it will inevitably face trying to service its IMF loan and Chinese credit line at a time of negative central bank reserves, Milei has the perfect alibi for taking his metaphorical chainsaw to all state assets of any value, just as was always the plan.

“Everything that can be in private sector hands will be,” he said.

Whether that includes health and education remains to be seen. These are the only two areas of public services that survived relatively in tact the neoliberal dismantling of the 1990s by Carlos Menem, whom Milei has labelled as the best president in Argentina’s democratic history, and the crisis of 2001. Public education – at all levels – and health, the last two remaining jewels in Argentina’s crown, are unique in all of America and in much of the world, notes the independent journalist Emiliano Gullo:

In Argentina, five Nobel Prize winners were formed (two in physics, one in Medicine and two in Peace). One of them, Bernardo Houssay, created Conicet, the most qualified public research institute in South America that Milei has promised to close. Mexico has only one Nobel Prize in hard sciences. Brazil, none. The list of public institutions that cemented Argentine culture and identity crosses disciplines such as cinema, sports, and literature. On Sunday night, 55% of the population turned their backs on Argentina and the country took another step in the process of Latin Americanization, which began in 1976 with the military dictatorship and the first wave of neoliberalism.

The incoming government has also proposed eliminating all state subsidies for public transportation, which will hit the pockets of the poorest precisely at a time when prices for most other things are already out of control. The government says the removal of the subsidies will help bring inflation down, which in turn will offset any economic pain occasioned by their removal. But these policies, even if they work, take time to feed through. And the government is preparing for widespread economic pain and discontent anyway, which is where Milei’s vice president, Victoria Villaruel, comes in.

Dark Echoes of the Past

The daughter of a high-ranking member of Argentina’s armed forces who refused to pledge loyalty to the constitution of Argentina’s new demorcatic system in 1987, Villarruel has made a name for herself by challenging the decades-long consensus over the dictatorship as well as questioning the number of victims, dead and disappeared, it created. The lawyer seeks to pull off what seemed unthinkable until very recently: the political triumph of a revisionist current that challenges not only national court rulings after the fall of the dictatorship in 1983, but also the verdict of history.

In 2020, she signed the Madrid Charter, a document drafted by the far-right Spanish party Vox that describes left-wing groups, such as the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, as enemies of Ibero-America and accuses them of engaging in “a criminal project under the umbrella of the Cuban regime” that “seeks to destabilise liberal democracies and the state of law.”

The day that Milei and Villaruel take office, December 10, will mark 40 years since Argentina’s return to democracy. It will also be the first time that a political party with family, emotional, and material ties to the military dictatorship takes power, notes Gullo:

Like a Trojan horse but with flashing neon signs, the Military Party… has just entered a government in a democratic manner. In addition to denying the symbolic figure of the 30,000 disappeared and constantly denigrating the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Villarruel is the daughter and niece of convicted soldiers, and has the support of the torturers who are imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

And she will be in charge of defence and law and order, so once the protests, strikes and pickets inevitably begin following the first wave of spending cuts, privatisations and mass job losses, it will be her who will be calling the shots. The crackdown is likely to be brutal.

The right-wing demagogues are back in power in Argentina. And they are making headway in many other countries. And that bleak reality, writes the Spanish journalist Rafael Narbona, is largely the result of the failings of the democratic system as well as the enthusiastic embrace by left-wing parties of the underlying theses of neoliberalism.

Democracy is not a question of votes, but of values. Milei intends to cut social rights and whitewash the Videla regime. His program is not democratic and harms the weakest sectors of society. Why has he gotten so much support then? Perhaps because since the eighties the left has assumed the theses of neoliberalism.

In Spain, Felipe González allowed real estate speculation, implemented bullshit job contracts, fought unions, cultivated corruption, resorted to state terrorism, applied a fierce program of deindustrialisation and got Spain involved in the first Iraq war. In the years that followed, voters experienced the impression that the right and the left only differed on minor issues, as they pursued the same antisocial agenda, protecting elite interests. It was not a local phenomenon, but a global one.

The demagogues took advantage of this situation to prosper. Trump, Bolsonaro and Milei have presented themselves as anti-system politicians, but the truth is that they are the most solid pillars of a system that continues to undermine the welfare state, favouring large commercial corporations. Media solo concerned with economic power and a growing disinterest in culture have also played their role in the rise of the demagogues.

The left will return to power, but it is not unlikely that it will make the same mistakes again. When a statesman tries to carry out radical changes, he fatally seals his fate, as happened to Salvador Allende, Olof Palme and Patrice Lumumba.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11 ... ntina.html

That last paragraph....tell that to Lenin, Mao, Fidel and Ho, you smug asshole.

[blindpig]

Don’t Cry for Argentina. It Is Not Worthy of Your Tears

Stephen Karganovic

November 22, 2023

Argentina has made its choice and now it must bravely face the consequences of its own making, Stephen Karganovic writes.

The Argentine runoff Presidential election has produced a result that many who still care for Argentina will regard as regrettable. But there are also bound to be not a few level-headed observers who will regard the outcome as somewhat suspicious.

The apparent winner is an oddball “Libertarian” politician, Javier Milei. Being an eccentric and a loose cannon, Milei is difficult to classify ideologically. He appears to be enthusiastic about cloning his deceased dogs, and he himself seems to be a cloned personification of the most obnoxious aspects of the American Libertarian movement. Libertarianism in its inspiration happens to be as parochially North American as the Mormons in the domain of religion and just as shallow in terms of philosophical substance. It remains to be seen whether Milei will prove to be a consistent ideologue of the nebulous Libertarian doctrines he professes, in which case the Requiem for Argentina should begin to be composed without delay.

If, however, Milei has even one pragmatic bone in his body he will be obliged very soon after his inauguration in December to go into reverse gear or face the wrath of the public that he has deluded with his irresponsible messianic promises.

Even worse for himself, for his political buffoonery he may also be obliged to face punishment from Argentina’s still vibrant armed forces, which have a respectable record of intervening to rein in wayward civilian politicians, though not necessarily always displaying as well the skills required to straighten out the messes the former had left behind.

There is no doubt that Argentina is currently very deep in one of those imbroglios into which it cyclically descends. The solutions offered by the charlatan were wisely rejected by its citizens in the first round of the elections, restricting Milei to about 30% of the vote. But Milei’s runoff rhetoric must have been irresistibly persuasive. In the second round he went on to garner a remarkable 55% of the vote (prompting the reasonable question of whether the popular Dominion vote counting machines, after their stellar performance in 2020, may have ended up in Argentina).

One of Milei’s brilliant solutions, abolishing the Argentine peso and replacing it with the U.S. dollar, may soon come to haunt the Argentine people. It would be interesting to hear Milei’s explanation of how doing away with the national currency, fragile as it may be yet always capable of recovery given the application of correct financial policies, and under the control of the issuing government, while replacing it with a declining foreign currency under the control of outside interests, would help remedy Argentina’s problems. Does Libertarian ideology allow for national sovereignty? Is Milei informed that not too long ago Ecuador discarded its national currency in favor of the dollar, but that for the Ecuadorean people the experiment on the whole resulted in more economic discomfort than benefit? Why now should the outcome be different in Argentina, and that at a time when the dollar is losing its reserve currency status and rapidly declining in value, far more so then when Ecuador was led down that primrose path?

Moreover, has Milei, who is reputed to be an economist, noticed a global financial trend which a repentant Jeffrey Sachs has called by its correct name, “dedollarisation,” and has that conspicuous trend had any impact on his thinking and choice of cures for Argentina’s financial ills? There is scant evidence that it has or that the warnings of sober economic experts have influenced the formulation of the policies that Milei has proposed. At the end of the day, with their new junk currency in hand, Argentines may remember with nostalgia their present inflation of mere 143%. Just as probably, they may come to regard with wrath the Pied Piper many of them had voted for.

Nor does Milei appear to be aware of the other major collapse that is taking place in the contemporary world, that of the unipolar system to whose imperilled currency he wishes to tie his country’s fortunes, suggesting that, indeed, El Clarín may be his chief source of political information. Contrary to every postulate of prudence (and some would argue of common sense as well) Milei has announced that as President he intends to reverse Argentina’s membership in BRICS. Public commitment to this politically counterintuitive policy goal suggests that Milei may be more than just an eccentric Libertarian enthusiast and that in fact he may be a figure purposefully inserted into the global game to promote a much more serious and disruptive geopolitical agenda.

There are very few today who recall that Argentina has not always been the Sick Man of the Pampas and that over a hundred years ago in economic strength and attraction it rivalled the United States as the destination of choice for European immigrants. Its once brilliant prospects came to nought as a result of the combination of the corruption and foolishness of its elite and idiocy of its pampered populace.

Argentina’s decline and fall has mirrored in many ways the downfall of Ukraine, formerly one of the Soviet Union’s most progressive and prosperous republics. Argentina, like Ukraine, was thrown under the bus by its greedy elite, also acting from selfish motives of short-term material gain and also placing itself in a condition of voluntary subservience to foreign, in Argentina’s case mainly British, patrons and their dazzling culture. The bamboozled populace followed suit in its own ignorant way.

The tribulations of both countries, far from being the outcome of objective necessity, are the avoidable result of foolish choices made jointly by the ruling elite and their equally irresponsible subjects.

Whatever vote counting machines may have been used, Argentina apparently has made its choice and now it must bravely face the consequences of its own making. There is no particular reason to shed tears for it any more than there is to cry over the tragic fate of its suicidal mirror image in Eastern Europe.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/ ... our-tears/

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What will happen to the Argentine economy under the new president?
November 24, 2023
Econopocalypse



The situation in Argentina, where the flamboyant showman Javier Miley came to power, is causing serious concern among the expert community. Even during the time of President Mauricio Macri , multinational corporations gained almost complete control over the Argentine economy and led it to a state of cyclical default.

Unsustainable loans from the IMF, fully “mastered” by IMF officials, representatives of TNCs and government corrupt officials, do not allow the development of the economy. The financial scam, as a result of which in 2018 the IMF provided Argentina with a loan totaling approximately $57 billion, of which $44 billion was actually paid, was the source of current serious problems. In addition, Macri's policies led to the closure of 30,000 small businesses, a 500% devaluation of the national currency, increased tariffs for electricity, water and gas (by an average of 3000%), and reductions in budgets for health care, education and science. This created the foundation for current events, which can appropriately be called the complete loss of economic and political sovereignty.

Visionary economic ideas of Javier Miley
The most interesting statement of the recently elected President Javier Miley is the initiative to liquidate the Central Bank of Argentina and replace the national currency (peso) with the US dollar.

According to the latest data from the Argentine central bank, analysts participating in the Survey of Market Expectations (REM) have raised their forecast for the annual inflation rate for the current year to 185.0%. This marks a revision to the forecast from the previous month, when it was 180.7%. The survey, conducted between October 27 and October 31, involved 38 representatives of consulting companies, financial institutions, as well as local and international research centers. Analysts agree that monthly inflation in November will be 11.5%.

The situation is, to put it mildly, catastrophic. Such a high level of inflation does not allow us to count on trust from the population and the business community. Any president who finds himself in such a situation has practically no options for influencing the economy using classical methods. At this level of public debt and inflation, economic activity can only be revived using external resources. Therefore, statements about the liquidation of the Central Bank, at the suggestion of American curators, simply state the fact of the death of the country’s financial system .


In Argentina , the formation of a parallel financial system based on Tether (USDT) has been underway for quite some time . It is this stable coin that is becoming dominant not only in the financial system of Argentina, but also in other Latin American countries. As the share of USDC and local currency settlements in the market falls, much of this capital flows into Tether (USDT).

Today, up to 900 wholesalers and 50 retailers in the Buenos Aires Central Market will be able to accept USDT through the IP service provided by KriptonMarket .

The stablecoin Tether is being promoted in Argentina as a solution to combat inflation and a way to facilitate digital payments between small producers and end consumers by reducing transaction costs.

An interesting comment from Paolo Ardoino, technical director of Tether:

“We hope that the implementation of Tether for entrepreneurs and small businesses in Buenos Aires can be an example that can be scaled around the world. With the national currency constantly devaluing, Argentines need solutions that allow them to gain financial freedom . If we can contribute to the well-being of an entire country through the advanced technologies offered by blockchain, this will be another step in the fight against financial discrimination .”

The wording itself is important here. The blockchain project is promoted as a way to gain freedom, and the classical banking system is identified as a source of financial discrimination.

Additionally, the collaboration between Tether and KriptonMarket includes the launch of training courses throughout Buenos Aires to inspire a new generation of blockchain enthusiasts and business professionals.

We have already examined in some detail the impact of USDT on the Brazilian economy . Based on this analysis and Miley’s current populist statements, it is highly likely that we are not talking about a transition to the dollar in the classical sense , although this is exactly what the majority of the population thinks and hopes. Rather, the idea is to increase the share of USDT in the country's financial system. This is the digital equivalent of a dollar, but not a dollar . This is a stablecoin issued by a private company. Naturally, its emission and circulation are under the control of US intelligence services. Moreover, there is always the possibility of forced conversion of accounts/deposits in USDT into the digital dollar USDC, which will already have the full functionality of programmable money.

Right now, blockchain technology, under the control of US intelligence agencies, is being used to dismantle the financial system throughout Latin America. The ultimate goal is to deprive the countries of the region of financial independence, which in the near future will provide ample opportunities to discredit governments and completely dismantle the state management system.

Shock therapy as a tool for introducing unconditional basic income
Other statements by Miley concerned the reduction of the state’s presence in the economy, shock therapy, and the exclusion of education and health care from the state financing system. We are talking about optimizing costs in the social sphere and the transition to uncontrolled market relations. All residents of the post-Soviet space experienced this in the 90s. But the population of Argentina does not yet have such experience and, perhaps, hopes for the best, listening to the speeches of another populist. This phenomenon can easily be explained by the degradation of the education system and the complete control of the media by TNCs.

With the help of Miley, the globalists have now dealt the main blow to the financial system with the aim of further introducing the mechanism of unconditional basic income and social rating . Although Miley blames socialists for all the problems, it is their experience of distributing goods in society that underlies the social rating system. Shock therapy, according to Miley, means that some competitive enterprises and specialists will be integrated into the Anglo-Saxon economic circuit.

But there are very few such enterprises and specialists. No more than 3-5%, estimated. The remaining enterprises, which Macri began to clean up, will naturally not survive. The same applies to Argentine specialists who are deprived of access to the American and European professional training systems. Accordingly, they will experience serious problems with employment both in enterprises bought up by TNCs in Argentina and outside the country.

All this will raise the question of introducing an unconditional basic income and social rating for the population as the only workable option. Argentina, which the globalists deliberately brought to bankruptcy, will now be used as one of the testing grounds for testing a new control system on living people in real conditions.

Possible privatization of oil and gas enterprises in Argentina
The issue of privatization of enterprises in the oil and gas sector of Argentina was voiced, but postponed to a later date. Now, in all likelihood, US oil and gas giants are auditing enterprises and assessing the level of investment required to increase capacity.

For the second quarter of 2023, the state oil company showed a profit of $380 million, which is 51.3% lower than for the same period in 2022. Such a sharp drop in profits is primarily due to inflation of the local currency, the peso. But the company's revenues fell by only 12.4% year-on-year. With additional investments, the profits of Argentine oil and gas enterprises can increase many times over, making them a valuable asset for TNCs.

Natural resources of Argentina
Argentina received its name from the Latin argentum - silver. It was this metal that was the basis of the colonial economy since the conquest of the country by the conquistadors. At the current stage, only technologies change, but not methods. Argentina has reserves of iron ore, uranium, lead, zinc, copper, manganese, tungsten, lithium and other minerals.

An extremely interesting asset is the agro-industrial complex. Meat production was successfully privatized by structures affiliated with the Soros Foundation. But arable land and drinking water supplies are also of interest. Companies such as Monsanto and Nestle have a long and active presence in Argentina. Now they have a real chance to get closer to a monopoly position in the local market.

Appointment of a showman to cover up the activities of TNK
Such a shocking and energetic personality as Javier Miley is ideal for diverting public attention from the activities of TNCs in the country and in the region. Since his election, the media has been filled with his speeches, often of a very provocative nature. In the meantime, all the attention of the population and the media is switched to the show, you can safely liquidate the financial system and conclude contracts on enslaving conditions. In the near future we will witness very unpopular decisions that will be made precisely in the interests of TNCs.

Miley's unexpected sympathies towards Israel and the USA

A lively discussion was sparked by the initiative to move the Argentine embassy to Jerusalem, the decision to visit Israel, and open support for the policies of the United States and Israel both in the Middle East and in general.

To understand the situation, it is necessary to clarify some details. Miley came to power because he has the support of representatives of Chabad, an ultra-Orthodox and influential religious movement in Judaism. For him, joining the Chabad ideology turned out to be a very forward-thinking approach. Instead of the usual visits to the Biden administration, the UN or the IMF, the Argentine politician chose Israel as the location of his inaugural visit.

In a recent interview with local television, Miley articulated his particular religious orientation this way: “I abandon traditional church attendance in favor of synagogue, where I actively listen to the teachings of the rabbi and immerse myself in the wisdom of the Torah. My global reputation as a steadfast friend of Israel is a testament to my commitment.” He regularly attends classes with Rabbi Shimon Wachnish, leader of the Argentine-Moroccan Jewish community in Buenos Aires. Miley speaks warmly of his mentor, noting, “Rabbi Vachnish is a trusted confidant with whom I consult regularly. Our long and deep conversations, sometimes lasting two or three hours, make a significant contribution to my personal development and deepen my understanding of the circumstances.”

Against this background, all of Miley’s statements about the foreign policy that he is going to pursue take on very specific outlines. It is obvious that he will act exclusively in the interests of the Anglo-Saxon elites, influenced by various religious movements of Judaism.


Argentina, sanctions against the Russian Federation, and BRICS membership
Miley’s statements regarding sanctions against the Russian Federation, refusal to participate in BRICS, friendship with the United States and Israel are a good information operation aimed primarily at causing a split in the group of countries that do not share the “democratic values” of the Anglo-Saxons.

Events in Israel showed that the United States, Great Britain and Israel found themselves virtually in information isolation on key issues of the current conflict. It is now critical for them to gain public support outside their community to give legitimacy to their actions.

As for Argentina's sanctions against the Russian Federation, it is difficult to imagine that, against the backdrop of tens of thousands of sanctions imposed, the Argentine president is able to generate something fundamentally new and provide a mechanism for implementation. Rather, we are talking about developing theses that the curators from the USA kindly asked to voice.

Argentina could initially participate in BRICS only as a recipient of assistance from other donor countries. Investments are required to develop any projects within the country or abroad. But even if they were provided, these funds would be used in full to repay the IMF debts. In order for effective activities within the BRICS framework to become real for Argentina, it is necessary to completely disconnect the country from the American financial circuit. But when the not very positive example of Venezuela is before your eyes, and the country’s financial system is practically paralyzed, it is difficult to find weighty arguments for such a decision.

Overall, the situation for Argentina is now developing within the framework of the regional governance template formulated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. In any case, the phrase is attributed to him: “Somoza ( Anastasio Somoza ) may be a son of a bitch , but he is our son of a bitch .” It is this format that makes it possible to promote unpopular decisions in the interests of globalists, under the guise of a show.

https://rybar.ru/o-perspektivah-ekonomiki-argentiny/

Google Translator

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NEITHER ANTI-SYSTEM NOR ANTI-POLITICS
WITH MILEI "LA CASTA" ENJOYS POLITICAL PROMINENCE AND GOOD HEALTH
Nov 23, 2023 , 10:33 am .


Javier Milei's anti-system speech is a smokescreen to cloud the impunity that those around him have experienced (Photo: Archive)

The elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, promised during his electoral campaign to free himself from his country's political class, which he has called "the caste", however, some early decisions indicate the opposite.

Argentina has gone through different political-economic cycles that have led to processes of accumulation of power in favor of national and global financial elites. The banks define their course and this has been achieved through neoliberal adjustments such as those implemented by the then president Carlos Ménem (1989-1999), as well as with Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), in agreements with transnational blocks and institutions that have participated in the deconfiguration of the State.

Seeking to relaunch that process, Milei said that he will seek to privatize the national oil company Yacimientos Petrolófilos Fiscales (YPF) , as well as public media such as Public TV, National Radio and Télam. After his victory, the self-proclaimed libertarian led a campaign of radio interviews, where he defined his desire to sell state companies.

In addition to anticipating that he will travel to the United States and Israel before assuming the presidency, he assured that "everything that can be in the hands of the private sector, will be in the hands of the private sector." This phrase is a play on words that recalls the famous Ménem operator, Roberto Dromi, who in the privatization attack of 1989 announced "erroneously" that "nothing that should belong to the State will remain in the hands of the State."

As a result of that "lapse", the Argentine State was decapitalized, the billions from the sale of the companies were not used to end the burden of the external debt, but rather served to sustain, in a strong debt process, the flow of dollars that would guarantee the convertibility experiment.

After the first round for the presidential election, there was a process of symbiosis between Milei's political group, who had the second most votes, and the candidate of Together for Change, Patricia Bullrich, who was left out of the runoff and was sponsored by Macri. . This closed Milei's flurry of insults against that sector of "the caste" and reconfigured the political map to the detriment of Peronism and sectors of the Radical Civic Union.

However, beyond the verbal, Milei has begun to announce names for his cabinet. These are not new faces, as will be seen below.

NICOL ÁS POSSE WILL BE HIS CHIEF OF STAFF
In 2007, he joined Corporación América, the company of Eduardo Eunerkián, owner of a conglomerate that includes airport concessions, agricultural companies and media companies. Posse stood out as CEO responsible for Duty Free at the magnate's airports and was then in charge of project management in the failed "Aconcagua Bioceanic Corridor" between 2009 and 2017, an initiative to unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through a high-tech rail corridor.

In 2016 he assumed management of the El Palomar Airport, where he was able to expand his experience in the airport field and, together with Milei, explored the Chilean public works financing system. This shared experience became the basis of his political desire, leading them to attempt to replicate and adapt the model in Argentina.

During the campaign, Posse was director of technical teams and political strategist, he was in charge of organizing key areas such as Education, Health, Energy, Mining and Housing. His role was central in the "political assembly" of La Libertad Avanza (LLA), channeling economic contributions and being the link to finance the campaign.

A PRO CARD ON THE "SMALL TABLE": SANTIAGO CAPUTO
By "small table" we mean the environment closest to the president-elect. In his speech after the election results of Sunday, November 19, the engineer Santiago Caputo was named by Milei before his vice president Victoria Villarruel for being considered the architect of the victory in the elections.


Nicolás and Luis, uncles of Santiago Caputo, were at the center of power during the Macri administration (Photo: Archive)

Caputo joined the LLA campaign in 2021 and became Milei's right-hand man. He worked with Macri's "guru", the Ecuadorian Jaime Durán Barba, operator of two offshore accounts in the British Virgin Islands. His family environment revolves around Macriism, he is the nephew of Nicolás and Luis Caputo, allies of the former president who created the megadebt with the IMF and son of the former president of the College of Notaries of the city of Buenos Aires, Claudio Caputo.

Nicolás "Nicky" Caputo is the owner of the technology company Mirgor, co-founded with Macri, and Luis "Toto" Caputo, the former Macri Finance Minister, who was nicknamed "the Messi of finance" and ended his administration with a void of US dollars. the reserves.

On the other hand, Flavio, Hugo and Rossana Caputo, other relatives of Santiago Caputo, were involved in financing Jonathan Morel, one of the co-founders of the violent organization Revolución Federal (RF). Morel's services as a carpenter were hired from his construction company and the million-dollar payments they made coincide with RF attacks on political leaders, including Cristina Fernández de Kichner.

Morel is being prosecuted for inciting collective violence along with Leonardo Sosa, the other co-founder of the organization that threatened the former president.

Santiago Caputo worked with Santiago Nieto and Roberto Zapata, two PRO men who worked closely on the Cambiemos campaign in 2015.

DIANA MONDINO: THE NEXT CHANCELLOR IN FAVOR OF HANDING OVER THE MALVINAS
The future Argentine chancellor is Diana Mondino, who compared homosexuality to "having lice." The economist, who also proposed privatizing public works , among other State tasks, was part of the board of directors of large companies such as Pampa Energía, Standard & Poor's and Loma Negra, always in the private sphere.

Página/12 reports that, despite his privatizing spirit, Mondino graduated with a degree in Economics from the National University of Córdoba and has training in companies and business in both Spain and the United States. She endorsed on several occasions the "self-determination" of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands , in line with the historical British position.

In relation to the latter, last September he declared to The Telegraph that "no decision can be imposed on other people, neither on Argentinians nor on anyone. Decisions can no longer be imposed, that has to end." He added that "the decision of the locals" can only be qualified if the Argentine government "seduces" the islanders with concessions to the British, such as leaving open the possibility that Great Britain "can make reasonable use of the resources it there down there."

He has also repeatedly defended the creation of an "organ market" aligned with the work of Nobel Prize winner in Economics Alvin Roth, who in 2012 was recognized for developing an algorithm to streamline the cross-transplant system. This was implemented in the United States, allowing 30 patients to receive kidneys from 30 unknown donors for four months in 17 hospitals in 11 states.

However, in 2018, the Council of Europe vetoed the implementation of the United States-driven system of "global kidney exchange" because they denounced that it hid the "trafficking in human organs" and encouraged the "risk of exploitation" of highly vulnerable individuals.

SOCIAL SECURITY: "STRONG HAND" WITH A HISTORY OF BRIBERY
The workers' pensions will be under the administration of Carolina Píparo, a 47-year-old social worker who was elected provincial deputy in 2017 and joined the ranks of liberalism in 2021, after being expelled by the PRO as a result of the scandal in which she was involved . to her husband, after running over two motorcyclists in La Plata in 2017 and trying to bribe them.

She will be the head of the National Social Security Administration (Anses), the body with the largest budget in the State. She entered politics in 2010 after an assault while she was pregnant, since then she became strong in the "iron fist" agenda.



In charge of social security will be Carolina Píparo, accused of bribery along with her husband (Photo: File)
Second on board would be Juan Manuel Verón, Investment Director at Principal Financial Group (PFG), a multinational company in Mexico. He participated in the last reform of that country's pension system and is expected to be the "brain" of social security policy in Argentina for the next four years.

The Mexican pension reform validated the appropriation and use of the savings of that country's workers in the hands of financial entities. Many of these businesses are oriented towards transactions with the "Mexican State" itself, with the purchase of public bonds.

The adjustments made by the outgoing Argentine government resulted in the vulnerability of some 5.5 million retirees (73%) who receive the minimum allowance , whose final assets are made up of other income (bonus of 55 thousand pesos, Pami food benefit, etc. .) that the new government could not renew in January 2024.

INTERNAL POLITICS (AND THE POLICE) BY A VETERAN OF "THE CASTE"
Guillermo Francos will head the Ministry of the Interior. He worked at the Inter-American Development Bank as a director. He is an omnipresent public official in Argentine history: during the dictatorships of Roberto Marcelo Levingston and Alejandro Agustin Lanusse, between 1970 and 1973, he served as private secretary of the Ministry of Justice, in the administrations of Jaime Perriaux, Ismael Bruno Quijano and Gervasio Colombres. .

He then worked as a lawyer in the Department of Legal Affairs of the Ministry of Justice under the presidency of María Estela Martínez de Perón between 1974 and 1976, and between 1976 and 1985 as Director of the National Institute of Educational Credit.

Towards the end of the 1980s, he presided over the Federal Party, after the death of its founder, Francisco "Paco" Manrique, and in 1996 he founded the Action for the Republic party together with Domingo Cavallo, father of "one to one" (1 peso for 1 dollar) that caused damage to the national industry and ended in a deep debt crisis. This is one of the economists most admired by Milei.

In 1985, Francos was elected councilor of the Federal Capital until 1993, he was a national deputy between 1997 and 2000 and president of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires during the governorship of Daniel Scioli. He is emerging as the political operator who will carry out the negotiations with the governors and build the necessary bridges for the approval of laws.

Economic policies would cause social upheaval, as has already happened in Argentina. To deal with this, Macri has already described the protesters as "orcs" and has announced that they would encourage social confrontation. This will be the task of Francos, who will be in charge of the security forces.

In addition, the vice president-elect, a denier of the disappearances and torture of military dictatorships, will supervise the areas of Defense and Internal Security.

A MEDIA AND CRIMINAL LAWYER IN THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE
Mariano Cúneo Libarona began his foray into the media when he defended Guillermo Cóppola in the case of the vase with drugs , in the 1990s. He also defended Carlos Ménem's brothers-in-law, Amira and Emir Yoma, in cases involving drug trafficking and trafficking. of weapons, particularly in the investigation into the illegal diversion of Argentine weapons to Ecuador and Croatia. The lawyer was detained preventively following a complaint from Lourdes Di Natale, who, in addition to being his ex-wife, was Yoma's secretary.


Cúneo Libarona is not a new face: he belongs to a traditional family of lawyers, has handled shady cases and has been imprisoned for cover-up (Photo: Archive)

Di Natale, who died in 2003 in a confusing episode where he fell from his apartment on the tenth floor, said that Yoma had paid 400 thousand dollars through the arms seller Diego Palleros to the Daforel company.

In the case of Amira Yoma, the media criminal was her legal representative in her accusation in the " Yomagate " or "Narcogate", a drug trafficking trial that was unleashed from a notebook found in the arrest of the accountant Ramón Humberto Puentes in Uruguay , where among other names the president's sister-in-law appeared as responsible for transporting a "cargo" from New York.

Also in the late 1990s, Cúneo Libarona was imprisoned for a month after being accused of aggravated coercion and cover-up in the case investigating the theft of a video from Judge Juan José Galeano's office. In the context of the case in which the attack on the AMIA was investigated, the lawyer represented two police officers accused of the theft, who were finally acquitted and everything was declared void. The judge and the judge's secretary in charge of the investigation were arrested.

He is one of the trusted lawyers of businessman Eduardo Eurnekian and Milei's former co-worker , however there are many doubts in the legal environment regarding the lawyer. He participated in the trial for the Time Warp tragedy , an electronic music party where five young people between 20 and 30 years old died and dozens had to be hospitalized (six of them in intensive care) due to the consumption of adulterated synthetic drugs. . Cúneo Libarona, together with Fernando Burlando and Matías Morla, were in charge of defending those responsible for the event: Adrián Conci, Facundo González and Víctor Stinfale.

His law firm defended Giselle Rímolo , now called Mónica Cristina María Rímolo and ex-partner of a famous driver, Silvio Soldán. The accused presented herself as a nutritionist, homeopath, psychologist and specialist in alternative therapies and in 2012 she was sentenced to nine years in prison for manslaughter, illegal practice of medicine, fraud on more than 70 occasions and trafficking in dangerous medications.

In addition, Cúneo Libarona was a defender of the businessman Sergio Taselli, noted in the "bribery notebooks" of Oscar Centeno, driver of the official Roberto Baratta. Taselli was arrested by Judge Claudio Bonadío when he appeared to testify, but was later released from prison.

"THE BREED" IS IN GOOD HEALTH
In fact, Milei's anti-system speech is vacuous; Her ties inside and outside the government she is about to form are aligned with actors and structures that have corporatized Argentine politics. Her notion of a "strong hand" and her verbal histrionics are apparently a smokescreen to cloud the impunity that those around her have experienced.

His libertarian theses to get Argentina out of the serious economic crisis it is experiencing predict another stage of it, just as his promise to remove the entire ruling class that governs the country is just a reconfiguration of forces to put a tired society to the test. service of the same local politicians and transnational powers.

Milei means an opportunity for the technocratic detritus that requires seizing public funds in order to sustain a model in full collapse.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/co ... uena-salud

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Atilio Borón | Facultad de Derecho

Argentina: Milei’s triumph was a neatly planned media construction
By Atilio Borón (Posted Nov 23, 2023)

Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World on November 20, 2023 (more by Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World)

As usual in terms of political or electoral analysis in Latin America and the Caribbean, a few hours after Javier Milei’s victory in the Argentine presidential elections, we conducted an exclusive interview for Correo del Alba, with Atilio Boron, the renowned political scientist and intellectual with whom we reflected on the triumph of the extreme right.

Correo del Alba: Milei is what is known today in the political field as an outsider, what happened to this controversial figure, supported by young people, mostly men, who rose like foam? Did the old Peronist guard not see it coming? Is it responsible for the results of this November 19?

AB: Let’s go by parts. First, Milei was an outsider in the political field, but not in the media. Mariana Moyano, the journalist who unfortunately disappeared a few weeks ago, verified that he was the most consulted economist by radio and TV programs in 2018. According to this source, in that year he was interviewed 235 times and had 193 thousand 547 seconds of air time. No character in political life even comes close to these figures, and the same happened in subsequent years. In other words, it was a neatly planned media construction.

Second, the role of youth, the main victim of the process of informalization, “desalarization” and labor precariousness. The segment between 18 and 29 years of age, a total of eight million 337 thousand 914 people, represent 24.29% of the national electoral roll. To the above, it is necessary to add one million 163 thousand 477 young people between 16 and 17 years of age who are eligible to vote. At the national level, this age group represents only 3.3% of the total electoral roll, a proportion almost equal to that of the province of Entre Ríos. Therefore, we are talking about a little more than 27% of the electorate formed by young people who found little or no incentive to vote in favor of the pro-government candidate, or who had little to no memories of the events of December 19 and 20, 2001 and even of the golden age of Kirchnerism. They were not enamored by the official proposal, something that was evident even to a blind man just by comparing the youthful fervor of Milei’s events -carefully staged, no doubt; but suitable to arouse the enthusiasm of young people-, with the packaging and the lack of enthusiasm that prevailed in almost all the events organized for Massa by the Frente de Todos apparatus.

To conclude with this question, it is obvious that the old Peronist guard, self-absorbed and entrenched in the defense of its corporate and sectorial interests, has not seen what is coming for a long time, nor does it show the least understanding of what contemporary society is and how it works today.

CA: How much of what Milei promised in his campaign is possible to achieve in Argentina today?

AB: It is difficult to make a forecast. There are areas in which social resistance, spontaneous, from below, will be very strong. I am thinking of the case of the attempt to advance in the privatization of social security, given the catastrophic experience of the AFJP around the world. In others, perhaps not so much, for example, if the object of such policy were Aerolíneas Argentinas; but there could also be surprises there. With YPF, the matter will be much more complicated, because the provinces are the owners of the subsoil wealth, and this would imply opening a debate of difficult prognosis for the Government given the composition of both chambers of the Congress. In short: it will be necessary to see case by case and measure in each instance the prevailing correlation of forces.

There are many factors that influence this disparity of reactions. One, the fact that a good part of the social organizations and party forces are very weakened and delegitimized. Two, the decomposition of the popular universe, fragmented in a myriad of labor situations marked by absolute precariousness, the lack of union representation and the total absence of protective legislation that benefits an increasingly minority sector of the economically active population. Three, the struggle within the heterogeneous dominant bloc where the fractions linked to financial speculation have a greater gravitation than those anchored in industrial production and even in agribusiness. The variable results of this dispute between fractions of the ruling classes will be very important when it comes to facilitating or hindering the fulfillment of the new president’s campaign promises.

CA: Is Milei a paradigm shift that represents more the youth that has been forming accompanied by social networks that circumscribe reality to their interests nothing more?

AB: He is an emergent of that situation of extreme vulnerability of a youth brutally hit by the pandemic and quarantine and, moreover, by an economic policy that deepened economic and social exclusion and increased poverty to unprecedented levels, except for the brief hyper inflationary episodes of May-July 1989 and January-March 1990. For this social category, the experience of the government of Alberto Fernández and his Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, was an unmitigated disaster. For these young people there were neither economic policies for the repositioning of wages (except for a minority, and thus insufficient), nor an epic that would allow them to conceive themselves as militants of a national cause, and much less a communicational apparatus that would strengthen their claims while making the voice of the rulers heard. The result: an almost massive rush towards someone who, astutely, was presented by the dominant powers as fresh, youthful, novel, despite being a 53 year old man. Surprising? Not for those of us who study the role of social networks, algorithms and the new techniques of political neuromarketing. Or for those of us who, like me, have been preaching in the desert the need to wage the battle of ideas to which we had been summoned by Fidel since the end of the last century and which the left in general as well as the national-popular movement irresponsibly underestimated. The result: triumph of “anti-politics”; identification of the “caste” and the State as predatory agents while hiding the role of the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes as agents of collective exploitation; exaltation of hyper-individualism and its correlate, abandonment if not repudiation of collective action strategies and class, territorial or labor organizations, trusting in individual “salvation” and condemning those who participated in collective protests, all for the benefit of the irrational exaltation of a skillful demagogue sponsored by the most concentrated capitals.

In view of this cultural configuration, it was almost impossible, especially with inflation hovering around 13% or 15% per month, that a Minister of Economy responsible for this situation could win in the elections. In view of this background, the vote that Massa did acheive is truly astonishing.

CA: Will he be able to put an end to the Welfare State that has characterized Argentina since the middle of the last century with Perón and Evita?

AB: It is partly answered in the first question. But we must add to the Argentina of Perón and Evita the important economic and social advances during the years of Kirchnerism, although it is evident that however praiseworthy these may have been, they were insufficient to successfully confront the ravages that capitalist accumulation produces throughout the world and most especially in a country with a State as weak and inefficient as Argentina.

Note that, as assured by a report of the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA), between 2016 and 2022 the transfer of income from labor to capital amounted to 87 billion dollars, of which 48 billion dollars were transferred in 2021 and 2022, years in which a “national and popular” coalition governed. The result: a very serious deterioration of wages, which, in the formal economy, are even below the poverty line. Could anything else than the frustration and anger of broad sectors of the electorate in the face of this painful economic reality have been expected? What antibodies did they have to avoid being seduced by a nonsensical discourse, full of absurd myths (such as, for example, that Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century was the richest country in the world, among many other nonsense!), but which vociferated the need to put an end to an intolerable situation, leaving aside everything old and execrating a supposed “caste” that, for its own benefit, had condemned them to poverty and destitution?

CA: How does he visualize the opposition to Milei, will there be a movement to watch over his program?

AB: It will depend on the reorganization and rearticulation of the popular camp, on its concrete proposals of struggle, on the character of its defensive strategy before the foreseeable attacks of a government obsessed with cutting labor and social rights and provoking a maxi-adjustment of the economy. It also depends on the emergence of credible leaderships endowed with great convening power, capable of attracting the millions of people plunged into misery and insecurity by the unlimited voracity of capital.

The party system has collapsed and, even worse, the political forces and identities that marked a large part of Argentine political life since the middle of the last century and up to a few years ago -radicalism and Peronism- have entered into a crisis of unprecedented proportions. They will probably reappear, in a neoliberal key and under mutant and, probably, aberrant forms that will have little or nothing to do with the DNA that constituted them.

The organic radicalism faded away and its voters threw themselves with all their strength to vote for someone who had grossly insulted the two most important leaders of that political force: Yrigoyen and Alfonsín. And the Peronism apparatus, and the voters of that current, only in a minority supported Massa’s candidacy. It is enough to see what happened in the provinces usually bastions of the Peronist vote (La Rioja, Salta, Tucumán, Chaco, Catamarca, Santa Cruz and, to a lesser extent, others) to prove that this electorate is already available for any demagogue or any copular arrangement decided by the groups that in each province took over that seal. Neither the Radicals nor the Peronists are today political forces with an organization, leadership and strategies of political struggle of national scope. They have fragmented into 24 parties, one for each province, and willing to negotiate their vote according to the circumstances.

“Neither the Radicals nor the Peronists are today political forces with an organization, leadership and strategies of political struggle of national scope.”

CA: How is and how will be Milei’s relationship with the Armed Forces?

AB: I think it will be very good. Vice President Victoria Villarruel is an unabashed apologist of the genocidal dictatorship, admirer of the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla and his cronies in the violation of Human Rights; she will be Minister of Defense and Security.

The reactionary political socialization of the Armed Forces, a task for which the Southern Command and the various treaties of military collaboration between the United States and Argentina play a very important role, will surely open the way for them to take charge of the repression that Milei’s ultraneoliberal policies will necessarily demand.

In line with what Patricia Bullrich said and did as Minister of Security of the Macri government, Milei will give the green light to the Armed Forces and the police to unload their repressive potential against the “enemy within” with total impunity. The “Chocobar Doctrine” was a protocol that enabled the federal forces to shoot without raising the alarm against any suspect, which implies a very serious setback in terms of respect for individual guarantees and the rule of law. It was left without effect by one of the first initiatives of the government of Alberto Fernandez, but unfortunately it seems that this doctrine will be back with the new government.

However, we will have to see how the security forces react when they have to face thousands of young people, women and children demanding justice, even though the lessons of Latin America’s contemporary history show that the confusion between internal security and external defense is usually the mother of very serious violations to Human Rights, as it happened in Mexico in the years prior to the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In the United States or in European countries both functions are clearly delimited. The new Argentine government seems willing to take a gamble with more than obvious disastrous consequences. But, in this as in other issues, such as policies of cuts or annulment of rights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the reaction of Argentine society, which on several occasions has shown signs of opposing fierce dictatorships or savage economic adjustment plans. Argentine history offers numerous examples of resistance and although society has changed a lot in recent times, it would not be strange that this rebelliousness would reappear once again with volcanic force, even in the absence of appropriate organizational structures. The “Cordobazo” of 1969 and the popular insurgency of December 19 and 20, 2001 are specters that will undoubtedly disturb the dreams of those who seek to destroy the economic, social and cultural conquests that the Argentine people won through great struggles.

CA: How could Milei’s triumph, geopolitically speaking, affect the Region?

AB: First of all, it will harm Argentina, because, in line with Washington’s demands, it will turn this country into a battering ram to reduce China’s presence in the Region, even at the cost of harming Argentina’s national interests, its exporting sectors and the labor force linked to them. Milei’s is probably a “dream” victory for the North American establishment. because it finds in the south of the continent a fanatic willing to execute without question the slightest suggestions coming from Washington: staunchly anti-communist (in a definition of such vagueness that goes from Lula to Pope Francis, passing through China, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua); unconditionally aligned with the Empire, justifier of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, admirer of the Israeli terrorist State and of the North American society, Milei from the Casa Rosada will encourage with his example similar behaviors among the leaders of the right wing of neighboring countries.

Perhaps, and again we must take into account the cleavages within the dominant bloc, he could go so far as to not only exclude Argentina from the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), but even reject or postpone sine die the decisive incorporation of our country to the BRICS plus, which should take place on January 1st of next year.

In short, the crusade against the “Chinese enemy”, according to the documents of the National Security Council of the United States, has found its prophet in these distant and turbulent lands of the South. And, from the geopolitical point of view, with Milei in the presidency of Argentina, the gravitation in the international chessboard of Latin America and the Caribbean suffers.

https://mronline.org/2023/11/23/argenti ... struction/

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Puebla Group Warns of Coup d’État in the Making in Guatemala
NOVEMBER 23, 2023


President-elect of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo. Photo: Lenin Nolly/EFE/file photo.

The member countries of the Puebla Group warned this Tuesday of a coup in the making against Bernardo Arévalo that seeks to prevent his inauguration as president of Guatemala in January.

In a statement published on its website, the Puebla Group stated that this coup attempt is promoted by “dark forces that govern the Executive Branch” as well as leaders of the judiciary of the Central American country.

“Although these forces want to change the people’s election, Bernardo [Arévalo] and Karin [Herrera] were elected on August 20 as constitutional president and vice president of the country, as confirmed by the Superior Electoral Court,” the statement reads.

It adds that, behind this conspiracy, are the Attorney General María Consuelo Porras and the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity (FECI) Rafael Curruchiche “who, protected by President Alejandro Giammattei and some corrupt magistrates of the judiciary, are promoting legal warfare actions (lawfare).”

In the statement, the group highlighted the massive demonstrations that have been carried out in Guatemala for more than 40 days, especially by indigenous peoples, who are defending the results of the polls.

“We ask that the intimidation from the r’s Office against some sectors of the press, the opposition, students, and against members of the judicial branch and the public ministry who have acted independently cease definitively,” added the Puebla Group’s statement.

For this reason, the international organization requested the Latin American Council for Justice and Democracy (CLAJUD) to take the necessary measures to defend Guatemala’s democracy.

Last week, the Public Ministry announced that it would ask the Supreme Court to withdraw immunity against the president, the vice president-elect, as well as other deputies from the Semilla Movement party.

Arévalo unexpectedly won the presidential elections; some polls placed him as low as eighth position. He was the candidate for the Semilla Movement, a social democratic party whose main promise is to combat corruption.

https://orinocotribune.com/puebla-group ... guatemala/

[blindpig]

Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’

JANINE JACKSON

CounterSpin interview with Mark Weisbrot on Javier Milei

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot about Argentine President-elect Javier Milei for the November 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Fox News (11/19/23)

Janine Jackson: Many people are hearing the name Javier Milei for the first time about now. Milei has just been elected president of Argentina—56% to 44% are the numbers we’re hearing right now—over the country’s economic minister, Sergio Massa.

Fox News trumpeted, “Javier Milei crushes Argentine Left, Becomes World’s First Libertarian Head of State.” Donald Trump announced that Milei would “truly make Argentina great again,” and Elon Musk declared, “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.” That reception gives you some indication of where this is going, and what it could mean.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He’s author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy, and co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot.

Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Janine. Great to be here.

JJ: Lest there be a lot of mystery: To start with, Javier Milei carried around a chainsaw as a prop on the campaign trail, and that was about “cutting public spending.” And he described the state as a “pedophile in a kindergarten.” And don’t think he’s done, because he went on to say “the state is a pedophile in a kindergarten with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline.”

It reminds me of Duterte saying he’d be “happy to slaughter” 3 million drug addicts in the Philippines, and of course it reminds folks of Trump and his current pledge to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of this country” (and that’s just from this week).

It’s histrionic. We have politicians saying things you hear supervillains in the movies say. And I guess the concern is that they will be underestimated as merely colorful and over the top, and not considered in terms of the actual real-world things that they want to do and are capable of.

So there, that’s my setup. What are the material things that listeners need to know about Javier Milei and his election?

CEPR (11/17/23)

MW: Well, the material craziness of Milei is an important part of the story. And as you mentioned, or hinted at, by the examples you gave, the media have been comparing him to Trump, and he likes it. And so it is part of that phenomenon, which we could talk about for hours, of crazy people getting elected in situations and ways in which they wouldn’t in the past. And, of course, that’s the big anthropological sociological question, is how does this happen?

But I won’t get into that. What I’d rather talk about is what his craziness means. I think that’s more interesting to your audience as well.

And so his craziness is partly a coherent extreme-right libertarian view. He says, “Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property, and in the end limits our freedom.” And he applies this to fixing the problem of hunger, fixing the problem of poverty or employment. So he’s really as extreme as you get in that right-wing libertarian set of ideas.

Reuters (11/24/23)

So the question is, in terms of policy, what does that mean? First, he wants to abolish the central bank, which of course would be a disaster, and almost no economist would support even thinking like that. And he wants to also dollarize the economy, which would probably also be a disaster; most economists would say that. They don’t even have the reserves for that at this point, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

So he has big things he would get rid of. He would get rid of some ministries. And certainly the chainsaw, a symbol. A guy walks around in a Batman costume with chainsaws, and he got elected president. He wants to cut public spending at least 15%, has no attachment whatsoever to anything like public education, healthcare and everything. So he would cut anything he can, and the economy would probably go into recession, almost certainly. And who knows where it would stop.

JJ: He seems to have a definition of “socialism,” and this is what I feel like US media are going to pick up on, because, as you and I both know, they will have a lot of quotes from him, and they will have quotes from some people who disagree with him, but I don’t think they’re going to dig deep into the rhetoric. And so he talks about everything that happened from previous administrations in Argentina as “socialism,” and, I mean, how do we unpack that?

MW: Yeah, that’s right. Argentina “has embraced socialist ideas for the last hundred years.” Of course, that’s crazy too.

I don’t know what he’ll actually be able to do. That’s the first thing. He has only 39 seats out of 257 in the Lower House, and 8 out of 72 in the Senate.

Now he does have a party aligned with him, that was the president from 2015 to ’19. And that was Macri. And that’s how he got elected, partly, because Macri and his party supported him; these are right-wing people, but they’re not as crazy as him.

So it’s not clear what he’ll get done. This is going to be what we’ll see.

You have to remember too that the government that he’s succeeding, the Peronists, they have a real movement, and they’ve gotten in the streets before when terrible things have happened; in 2001, four presidents resigned within less than two weeks, at the end of 2001. And that was because of protest.

New York Times (8/19/19)

I think this is maybe where to start the story, because you guys focus on what the media are missing or getting wrong. And I think we really should start, I think, with what you don’t see in the media.

You don’t see, for example, that in these last 20 years, the Peronists actually did very well. They first came to power with Néstor Kirchner in 2003. And you had, in the 12 years that followed, before Macri, you had a 71% decline in poverty, 81% decline in extreme poverty, and GDP, or income per person, grew by 42%, which, I compared it to Mexico, it’s three times as fast.

So this was a very successful set of policies, but I haven’t seen that in any of the coverage. I wrote it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of years ago, but you don’t really see that part of the story.

And that’s unfortunate, because people need to know that. And of course it’s partly because people don’t know that—the Argentine media is no better than here, the major media—that somebody like this could get elected.

And, of course, what happened in this story, the other part of the story, I think, that’s really—well, first let’s start with the depression from 1998 to 2002. That was caused, overwhelmingly, by the IMF. And you can go back to the New York Times and read that, actually; at the time, they actually reported the IMF role.

So that was a huge part of the story. Because as you know, as most of your listeners know, the IMF is primarily dominated by decision-making by the US Treasury Department.

And then, of course, you had the Kirchners and the Peronists, and you had this long period where they did very well. And Macri himself—that was the president from 2015 to ’19—he wouldn’t have gotten to power, actually, if it weren’t for more things that came from the United States. And I can tell you that as well, depending on how much time you have.

JJ: Please do; I think folks want to know where the US role is here.

New York Times (4/1/16)

MW: Yeah, I think it’s really important, actually, for people here to know, because this was such a big thing. I mean, Argentina is obviously one of the largest economies in South America. And during this period, in the first decade of the 21st century, it wasn’t just Argentina that had this great rebound. Latin America as a whole reduced poverty from 44% to 28%, after having two decades of increasing poverty before that; that was 2003 to ’13, is the decade I’m looking at. That was a decade in which the majority of the hemisphere was governed by left governments for the first time ever.

And then the United States, of course, played this role, which we’ll focus right now on Argentina, in trying to get rid of all of them, and making their lives difficult so that they would be ousted, a number of them by coup d’etat.

So what happened in Argentina? They had to default to the IMF, in 2003, and the IMF backed down, and they defaulted on their private debt, right before they actually defaulted to the IMF, but the IMF rolled over the debt. So they had a big fight with the IMF and the private creditors, just to stabilize the economy. But they did that successfully, and they grew.

And then in 2014, a New York judge decided that Argentina should not be able to pay its creditors, over 70% of its creditors, the ones who had accepted the restructured debt. And this was Thomas Griesa, a New York judge, and he did this on behalf of the vulture funds. These were funds that bought up the debt when it was very cheap in the early 2000s, and wanted to collect the full value of it.

Mark Weisbrot: “The whole mess that got this guy elected was really created by the Macri government and

that IMF agreement.”

So he was trying to force the Argentine government to pay these US vulture funds. And he was doing it by cutting off the Argentines’ ability to pay all other creditors, until they would pay the vultures. And so that is part of what hurt the Argentina economy in 2014.

And just to show you how political this was, in 2016, the same judge, Griesa, actually wrote an opinion where he lifted the injunction on paying this debt, that is, he reversed the decision, and he said he did it because, and this is an exact quote from him, “Put simply. President Macri’s election changed everything.” OK?

So that’s partly how we got Macri, was him harming the Argentine economy right before that, and then, of course, reversing that tremendous harm as soon as Macri was elected. So there you go. There’s a big change. And it leads to another big change in Macri’s term because, OK, so Macri gets elected because of action that came from the US, and there are other actions as well, which I’ll describe.

But then Macri goes and gets—and this is because of Trump’s influence on the IMF that it happened—the largest loan that the IMF ever gave to anybody, any country in the world, $57 billion in 2018. And the conditions on that loan were terrible. And they forced the economy into recession. And then, of course, when things started to go sour—which they did right away, because the big loan that they got just financed capital flight out of the country, and, of course, that led to all kinds of problems—the IMF doubled down and had more austerity, both fiscal policy and monetary policy. And so things got worse.

And that actually leads you, really, to the situation you have today. That’s what created it: The economy, the 140% inflation that you have now, the whole mess that got this guy elected, was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement, and also other measures that the US took to deprive Argentina of dollars before Macri came to power as well.

Washington Post (11/19/19)

JJ: When you hear about having to make vulture funds whole, and the impact that has, I’m thinking Puerto Rico; I know that there’s lots of other places in the world that are coming to people’s mind. But then when you set that situation, so now I’m reading the Washington Post, which is trying to explain why did Milei get elected, and it’s saying:

Voters in this nation of 46 million demanded a drastic change from a government that has sent the peso tumbling, inflation skyrocketing and more than 40% of the population into poverty.

So they’re saying, well, Milei’s against this, the poverty and the problems that they’re having; he’s coming before the people and saying, “I’m going to shake that up.” And I don’t think, at least in this explanation, I’m not getting anything of the longer term history that you’re giving me. I’m getting, things were bad, Milei’s there to fix them, right?

MW: Yeah. Although, I mean, I don’t think the media here like Milei. It’s just like Trump. It’s this irony that you have in a lot of these situations, where the media don’t like these people because they’re too extreme. The US didn’t even want Bolsonaro, for example, in Brazil, who, by the way, was one of the first calls, a video call, that Milei made when he won this election. The mainstream consensus here is that these guys are too crazy, but they still do help them win.

JJ: Exactly….

MW: This is a paradox that probably you all can figure out better than me.

Vox (11/20/23)

JJ: I can’t. But you know what, you see the interviews, and we’re seeing them now, and folks who are listening will be seeing them, folks on the street in Argentina saying: “Well, there’s just too much inflation. There’s too much corruption.” Very sort of Trump-voter things of, “Well, I don’t like his social ideas, but his economic plans make sense.”

People want change. And I think that we can acknowledge that people want change. And then folks come along and say, you know what I am? I’m different. I represent change.

But where media don’t, to my mind, exercise their role is, well, why do people want change? And what does that have to do with the failure of existing systems, including economic systems? Instead, media just say, “I guess people just deep down want a kind of fascistic guy.” Even if they’re opposed, they still don’t dig deep enough, to my mind, into why folks were willing to do this Hail Mary play.

MW: Yeah, and I think part of the media story is that most people in Argentina, as well as your audience, don’t know this historical record. I mean, imagine if all the voters knew that in the past 20 years, you had the majority of that time when the Peronists were in power, the numbers that I just told you; people did quite well in terms of reducing poverty enormously. And the real wage growth was 34% under the Kirchners, for example, over that period. And all these things happened, and increased spending on cash transfer programs, everything. And they did extremely well.

Some people remember it, and that’s why they still got 44% of the vote, but not everybody is old enough, or even would necessarily understand the whole situation, not having seen it in print, or heard it on radio or television.

Al Jazeera (11/18/23)

And so, yeah, it’s easy for this guy to come in here, he’s almost literally a clown, and even though probably a lot of people, even, who voted for him think his ideas are crazy, or that he’s crazy, you see quotes like that in the press: “Yeah, he’s crazy, but I’m voting for him anyway.” But they don’t have a way of seeing that there actually have been successful alternatives.

And if we can go into the economics a little bit, I think part of the problem here is that the IMF loan is huge, and they have to pay that back. And of course they got some debt relief on the private debt, but the IMF doesn’t give any; they postponed the payment some, but it’s still going to come due. And, of course, you have capital flight because of that situation.

And you have a situation where you have what’s called an inflation depreciation spiral. So if confidence in the currency is undermined by a variety of things, including the inflation itself, and including the debt problems that the IMF left them with, and then pretty soon it’s going to be the anticipated and real policies of the IMF that are going to cause capital to flee the country, as they did in 2018.

So all of these things: What happens is capital flees the country, and that causes the currency to depreciate. And when the currency depreciates, then the price of all imports goes up, and then that causes more inflation, and then the increased inflation causes the currency to depreciate more.

And that’s why it was so hard for this latest government before Milei to resolve this problem, because it’s a self-perpetuating spiral, something you don’t want to get into. And, of course, there are ways, it is possible, but again, that’s a very hard problem. And that was a result of the policies that came in overwhelmingly with the Macri government, and the IMF agreement that he followed.

And you know, he even said it at one point, I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like, “I did everything that I agreed to in this agreement, and the economy went down the toilet.” So even he realized that.

But again, you’re not seeing that in the public discussion. All you saw up to the election is, the party in power must be responsible for what’s happening and they have to go. And then you see this guy Milei come in with really crazed ideas, and nobody even cares so much how crazy they are, it’s just different. That’s kind of how Trump won as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mark Weisbrot; he’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their research and analysis online at CEPR.net. Mark Weisbrot, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MW: Thank you.

https://fair.org/home/milei-is-really-a ... ian-ideas/

******

The Drums of War Are Growing Louder in South America
Posted on December 1, 2023 by Nick Corbishley

As tensions rise in the Essequibo territorial dispute, Brazil sends reinforcements to its northern border, Venezuela holds a referendum on whether to annex the region and Guyana mulls hosting US military bases.

Just over two weeks ago, I posted a piece flagging the possibility that the next geopolitical flash point in this year of living dangerously could be a centuries-old border dispute in an oil-rich corner of South America. That oil-rich corner is Essequibo, a sparsely populated 160,000 square-kilometre chunk of disputed land, comprising mainly rain forest, that makes up roughly two-thirds of Guyana, a former British colony. But the land has also been claimed by Venezuela since it won its independence from Spain just over 200 years ago. With a little encouragement from the US, the dispute now threatens to escalate into a full-blown war.

A map of the region:


Guyana: “Essequibo Is We Own” | Three Worlds One Vision

Troop Movements

On Wednesday (Nov 29), the Ministry of Defence of neighbouring Brazil announced it was sending military reinforcements to its northern border as a precautionary measure. The northern Brazilian state of Roraima, in the middle of the Amazon jungle, shares a border with both Venezuela and Essequibo and Brasilia is concerned that the ratcheting tensions between its two neighbours could descend into violence.

Last week, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (aka Lula) sent his senior adviser, Celso Amorim, a former minister of defence and foreign secretary, to Caracas to meet with the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, to express the Brazilian government’s concerns about the risk of war breaking out between the two countries. That meeting does not appear to have had the desired effect. On Wednesday, Lula posted a message on X reminding that (machine translated):

When a country decides to go to war, it is declaring the bankruptcy of dialogue. And I came into politics through dialogue, and I believe that it is much more sensible and effective to waste a few hours at negotiating tables than to go around shooting at random, killing innocent women, children and men.

The Brazilian government is particularly concerned about the possible fallout from a popular consultative referendum the Maduro government is holding this Sunday on the country’s territorial claims over Essequibo. The referendum includes five questions, the fifth of which is whether citizens agree that incorporating Essequibo as part of Venezuela’s own territory and granting its “current and future population” Venezuelan citizenship is a good idea.

The move is largely seen by Maduro’s critics as an attempt to shore up domestic support at home and is also a response to Guyana’s increasingly close military ties with the US. Caracas insists that the referendum is purely consultative and non-binding, and that it has no intention of annexing the territory. But at the same time it is increasing its military activity close to the border with Essequibo, ostensibly to combat illegal mining activities.

Ominously, Venezuela’s Minister of Defence Vladimir Padrino López recently said the dispute with Guyana “is not an armed war, for now.”

“Go out and vote (in the referendum). This is not an armed war, for now, it is not an armed war,” he said, adding that the members of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) will be “permanently on guard” for “any action that threatens” the country’s “territorial integrity.”

The government of Guyana is also raising the stakes. Up until last week it had repeatedly denied allegations from Caracas that it was planning to invite US Southern Command to set up a forward operating base in Essequibo. But then last Friday the country’s Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo said in a press conference:

“We have never been interested in military bases, but we have to protect our national interest… We’re going to be working with a number of countries on greater defence cooperation. We will have from the US Department of Defence next week two visits to Guyana, by two teams. And then several other visits in the month of December and then high level representation from the Department of Defence here.”

In other words, it appears that US Southern Command is about to set up a new forward operating base, or bases, in a territory that is still very much in dispute. That territory is not only rich in oil and gas but also boasts other mineral deposits, including Gold and Bauxite, as well as huge fish stocks and fresh water supplies. Also of note is Jagdeo’s mention of “a number of countries” with which it is seeking “greater defence countries.” Those countries include Canada, which has mining interests across Latin America, and Brazil.

The US and Guyana already signed an agreement in 2020 to undertake joint military patrols in the Essequibo region, ostensibly for “drug interdiction” and to provide “greater security” to the South American country. Southcom has signed similar agreements with the governments of Ecuador and Peru in recent months (as we have covered here, here and here) and is looking to do the same with Uruguay.

A Centuries-Old Dispute

The current diplomatic tussle over Essequibo may have been ignited by the discovery in 2015 of huge deposits of oil off the coast of the disputed region but its roots date back over two centuries. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the initial antagonist in the dispute was the British Empire, which in 1814 acquired the regions of Demerara and Berbicea from the Netherlands (the cream coloured territory in the map above) after the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. In that treaty the Netherlands did not demarcate the territory’s western border with Venezuela.

That was an open invitation for the British Empire. In the chaos that resulted from the overthrow of Spanish rule in South America, the British began to exploit weaknesses in post-independence Venezuela, then part of “Gran Colombia“, to make incursions west of the Essequibo river, where gold deposits were soon discovered. The Essequibo territory had de jure belonged to the Spanish crown but it had exercised little effective control over it. Wherever British troops found a power vacuum, they left British settlers behind. It is also during this time that the British occupied the Malvinas (Falkland Islands).

In 1822, Simon Bolivar ordered his Minister in London, José Rafael Revenga, to present an official complaint to the British authorities, in the following terms:

“The settlers of Demerara and Berbice have usurped a large portion of land that according to the latest treaties between Spain and Holland belongs to us on this side of the Essequibo River. (…) said settlers must place themselves under the jurisdiction and obedience of our laws or withdraw to their former possessions.”

Needless to say, that did not happen. Over the next few decades the British progressively expanded their control over Essequibo. As the century progressed, it settled in more and more of the territories it claimed as its own, although there were periods of relative coexistence with Venezuela that put a temporary break on the British expansion. Following the British claim of 1887, which included populations under historical Spanish and Venezuelan control, the government of Venezuela decided to sever diplomatic relations.

Matters eventually came to a head at the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration, convened in 1899 to settle the dispute, at which Venezuela’s claims were, ironically, supported by Washington. Sitting on the five-member court were two Americans, representing Caracas, two Britons, representing, of course, the interests of Her Majesty’s Empire, and a Russian who was supposed to be an impartial judge. The latter, Friedrich Martens, was instrumental in tilting the ruling in the British colony’s favour.

The arbitration court agreed to grant the United Kingdom 159,000 square of territory west of the Essequibo River. Some jurists and political authorities, including the Netherlands and Brazil, warned that the ruling had been excessively generous to the British. Venezuela lodged a formal complaint, though it finally grudgingly accepted the outcome and collaborated in the demarcation of the new border. The conflict remained dormant for decades.

But all that changed in 1949, when one of the four North American lawyers who represented Venezuela in the Paris arbitration award, Severo Mallet-Prevost, had a memorandum published posthumously that documented a litany of irregularities in the process, from external pressure to the partial attitude of the Russian judge, to parallel negotiations. In other words, the trial had been rigged in the UK’s favour from day one and in Mallet-Prevost’s opinion, that was enough to nullify the ruling.

After these revelations, Venezuela resumed its territorial claim. Then, in 1966, the year the UK granted independence to Guyana, it also signed the Geneva Agreement with Venezuela, under which the parties agreed to reach a mediated solution to the Essequibo dispute, recognising Venezuela’s nullification of the 1899 decision.

But the newly independent Guyana refused to engage in direct negotiations with Venezuela, preferring instead to pursue UN-based mechanisms including through the General Assembly and the Security Council. In 1987, both countries agreed to thrash out their differences through a UN-mediated “Good Offices” process. During the Hugo Chávez era, integration with the neighbour was prioritised over territorial differences.

To begin with, Maduro continued along the same path. In September, 2013, months after Chávez’s death, he made an official visit to Georgetown and declared that the dispute was a legacy of colonialism. Then, in 2015, a consortium of oil companies led by Exxon Mobile discovered huge deposits of oil and gas in the disputed waters of Essequibo. And just like that, the conflict was reignited, but this time it is the US, not the British, that is stirring the pot.

All About the Oil

For the moment, it is Guyana’s vast untapped energy supplies that are of most interest to the US government and corporations. As a 2018 report by US Southern Command conceded, the US will have increasing difficulties securing enough energy to meet domestic demand in the decades to come. Though the report does not mention Guyana directly by name, it leaves little doubt that the US economy’s main source of energy supplies in the years to come will be its direct neighbourhood.

Then, in January this year, Southcom Commander Laura Richardson explained, with disarming frankness, US’ strategic interest in Guyanese oil in a speech to the Atlantic Council:

This region, why this region matters, with all of its rich resources and rare earth minerals: you’ve got the Lithium Triangle which is needed for technology today; 60% of the world’s lithium is in the Lithium Triangle, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile. You just had the largest oil reserves, light sweet crude discovered off of Guyana over a year ago. You have Venezuela’s resources as well with oil, copper, gold. China gets 36% of its food source from this region. We have the Amazon, lungs of the world. We have 31% of the world’s fresh water in this region too.

Below is a clip of the speech in all its glory. It is, I believe, a perfect illustration of late Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s thesis that war is a “racket” — “possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.” Like Butler in his day, General Richardson is nothing more than a “high-class muscle-man” — or in her case, woman — “for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers”; “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” Unlike Butler (at least in his later years), Richardson seems to bask in the role.



If anything, war is even more of a racket today than it was back in Butler’s time (early 20th century), mainly because the business of war is so much larger. In Guyana, the US stands to benefit not only from gaining access to valuable mineral resources at dirt cheap prices — the production sharing agreement the Guyanese government signed with the Exxon Mobil consortium was so egregious that a former presidential adviser cautioned that the country was being “recolonised” — and without having to pay any of the externalities; it will also get to sell Guyana shiploads of US-made weapons and other military equipment.

And Guyana right now is rolling in money, despite the miserly conditions the Guyanese government agreed to in the contracts it has signed with Exxon. But how much of that money will be funnelled into the US military industrial complex, just as happens with all US wars? For example, Guyana’s coast guard just took delivery of a patrol boat built by Metal Shark, a US military contractor that has sold well over a dozen maritime combat vessels to Ukraine since the war began there.

As Julian Assange once said about the Afghan war, the goal is “to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of Europe,” through the target country, “and back into the hands of a transnational security elite.”

Exxon’s Revenge

The US began taking an interest in Guyana, which boasts one of the lowest population densities on the planet, in 2015 — the same year that a consortium of firms led by Exxon Mobil discovered huge deposits of oil in waters off the coast of Essequibo. For decades Washington had more or less stood on the sidelines of the territorial dispute over Essequibo, calling for a “timely resolution” through bilateral negotiations. But that all changed in 2018, when it began calling for the hugely controversial 1899 arbitration decision to be upheld.

In the same year, Guyana filed an application before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asking the Court to reaffirm the 1899 arbitration award that established the boundary between Guyana and Venezuela. In 2020, the ICJ ruled against Venezuela, whose government refuses to acknowledge ICJ jurisdiction on the matter.

As the Washington Post reported in 2017, the discovery of oil in Essequibo was the perfect revenge for Exxon’s then-CEO Rex Tillerson, whom Donald Trump would later go on to appoint as his secretary of state:

Rex Tillerson hadn’t been CEO of ExxonMobil very long when the late president Hugo Chavez made foreign oil companies in Venezuela an offer they couldn’t refuse. Give the government a bigger cut, or else.

Most of the companies took the deal. Tillerson refused.

Chavez responded in 2007 by nationalizing ExxonMobil’s considerable assets in the country, which the company valued at $10 billion. The losses were a big blow to Tillerson, who reportedly took the seizure as a personal affront.

Only Tillerson didn’t get mad, at least in public. He got even.

Flash forward to May 2015. Just five days after former military general David Granger was elected president of the South American nation of Guyana, unseating the country’s long-ruling leftist party, ExxonMobil made a big announcement.

In the deep blue waters120 miles off Guyana’s coast, the company scored a major oil discovery: as much as 1.4 billion barrels of high-quality crude. Tillerson told company shareholders the well, Liza-1, was the largest oil find anywhere in the world that year.

For tiny Guyana (population 800,000), the continent’s only English-speaking country and one of its poorest, it was a fortune-changing event, certain to mark a “before and after” in a country long isolated by language and geography.

There was just one problem with this undersea bonanza. Venezuela claimed the waters — and the hydrocarbons beneath them — as its own.

Clearly drilling in the disputed area was potentially a good business decision for ExxonMobil, not some sort of elaborate revenge scheme by its CEO

But revenge had been served. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s successor, was livid.

“There is a brutal campaign against Venezuela of lies, funded by ExxonMobil … which has great influence at the Pentagon,” Maduro declared, calling the dispute an attempt to corner Venezuela and precipitate “a high-intensity conflict.”

Since then the US has waged a brutal economic war against Venezuela that has allegedly killed tens of thousands of people, according to a report by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). It has, with the help of the Bank of England, confiscated Venezula’s gold; and even tried to engineer a coup against the Maduro government by appointing Juan Guaidó “interim president”, with farcical consequences. Now holed up in Florida, Guaidó faces a raft of criminal charges back home including treason, usurpation of functions, profit or extraction of money, securities or public goods, money laundering and association to commit a crime.

Yet even as the US is on the verge of establishing another military foothold just across the border from Venezuela (Southcom already has seven or eight official military bases and many more unofficial ones in Colombia, whose Petro government has reestablished commercial and diplomatic ties with Caracas) in disputed territory, it is also in the process of lifting sanctions against Venezuelan oil, gas and gold. On Tuesday, Maduro asked Joe Biden to lift all the remaining sanctions and begin a new era of relations “at the highest level” — something the Biden administration is not ready to contemplate until at least after next year’s elections.

In the meantime, the distant drums of another US proxy war are growing louder in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has already seen its fair share of (largely US-sponsored) military conflicts and whose leaders in 2014 declared the region a “Zone of Peace.” But that peace could soon be shattered if the current cycle of ratcheting tensions between Venezuela and Guyana is not stopped.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... erica.html

[blindpig]

Will Milei Catapult Argentina Into the Unknown? No, other politicians and Economists Won’t Allow Him to Do It

Richard Hubert Barton

December 10, 2023

Libertarianism is in fact combating the legend of Peronism which is very much alive, Richard Barton writes.

We will put an end to the parasitic, stupid, useless political caste that is sinking this country.

Milei in a speech after finishing in first place in primary elections in August 2023

The long shadow of Juan Domingo Perón

To grasp the present-day social and economic situation of Argentina at which it arrived is impossible without at least some limited hints about the Peronist movement which have been staging comebacks since mid 20th century. Perón claimed that he had learned economics during his two-year stay in Italy. The key tenets of Perón’s economic ideas included emphasis on industrialization, trade and financial autarchy, and active state planning and intervention, particularly in the allocation of credit and the distribution of income among factors of production. These policies had a persistent and negative impact on the Argentine economy and led to inflation, deficit and stagnation.

Some analysts agree that the Peronist Economic Policy Paradigm is best condensed in a letter sent by Perón in 1952 to the newly elected president of Chile, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo:

Give the people, especially to the workers, all that is possible. When it seems to you that you have already given them too much, give them more. You will see the results. Everybody will try to frighten you with the spectre of an economic collapse. But all of this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than the economy, which everyone fears so much because no one understands it.

Ironically, by the end of 1951, the Argentine economy was down on its knees after four years of stagflation and growing social unrest. It was evident by then that the economy was not “elastic.”

Some further insights into Perón’s peculiar way of thinking may be given on the basis of his speeches. According to analysts like Emilio Ocampo who is an expert on Peronism, they can be reduced to arguments in support of the nationalistically-tinged idea disregarding individual effort or luck but emphasizing the influence on income as an external force with human intention. Importantly, it is “others”, Perón went on to argue, who are actively taking actions which lower Argentinians’ income. He saw of minor importance the question of taking a collective stand to reduce the influence of natural elements (through insurance or a better selection of activities and crops). Basically, for him it was a question of actively opposing other actors that try to exploit Argentines.

The newly elected president Javier Milei took defeated Sergio Massa whose Peronist movement had governed for 16 of the last 20 years. He promises to overcome a financial calamity that has left 40% of Argentina’s 45 million citizens in poverty and pushed inflation to more than 140%. How does he intend to achieve it? Well, it is not a secret, he has already rolled out all the heavy libertarian weaponry.

Would you trade with an assassin?

President Javier Milei in November 2023

Crossroads

The striking feature of Milei’s recovery program is its ideological character. For starters, Milei presented his foreign policy proposals as a global “fight against socialists and statists.” He said he would not promote political and trade relations with communist countries like North Korea, China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba.4 This may be interpreted as withdrawing or limiting interdependence and creating potentially conflictual relations basically on ideological grounds.

His harshest criticisms were reserved for China. According to him, President Xi Jinping’s ruling Communist Party typically silences dissidents with lengthy prison sentences and has been accused of detaining more than 1 million mostly Uyghurs in camps in its Xinjiang region. The U.S. has dubbed that campaign a genocide, while China calls the facilities vocational training centers.

China has also been accused of kidnapping a handful of people from abroad including Thailand. He reiterated that he would maintain particularly friendly relations with the U.S. and Israel.

The main thrust of his policies is aimed at radical transformation of Argentina’s economy. He is quite open about a need to introduce dollarisation and says his dollarisation detractors are “brutes”; Milei is determined to eliminate the Central Bank; He is committed to “chainsawing” 12 out of 18 ministries; he supports privatisation of 34 government-owned big enterprises; he foresees slashing government expenditure that climbed to 38% of annual GDP; he is committed to reduce or scrap most of Argentina’s taxes and once again declared: “I know how to exterminate the cancer of inflation!”

Mixed reactions to Milei’s victory

With such an extreme and unusual political programme as that of Milei, it galvanized into action as much his friends as his enemies. Let’s quote a few reactions to his win on 19 November 2023.

“I am a man of democracy, and I value nothing more than the popular verdict. I trust that tomorrow we can start working with Javier Milei to guarantee an orderly transition,” said outgoing President Alberto Fernandez.

“I congratulate Javier Milei for bravely representing the will to advance and prosper that lives in the hearts of Argentinians. He knew how to listen to the voice of young people and the fatigue of millions of neglected and impoverished people,” said former President Mauricio Macri.

“The extreme right has won in Argentina. It is the decision of its society. Sad for Latin America, and we’ll see… The relationship between Colombia and Argentina, the bonds between their communities are maintained in mutual respect. I congratulate Milei,” said Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro.

“As president of Chile, I will work tirelessly to keep our sister nations united and collaborating for the well-being of all,” said Chilean President Gabriel Boric.

“Democracy is the voice of the people, and it must always be respected… I wish the new government good luck and success,” said Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva.

“Argentina is a close partner of the European Union. I thank Alberto Fernandez for the excellent cooperation over the last years. I look forward to continuing this cooperation for the benefit of our peoples,” wrote President of the European Council Charles Michel on X.

“We hope that the course towards commitment to multipolarity, independent foreign policy and a firm defence of national interests will be further developed. We are confident that this will be facilitated by Argentina’s accession to BRICS, which will open up new horizons and opportunities for it,” Russia’s ambassador to Argentina, Dimitry Feokitistov, said, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov told reporters that the Kremlin had taken note of statements about Russia from Milei but wanted to maintain strong ties with Buenos Aires.

Washington’s reaction came via National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who congratulated the president-elect, as well as the people of Argentina “for holding free and fair elections.” “We look forward to building on our strong bilateral relationship based on our shared commitment to human rights, democratic values, and transparency,” he added

A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Beijing hopes to “continue our friendship, boost our respective development and revitalisation with win-win cooperation.”

Former U.S. president Donald Trump, to whom Milei is often compared, also sent congratulations.

“Congratulations to Javier Milei on a great race for president of Argentina. The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again!”

His victory was also celebrated by X’s owner Elon Musk, who posted: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.”

Modifications on the way

The electoral programme of president-elect Milei will have to be considerably modified. So widely acclaimed need for dollarisation is undergoing some scrutiny. Remarkably, Emilio Ocampo whom he made his chief dollarisation strategist raved about bringing offshore dollars and getting money from under mattresses and get them back into the system in order to create a pool of greenbacks for the purpose of dollarisation. Apart from that Milei’s team projecting dollarisation is looking at five alternatives among them such as treasury bonds, debt from the public pension fund and shares in the state oil firm.

While still being loud about his campaign promise, hailing dollarisation as a cure for the country’s hyperinflation problem Milei had on 5 October 2023 a disappointing meeting with the big business gathering in Mar del Plata. The leading Argentinian businesspeople refused to endorse his dollarisation proposal and remained sceptical about it. Furthermore, he was reminded that according to more than 200 economists of all stripes, signatories of an op-ed piece published on 10 September it is a “mirage.” In their text, they underlined the impossibility of “dollarising” without sufficient dollars in reserves, but also the loss of monetary sovereignty. To make the picture fuller, the IMF barred Argentina from accessing international markets while the country is still paying back its debts. Argentina owes the Washington, DC-based lender some $44 billion following a historic bailout in 2018. To make matters considerably worse, the World Bank expects the Argentine economy to contract by 2.5% in 2023, in part due to a devastating drought estimated to cost it $20 billion in lost agricultural exports. Presidente Milei, ain’t you unlucky!

One of the useful explanations as to why Argentina shouldn’t use dollarisation to control its inflation that I came across was that of researcher Bhagwan Das. The basic consequence of dollarisation is that Argentinian Central Bank ceases to exist and acts upon the instructions of the U.S. Federal Reserve. The latter institution acts in the interests of the U.S. Thus, the Argentinian Central Bank no longer acts as the lender of the last resort for domestic financial institutions in distress and gives up its power to set domestic interest rates and manage the exchange value of its currency.

How can it affect the Argentinian economy? For instance, right now, lending rates in the United States are at their maximum (5.25 to 5.50%) while its inflation is slowing to around 4% or even below. Once U.S. inflation rate declines to 2%, the U.S. Federal Reserve may start cutting its lending rate to support its own economic growth. Meanwhile, once Argentina adopted U.S. dollar as its own currency or legal tender, then with the prevailing budget and trade deficits and inflation rates, a reduction in interest rates will only worsen the inflation and drive the economy deeper into recession and unemployment. This in turn, may lead to social unrest and riots as happened in the early 2000s.

In this context it is no longer surprising that in his victory speech Milei no longer mentioned dollarisation and shutting down the Argentinian Central Bank. It may be understood as a way of seeking support from centrist parties.

I had watched for many years and seen how a few rich families held much of Argentina’s wealth and power in their hands. So Perón and the government brought in an eight-hour working day, sickness pay and fair wages to give poor workers a fair go.

Evita Perón

The most essential reasons for abandoning dollarisation and closing down the central bank

These electoral campaign promises of president Milei may not be politically acceptable. Ex-president Sergio Fernandez was courteous enough to congratulate Javier Milei on his victory but at heart he remains a Peronist and has no intention to facilitate his libertarian policies. Most importantly, he commands considerable influence in Argentinian congress, trade unions and in Argentinian society.

In 1976, 1989, in the 1990s, and 2007, while in Argentina I had extensive conversations with ordinary people trying to learn about their perceptions of Peronism. Overwhelmingly, they were positive. Some workers in a random conversation noted: “Ordinary people had a chance to buy a house only when Perón was in power.” When I insisted on something wrong that was going in the Perón era one worker told me that Perón introduced in his factory rules according to which once a worker performed well for half a year you couldn’t sack him even when he performed poorly later on.

Libertarianism is in fact combating the legend of Peronism which is very much alive. Perón, his wife Evita are part of the Argentinian folklore, culture and traditions admired by many. I can’t imagine most of Argentinians wanting the dollar as their legal tender or being happy with their monetary policy run from Washington. I fully subscribe to the recent comment made by William Jackson, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics who said: “We suspect that some of his more radical proposals — namely dollarization — may not materialize, given limited support both in Congress and among the public.”

More flexibility in relations with foreigners and with his Argentinian colleagues is strongly recommended

Perhaps some flexibility is required in Milei’s “chainsawing” public spending (shock therapy). All that at this stage is known is not “shock therapy’” content but Milei’s plan to pass it to Congress on 11 December 2023.

It is necessary to refocus on Milei’s cutting ties or freezing them with China. To cut ties or freeze them seem strongly-worded statements leaving no doubts as to Milei’s intentions. But with all his determination to fight “communists and socialists” will he get his foreign policy and trade his way?

Can he ignore the fact that China is the second-biggest buyer of Argentine exports? Has he forgotten that in 2015 the then-Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner while she was on a state visit to China sought new investments from the Middle Kingdom? After all, the present huge Chinese investments include a contract to build twin dams in Patagonia and an agreement to set up a nuclear plant. Is Milei unaware that it is no-one else but China that provides a crucial $18 billion swap line with the central bank that’s being used to pay the International Monetary Fund.

Lately, he has softened his comments on commercial ties with China. The word “freeze” was replaced by “not promoting,” and “honouring the already signed contracts.” Further contracts, it turns out, would be up to the Argentinian businesspeople and their Chinese counterparts. Amazingly enough, using high diplomatic skills, Chinese largely ignored Milei’s criticisms. At the same time, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing in Beijing that if Milei visited China in person “he would have a completely different conclusion as to the freedom and security in China.”

Milei, el loco (the madman) as some call him among the Argentinian masses, displayed a far reaching bravado toward other politicians and personalities in Argentina. For instance, in previous interviews he has called the centrist mayor of Buenos Aires “a leftist piece of shit” and suggested that a former cabinet chief of a centre-right government should be beheaded with a samurai sword. In another instance, he charged the pope (who is Argentinian) with encouraging communism and dubbed climate change “a socialist lie.” On a lighter note, he neither denies nor confirms rumours that his dogs advise him. “If so,” he says, “they are the best political analysts in the world.”

First year under president Milei

I am among those who want to give the new Argentinian president a benefit of a doubt and I shall assume that Milei learns quickly and turns further towards moderation. If so, there will be no need to run the country neither by decrees nor to conduct referenda. The whole dramatic picture of Argentina’s crisis he called “tragic reality” seems to be blown out of proportions. To realise it, it may be worth comparing it with the crisis of 1989 when president Carlos Menem came to power. Most briefly, it was a poverty-stricken country with its inflation approaching 5000% (it is not a misprint), foreign debt was about $60 billion and domestic debt about $7 billion. In addition to that, there were power failures, factory closings, widespread layoffs and shortages of everything.

When I arrived in Buenos Aires in August 1989, I recall vividly seeing people carrying packets, briefcases or bags with piles of banknotes to purchase basic foodstuffs whose prices changed up to 2-3 times a day. Unintentionally, I envisaged myself a crisis in the Weimar Republic about which I had read a lot.

Well, frankly speaking, there is nothing like that in Argentina now at least in terms of inflation. Menem came up to power as a Peronist but astute observers say, he turned out to handle economic problems as a neoliberal democrat. The facts are that by 1993, under Menem inflation was down to single digits.

I can’t see Javier Milei not to reduce inflation markedly in the first year in power. There should be substantial rise in investment, employment and regular debt repayments.

And there seem to be some reasons for optimism for presidente Milei.

He had a “very comfortable” meeting with Biden aides: Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, and Juan Gonzalez, Latin America adviser. They not only will guide him, give him professional advice but he will have to follow their instructions. Support from the Biden administration will be essential. In the coming weeks, Milei will enter negotiations over Argentina’s troubled $43bn loan from the IMF, in which the U.S. is the biggest stakeholder. They won’t let him down – he will be given every possible assistance they can offer to him. After all, they won’t find another loud-mouth of his calibre who would lecture the world about the virtues of the U.S. democracy.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/ ... -to-do-it/

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Milei fulfills campaign promise and reduces number of ministries


Javier Milei fulfilled one of his campaign promises on Sunday by signing the first of his presidential decrees | Photo: EFE
Published December 11, 2023 (5 hours 32 minutes ago)

The leader of the La Libertad Avanza party took office in the Casa Rosada and sent a message to his followers, in which he made it clear that his plan for tough economic and fiscal adjustment is the bet for his first months in office.

The new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, fulfilled one of his campaign promises on Sunday by signing the first of his presidential decrees with which he reforms the Ministries Law by reducing the number of portfolios from 22 to 9, through the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU).

The leader of the La Libertad Avanza party took office at the Casa Rosada and sent a message to his followers, in which he made it clear that his plan for harsh economic and fiscal adjustment is the bet for his first months in office: reducing the size of the State, since the adjustments will have to be paid for, if possible, by the political class and not the private sector.


Milei's government will be based on two mega-ministries: Human Capital, headed by Sandra Petovello, and Infrastructure, headed by Guillermo Ferraro. The other portfolios will be Economy (Luis Caputo), Foreign Relations, International Trade and Worship (Diana Mondino), Interior (Guillermo Francos), Defense (Luis Petri), Security (Patricia Bullrich), Justice (Mariano Cúneo Libarona) and Health (Mario Russo).


Of utmost importance is the role of the Chief of Staff, a position that Nicolás Posse will occupy. For his part, Santiago Bausili will be the president of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA); and Osvaldo Giordano, current Minister of Finance of Córdoba, will direct the National Social Security Administration (Anses).

The scheme of the new National Executive Branch is completed by 13 ministries that will work in the branches of Education, Energy, Transportation, Communication, Public Works, Labor and others.

The first of the mega-ministers, that of Human Capital, will be commanded by the journalist Sandra Petovello, and among its most important tasks will be "to assist the President of the Nation and the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, in everything related to education, culture, to individual and collective relationships and working conditions".

It will also intervene in issues related to the legal regime of collective bargaining and worker and employer associations; to employment, job training and social security, social inclusion and human development, as well as food security, poverty reduction and the development of the most vulnerable sectors.

The other mega-ministry, Infrastructure, will cover a workspace of 62 function points. Led by businessman Guillermo Ferraro, who is part of President Javier Milei's closest circle, it will assist the President of the Nation and the Chief of Staff of Ministers, in everything related to infrastructure and public services.

Among its responsibilities will be the development of policies linked to public works and infrastructure, national water policy, transportation, housing development policy, habitat and urban integration; the development and execution of communications policies, together with works related to mining and energy.

To lead the Economy portfolio Milei chose Luis "Toto" Caputo, who was Minister of Finance during the government of Mauricio Macri and his task will be to intervene in economic, budgetary and tax policy and productive development; in the administration of public finances, industry, agriculture, livestock and fishing.

In addition, it will draw up and supervise the economic, financial and fiscal relations with the provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), as well as the development, proposal and execution of the national policy on energy, mining and trade.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship will be occupied by Diana Mondino, one of the first confirmed as soon as she won the presidential runoff on November 19. In summary, her job will be to advise on foreign relations, her representation before foreign governments, the Holy See and international entities.


The Ministry of the Interior, one of the few that will remain standing from the previous administration, will be directed by former deputy and lawyer Guillermo Francos, who will be in charge of the internal political government, the full exercise of constitutional principles and guarantees, ensuring and preserving the republican, representative and federal regime.

He will also be responsible for the promotion and development of tourism activity, the definition and execution of policies for the development of high-performance, amateur and recreational sports, together with environmental policy and sustainable development, in addition to the rational use of resources. natural resources.

The radical leader Luis Petri will be the head of Defense and must attend to everything related to national defense and relations with the Armed Forces within the current institutional framework. As a counterpart, Patricia Bullrich will be the Minister of Security, a position that she had already held in the government team of former president Mauricio Macri.

Bullrich will be responsible for accompaniment to the president and the chief of staff regarding internal security, the preservation of freedom, life and property of the inhabitants, as well as their rights and guarantees within a framework of full validity of the institutions of the democratic system.

The lawyer Mariano Cúneo Libarona was another of the first confirmed in the Milei team and will cover the Ministry of Justice, so he will ensure relations with the Judiciary, with the Public Ministry, with the Ombudsman, in addition to the Council of the Judiciary.

It will also act in updating national legislation, in legal advice and in the coordination of the State's activities related to said advice, without prejudice to the competence and technical independence of the Office of the Treasury of the Nation.

After an exchange with Sandra Pettovello, both came to the conclusion that the Health area required a ministerial structure, since Milei "would have recognized the enormous complexity involved in governing that area as well." Directed by cardiologist Mario Russo, it will have to do with the health of the population and the promotion of healthy behaviors.


Furthermore, the details of the DNU accessed by Ámbito detail “the tasks necessary to enable the activity of the President of the Nation will be attended to by the following Presidential Secretariats: General, Legal and Technical, Communication and Press.”

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/milei-cu ... -0008.html

They will present an appeal in favor of the electoral process in Guatemala


The Public Ministry does not have the power to decide on electoral issues. | Photo: EFE
Published December 11, 2023

It would be necessary to analyze whether they would also incur in usurpation of functions, by arrogating to themselves powers that only correspond to the TSE or violating the Political Constitution of the Republic of Guatemala.

Several Guatemalan lawyers and magistrates classified on Sunday the recent announcement by the Special Prosecutor's Office Against Impunity (FECI) regarding the declaration of nullity of the electoral results due to discrepancies with the minutes as illegitimate and illegal actions and promised to present legal appeals against them.

Former Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz pointed out that the Public Ministry (MP) does not have the power to declare the electoral records “null and void” after the conference by the FECI prosecutor, Leonor Morales Lazo, who on more than one occasion occasion classified the minutes as null due to the alleged discovery of various identified irregularities.

For his part, constitutional lawyer Edgar Ortiz recalled that the MP has no jurisdiction in the electoral field, since "the MP also does not have the power to ask the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to annul the elections", so it is necessary that The Constitutional Court (CC) puts a stop to the actions of the MP.


“Tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. we are going to request assistance for the due execution of the protection, because we were granted provisional protection on October 7, when the Constitutional Court said that it urged all bodies to respect the alternation in power and electoral results,” declared Ortiz.

Likewise, it emerged that the former head of the FECI, Juan Francisco Sandoval, in addition to emphasizing that the MP does not have the power to decide on electoral issues, considered that he may have incurred some crimes when trying to do so. As he reflected, the TSE can validate or annul a process, just as the Court cannot initiate a criminal prosecution.

The former head of the FECI said that “each body has its own powers,” so at least the FECI prosecutors could have abused their authority, since they would be using their position for their own benefit or that of a third party.

Furthermore, it would be necessary to analyze whether they would also incur usurpation of functions, by arrogating to themselves powers that only correspond to the TSE or violating the Political Constitution of the Republic of Guatemala, by the alleged alteration of the constitutional order.

The former prosecutor pointed out that it is necessary to analyze the acts carried out by the MP because, although the FECI “only” declared the nullity of the acts in a press conference, it is necessary to see the acts and determine if the commission of the crime remains as a attempt or are preparatory acts for the consummation of the criminal act.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/presenta ... -0005.html

Google Translator

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Coup Attempt in Guatemala: Attorney General Tries to Invalidate President-Elect Arévalo’s Victory
DECEMBER 9, 2023


Guatemalan President-elect Bernardo Arévalo (center) marches with supporters and political and indigenous leaders, in Guatemala City, Guatemala, December 7, 2023. Photo: EFE/David Toro.

The attorney general of Guatemala tried to invalidate President-elect Bernardo Arévalo de León’s presidential victory, claiming that the general elections in which Arévalo was elected was plagued with irregularities that would merit a declaration of nullity. This statement, made on Friday, December 8, is being interpreted by various sectors as a coup attempt against the elected government.

“The voting records of the closing of the scrutiny are null and void for the general elections of president and vice president, deputies of the Congress of the Republic by national list, deputies of the Congress of the Republic by electoral district, municipal corporations, and deputies to the Central American Parliament, because these records were not authorized by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal,” said a representative of the Attorney General’s Office, Leonor Morales Lazo, who is in charge of presenting the case to the press.


Morales Lazo claimed that the TSE had delegated its own functions “to national and international third parties,” in allusion to the acquisition of a software “that served as a platform for the electoral event.” According to the Attorney General’s Office, the electoral software was used to commit fraud in the counting of votes.

Before Morales Lazo, the director of the Office of the Special Prosecutor against Impunity, Rafael Curruchiche, spoke to the press, announcing the invalidation of the elections. Curruchiche and Attorney General Consuelo Porras have been condemned by the Puebla Group for carrying out a lawfare to prevent President-elect Arévalo from taking office. In August, the legal status of Arévalo’s party, Semilla Movement, was suspended by the judiciary.

Electoral Tribunal responds: ‘The results are unalterable’
In response to the declarations of the Attorney General’s Office, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) of Guatemala stated that the results of the elections, in which Bernardo Arévalo de León emerged victorious, “are unalterable.”

“We have a president and a vice president who have been accredited and must take office,” the president of the TSE, Blanca Alfaro, said in a press conference held by the electoral body on Friday.

Alfaro ratified that both Arévalo and Vice President-elect Karin Herrera must be sworn in on January 14, 2024, in strict adherence to the Guatemalan Constitution.

“There is no way that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal could repeat any election,” Alfaro emphasized. “If the elected authorities are not sworn in, there would be a breach of the constitutional order.”

She explained that no authority can annul the elections “except if an order comes from the Constitutional Court.”

She added that she was “surprised” at the statements coming from the Attorney General’s Office and stressed that the elections were carried out in strict adherence to the pertinent laws.

OAS denounces coup attempt
On Friday, the Organization of American States (OAS) called the actions of the Guatemalan Attorney General’s Office a “coup attempt.”

“The General Secretariat of the Organization of American States condemns the coup attempt by the Office of the Attorney General of Guatemala,” the OAS said in a statement.

“The attempt to annul the general elections of this year constitutes the worst form of rupture of democratic order and the consolidation of a political fraud against the will of the people,” the statement added.

It is interesting to see anti-coup statements coming from the OAS this time, given the organization’s track record in having supported a number of coups across Latin America, including in Guatemala itself in 1954, against then President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and more recently in Bolivia in 2019 against the elected government of Evo Morales, and in Peru last year against President Pedro Castillo who is still in prison.

https://orinocotribune.com/coup-attempt ... s-victory/

[blindpig]

Argentina: The Milei Moment Has Arrived
DECEMBER 14, 2023


Milei’s inauguration. Photo: Bernardino Avila.

By Luis Alberto Quevedo – Dec 11, 2023

Yesterday, Javier Milei’s intense life as a panelist came to an end and his new life as president of the nation begins. Now his words and diagnoses will have to become government actions. For this reason, his first speech in front of the Legislative Assembly, at the very moment this mutation was taking place, aroused so much interest. The first surprise was that he did not address the deputies and senators who were constituted as representatives of the people: the two assembled chambers embody the always heterogeneous preferences of our society. Milei preferred instead the esplanade and to speak to his followers, not to the people as a whole (which would be fairly represented by the members of the Assembly) but to his own close followers. This was his first gesture.

He spoke surrounded by world leaders, some in office, and other former leaders who were specially invited. He spoke without his vice president and without his cabinet. He was accompanied by his sister Karina, who served as the head of the Libertarian party, head of his campaign, and as the orderly of the new cabinet appointments. She was also “Chief” of the esplanade at the time of his inaugural speech and the only person who accompanied him in the car that took him to the Congress and then to the Casa Rosada, another indicator of the future architecture of power.

Before his voters, he formulated an interpretation of the vote that brought him to the presidency: “Argentinians chose a new liberal social contract whose fundamental institutions are: private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, division of labor and social cooperation.” Except for cooperation, everything is almost identical to the discourse with which the country’s civil–military dictatorship initiated the most decadent process of the 20th century. However, the timespan to which Milei referred to in his speech did not stop at any government of the last 100 years: he said that the decadence began when populism destroyed the great project of the generation of 1880. Hence the references to Julio A. Roca: his great political beacon of the 19th and early 20th centuries, although Milei was forced to cut it back a little since Roca believed much more in the action of the state than in the invisible hand of the market.

But today, that cruel discourse was endorsed at the polls by an overwhelming majority which allows Milei (absolutely consistent with his campaign words) to state, at the beginning of his administration, that “the conclusion is that there is no alternative to adjustment and there is no alternative to shock; naturally, this will have negative repercussions on the level of activity, employment, real wages, [and] the number of poor and indigent people.”

This is what he promised and he is going to stick with it. And he repeated over and over again that the only solution is adjustment and that “there is no money” (another campaign slogan). At the moment he said it, the crowd gave him a standing ovation in the Congress square. It may seem strange to us that the promise of a “new era” begins with great suffering. This was said before he was voted in as president, which transforms the announcement of so much pain as a healing relief.

Javier Milei appeared for the first time as president and showed his character: he is pure will to power. He is alone and determined to start “a new era of prosperity, growth, development, freedom, and progress.” He has neither parliamentary majorities, alliances with other parties, nor political forces to sustain him. He does not even get along at all well with his vice president or with his entire parliamentary bloc. He relies on the overwhelming 55% that voted for him. It is not little to legitimize his presidency, but it is scarce if he wants to respect the republican procedures and balance, unless Milei believes more in plebiscitary democracy than in the Republic of dialogue and parliamentary consensus. We do not know yet, but everything seems to indicate that his fate, of success or failure, will be measured in the short term.

“It will be difficult, but we are going to make it—long fucking live freedom!” This was the sincere and forceful closing of his speech as president. It shows Milei’s conviction about his first steps. However, these words also require interpretation. Judging by the discursive context, we must assume that the promise signals that the difficult thing to achieve (and what Milei will fight for) will be to sustain, with a firm hand, the adjustment, the fall in the level of activity, the low wages, and the increase of the poor and indigent. Will freedom be enough to compensate for this harsh economic and social reality in his first years in office? From today, we will begin to answer so many questions.

https://orinocotribune.com/argentina-th ... s-arrived/

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Who Is Luis Caputo, Argentina’s New Economy Minister (Who Is Already Making the Economy Scream)?
Posted on December 15, 2023 by Nick Corbishley

Meet the new boss, same as the old.

In Spanish, as in English, the word “kaput,” taken from the German “kaputt”, means done for, knackered, wiped out. The surname of Argentina’s new Economy Minister, Luis “Toto” Caputo, is similar, just with a “c” instead of a “k” and ending in “o”, which is probably fitting given that his first dose of economic shock therapy — including a 54% devaluation of the Argentine peso, to bring the official exchange rate closer to the informal “blue” one; a halt on all public works; the freezing of public sector salaries; a sharp rise in taxes, and the elimination of many public subsidies — could wipe out what remains of Argentina’s fragile economy.

Predictably, the package of measures places the lion’s share of the burden on the already buckling shoulders of Argentina’s middle and working classes while the so-called political and economic caste — whom Milei vowed to eliminate during his election campaign — will emerge either largely unscathed or even wealthier. In fact, as I will explain later, Argentina’s central bank, also under new (and old) management, has prepared what many are calling a generous bailout of some of the country’s largest importing companies.


But before that, who is Luis “Toto” Caputo, and why does his name sound so familiar? After all, one of the key pledges Argentina’s Milei made during the election campaign, besides slashing taxes, getting rid of the central bank and dollarising the economy, all of which have been quickly forgotten or reversed, was to do away with the political caste that has dominated Argentine politics for decades. Yet few epitomise that “caste” better than Caputo.

Who is Caputo?

Caputo is a life-long friend of former President Mauricio Macri, whose government (2015-19), with Caputo’s help, did more harm to Argentina’s economy than any other since Carlos Menem’s disastrous ten-year tenure in the 1990’s.

Caputo began his career as an investment banker, first as chief of trading for Latin America at JP Morgan Chase (1994-8) before slotting into a similar role at Deutsche Bank (1998-2003). He was later appointed chairman of Deutsche Bank’s Argentine subsidiary. In more recent years, he has managed his own investment fund and sat on the board of an Argentina energy company.

But what interests us most is Caputo’s brief period in the public sector, which began in 2015. First, Macri appointed his old school chum as secretary of finance, only to quickly bump him up to finance minister and eventually central bank governor, all in the space of just three years. During that time, Caputo held arguably more sway over Argentina’s economy than anyone else. And it was during that time that the seeds of Argentina’s current crisis, including its out-of-control inflation, were sown.

First, the government offered to pay off the vulture funds that had bought, for cents on the US dollar, the bonds of the investment funds that had refused to accept previous write-downs of Argentina’s debt, in 2005 and 2010. They included US billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliot Management. The government’s goal was to return to international debt markets so as to access cheaper (foreign-denominated) debt, which it then gorged on with reckless abandon.

Between 2016 and 2018 Argentina’s foreign debt mushroomed from 17.7% of GDP to 41.8% and gross debt in foreign currency almost doubled, from 36.3% of GDP to 65.8%. Inflation also surged, from around 15% in late 2015 to over 50% by the end of Macri’s term. Even the Spanish-language Wikipedia page for Caputo includes a section documenting the myriad irregularities and potential fraud involved in the settlement reached with the holdouts (translation my own).

In 2016, the prosecutor Federico Delgado called for an investigation of the State’s payment to the holdouts, through a document in which he demonstrated possible legal and procedural irregularities in the indebtedness and payment, and declared that the $16.5 billion debt the administration took on to write off the $12.5 billion “owed” to the bondholders was “the finishing touch to a gigantic scam against the national State.”

A year later, the American journalist Greg Palast gave an interview in which he stated that Paul Singer financed Mauricio Macri’s presidential campaign with $2.5 million, thus ensuring an exponential profit on his lawsuit against Argentina. In this manoeuvre and in the deal the Macri government would reach with the fund, Singer obtained profits of 10,000%. Asked about his relationship with Paul Singer, Macri declared that he did not know him and that he was not aware that he had made a contribution to his campaign.

But it is what happened next, when Caputo was central bank governor, that set the stage for Argentina’s current woes. In 2018, with elections looming, inflation surging and Argentina’s debt situation once again spiralling out of control, the Macri government asked the IMF for a $57 billion bailout, the largest in the fund’s history, of which $44 billion would be disbursed.

As Michael Hudson recounted in an interview with the Real News Network, which we cross-posted here, since Argentina’s 2001 bailout, which was almost entirely used to enable capital flight, rank-and-file staff at the IMF had adopted a slogan : “no more Argentinas!” But the Fund’s senior ranks, led at the time by President Christine Lagarde, now at the helm of the European Central Bank, ignored that hard-earned lesson, or perhaps just didn’t care. After all, Macri’s administration was exactly the kind of government the IMF likes to do business with.

The money,or at least most of it, was quickly disbursed though, once again, it didn’t last long in the country. In the absence of capital controls, Argentina’s oligarchy simply took their share and sent it aboard. Once again, an IMF bailout had been used to subsidise capital flight so that Argentina’s wealthiest businesses and citizens could yank their money out of the country before the currency collapsed — all on the government’s tab.

Which brings us back to the present, and the biggest insult of all: to hear Caputo, the man who more than almost anyone else set this current crisis in motion, as even Milei admitted in a televised interview a few years ago, introduce his reform package on Tuesday with the following words: “the legacy we are inheriting is the worst in history.”

Incidentally, Milei’s choice for central bank chief, Santiago Bausili, was until recently a partner in Caputo’s investment fund. Like Caputo, he worked for JP Morgan , for 11 years, before joining Deutsche Bank, for another eight. He also worked under Caputo in the Macri government, first as under secretary of finance and later as secretary of finance.

Most controversially, Bausili received a significant share package worth $180,000 from his former employer, Deutsche Bank, at the same time as he was fulfilling his duties as a public servant. Those duties allegedly included helping the government issue foreign debt bonds as part of the agreement reached with the overseas vulture funds. As luck would have it, Deutsche Bank would end up charging the second highest fees for helping to place the foreign debt bonds issued by the Macri government between 2016 and 2017, as Página 12 reports.

In 2021, Bausili was accused of conflicts of interest in his interactions with Deutsche Bank during his time in government. The judge in the case, Sebastián Casanello, concluded that the evidence presented had demonstrated “Bausili’s detachment from the high standards of ethics and transparency that his role required of him,” adding that all of the actions taken by Bausili in that period “were prohibited by law.” Four months after Bausili’s prosecution, an appeals court overturned the ruling.

Casanello continued his investigation, however, accumulating more evidence against Bausili. In September 2022, he insisted on reopening the case. But this Tuesday, one day before Bausili was confirmed as the next head of the central bank, the Buenos Aires Federal Chamber once again blocked the prosecution.

Parallels with “Fujishock”

Caputo’s new economic reform package has drawn parallels with the neoliberal reforms enacted by Peru’s former President (and long-term inmate of Barbadillo prison) Alberto Fujimori during his first term in office, known as “Fujishock”. As even Wikipedia notes, Fujimori’s economic program “bore little resemblance to his campaign platform and was more drastic than anything [his rival candidate], Mario Vargas Llosa, had proposed.” What followed was “economic agony” (again, Wikipedia’s words) as “electricity costs quintupled, water prices rose eightfold, and gasoline prices rose 3000%.” Eventually, the economy stabilised.

It will be a similar story for Argentina — a country that has, for a host of reasons, been in a near-constant state of crisis for most of its history, as Jeffrey Sachs said in a recent interview with The Duran — but with one key difference: the Argentine economy is unlikely to stabilise any time soon; in fact, it could well collapse once again.

One thing that is clear is that most Argentinians, many of whom voted for Milei out of a mixture of desperation, frustration and anger with the establishment parties, face a crushing loss of purchasing power as the devaluation and rising import taxes drive inflation even higher while wages and pensions stagnate and public subsidies on energy and public transport are withdrawn.

In a complete departure from the libertarian ideals he espoused as a TV pundit before becoming a politician, Milei has also proposed a three percentage-point increase on practically all exports, from 12% to 15%. As Reuters reports, the government “is desperate for funds, especially foreign currency, with the grains sector the dominant driver of exports.” The government has also hiked import taxes from 7% to 17.5%, which will also fuel further inflation, and is considering reimposing income tax on struggling families.

These reforms will unleash much higher inflation for at least the months to come, as the Milei government itself has admitted, while ripping away all of the social protections that have allowed people on modest incomes to eke out an existence. This is in a country where the poverty rate is already above 40%, affecting 18.6 million Argentinians. As NC has reported before, this kind of austerity literally kills, through desperation, suicide and lack of access to basic health services.

IMF Support

Even so, the IMF was lightening-quick to approve Caputo’s raft of measures. In fact, it is probably safe to assume that the Fund provided some input on the drafting of the measures. As the Argentine financial journalist Alejandro Bercovich notes, what we are seeing is a classic IMF package: “The aim is to generate recession, reduce imports in order to accumulate dollars and thus continue servicing the debt owed to the Fund and lower inflation by cooling demand.”

The punchline from the IMF’s statement (emphasis my own):

“These strong initial actions aim to significantly improve public finances in a way that protects the most vulnerable in society and to strengthen the exchange rate regime.”

Of course, the IMF has a long, storied history of getting things badly wrong, especially wrt Argentina. In March 2018, for example, the-then managing director Lagarde described the first two years of [Macri’s] reforms as “amazing”.

To its credit, the Fund’s research arm has in recent years churned out studies confirming that both austerity and highly mobile capital increase inequality, making life much more difficulty for the most vulnerable in society, and that inequality is a drag on growth, which does nothing but hinder a struggling government’s ability to pay back its debts. Unfortunately, none of this appears to have informed the fund’s policy making.

Lastly, in another dark blast from the past, the Milei government’s economic reform package appears to include a public bailout of private sector debts. Again, not what you’d expect from a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist”. From Izquierda Diario (machine translated):

The Central Bank will go into debt for a sum of up to US$30 billion to rescue the private debt of importing companies. It will issue Bonds for the Reconstruction of a Free Argentina (BOPREAL) that importers of goods and services will be able to access in pesos, which will then be settled in 2027 in dollars. After announcing a financial war plan that will destroy salaries and pensions, Caputo endorses this scandalous debt package…

The debt of importers with foreign suppliers, which generally hovered around $30 billion in recent years, surged to almost $58 billion in 2023, as a result of a foreign currency shortage caused by [Argentina’s historic] drought. This led the central bank to delay or reduce the delivery of foreign currency, causing a sharp rise in non-payment to suppliers. Now, the new head of the central bank wants to “resolve” this issue by selling this new bond to importers so that they can pay off their debts. It is a liability that will preserve its value in dollars while generating returns [of up to 5% per year] until 2027. Of all the possible solutions to the problem of rising private debt, the central bank chose the worst: its conversion into public debt.

If there is one crowning lesson to take away from all of this, it is, as the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... cream.html

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Fuel prices increase by 37 percent in Argentina


Argentine citizens are waiting for the results of the policies of libertarian Javier Milei. | Photo: EFE
Published December 15, 2023 (10 hours 28 minutes ago)

Argentines will now pay 587 pesos per liter of gasoline or super naphtha (which is equivalent to 1.60 US dollars). For premium gasoline it started to cost 704 pesos per liter (1.92 dollars).

The decision of the Argentines is giving results, although at the moment they are not what many expected, Javier Milei's policies led to fuel prices increasing by 37% this Thursday.

In this sense, Argentines will now pay 587 pesos per liter of gasoline or super naphtha (which is equivalent to 1.60 US dollars). For premium gasoline it started to cost 704 pesos per liter (which translates to $1.92).

Diesel now costs 662 pesos per liter ($1.81) while premium diesel now costs 779 pesos ($2.13).

These new prices represent a 37% increase in the cost of fuel in Argentina, a historic increase considering that Milei has only been in power for days.



For now, Argentines are not only going to deal with the rise in the official exchange rate, which rose 100 percent, taking the dollar from 400.50 pesos to 800, which means that citizens' savings were cut to 50 % but they will also have to face the increase in fuel, which is tied to the general costs of the products and services that are consumed daily.

For now, the Argentine citizen has to wait to see how far the “libertarian management” of Javier Milei, the new president of Argentina, will go.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/aumento- ... -0001.html

President of Bolivia warns about impacts of Milei measures


The Bolivian Government made clear its willingness to maintain the same level of fruitful cooperation that it had so far with Argentina | Photo: EFE
Published December 15, 2023 (6 hours 43 minutes ago)

President Luis Arce warned on Thursday about the effects that the recent measures taken by the Government of Javier Milei could generate in Argentina's neighboring countries.

The President of Bolivia, Luis Arce, warned on Thursday about the effects that the recent measures taken by the Government of Javier Milei could generate in Argentina's neighboring countries, ensuring that his administration will do everything in its power to defend the national economy.

“It is not what one would have expected to be done, because the campaign speech was one and now other measures are being taken in addition to those mentioned, which can not only affect the country, but also all of Argentina's neighbors.” , the president warned in an appearance.

"It may be affecting Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and of course we are not going to be exempt, we are neighboring countries. "And we must be attentive to what may be happening to take any necessary measures to defend ourselves, to defend our economy," she stressed.


In that sense, the Bolivian president maintained that he will take all necessary measures to defend and take care of what has been achieved in economic matters, with the aim of preserving price stability, taking care of economic growth and preserving jobs.

Analysts and researchers of political and economic issues warned about the uncertain and complicated panorama that looms over bilateral relations between Bolivia and Argentina due to the ideological differences between Arce, a left-wing economist, and Milei, a colleague aligned with the opposite ideology.


The Bolivian Government made clear its willingness to maintain the same level of fruitful cooperation that it had so far with Argentina and to be able to work to promote the interests of both countries, something highlighted by the Minister of Development Planning, Sergio Cusicanqui.

Cusicanqui highlighted the importance of maintaining a fluid relationship between Bolivia and Argentina. With more than a million Bolivians living in Argentina, both countries have a solid connection, a symbol of the weight of the Bolivian community in Argentina, where 1,069,201 Bolivians currently reside.

On July 4, at the LXII Meeting of the Common Market Council and Summit of Heads of State of Mercosur and Associated States, Bolivia and Argentina signed several bilateral instruments, including the "Juana Azurduy" Brotherhood Treaty. and that of Integration and Cooperation between the Plurinational State of Bolivia and the Argentine Republic.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/presiden ... -0007.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

What shock therapy looks like from the President of Argentina
December 16, 2023
Rybar



The recent decision by Argentine Finance Minister Luis Caputo to devalue the peso from 391 to 800 per 1 USD is only part of a comprehensive strategy to reformat the country’s economy. We described the approximate vector of events earlier . These include the upcoming privatization of oil and gas enterprises, the formation of a parallel financial system based on the Tether cryptocurrency (USDT), another surge in inflation, and much more.

The first steps of the new Cabinet of Ministers of Argentina were aimed at destroying the state. sectors in the economy, which in the current paradigm looks extremely logical and anticipates a whole chain of events that the Argentines will face.

But instead of a foreword, a few words about the economic background of the President himself. The media-oriented image of the “chainsaw guy” creates the misleading impression of an ordinary person who does not understand economics very well, who is close to the problems of ordinary people, and who is ready to act in clear ways in their interests. But that's not true.

Javier Miley – Licentiate in Economics, University of Belgrano, Argentina; two Master's degrees in Economics, University of Torcuato Di Tella and CEDES/IDES. Previously: Chief Economist, Estudio Broda and Máxima AFJP; Senior Economist, HSBC, Argentina; Advisor to the Government of Argentina, ICSID. He also serves as Chief Economist at Corporación America, Advisor to the B-20/G-20, and member of the Economic Policy Group, ICC/G-20. Since 2012, he has headed the economic research department of the Akordar Foundation, a national think tank. For more than 20 years he taught macroeconomics, growth economics, microeconomics and mathematics for economists at the university. Author of more than 50 scientific papers.

Moreover, a list of his achievements is posted on the WEF website . Therefore, despite his provocative image and statements, it cannot be said that the person does not understand what he is doing.

How does Argentina's leadership see economic recovery?

In addition to the change in the peso exchange rate, Finance Minister Caputo announced 10 measures, most of which were aimed at reducing government spending:

1) State labor contracts valid for less than one year will not be renewed.

2) Suspension of state budget expenditures on advertising for one year.

3) Reducing the number of ministries and secretariats.

The first three points are aimed at sharply reducing the number of civil servants and government expenses associated with their maintenance.

4) Reducing “to a minimum” cash transfers to regional governments (provinces of Argentina) . Each province will now be forced to independently seek funds to fill the regional budget. The beneficiaries are expected to be TNCs.

5) Cancellation of tenders for public works and suspension of those tenders that have not yet begun. This means freezing all new infrastructure projects and stopping maintenance of existing ones. When they are brought to a critical state, TNCs will be able to buy them for next to nothing.

6) Reduce energy and transport subsidies. It looks like a death sentence for local producers, and especially for SMEs.

7) Freezing costs for the Potenciar Trabajo work program . It was a social employment program for the most vulnerable segments of the population.

8) Increasing the official dollar exchange rate to 800 pesos per dollar. Increase PAIS import tax and export duties on non-agricultural goods.

9) Replace SIRA with an import system that does not require prior authorization. This is the removal of customs barriers and a death sentence for local producers.

10) Doubling child benefit and 50% increase in Alimentar food card. This is especially touching given the current inflation rate of 120% with the potential of 300% in the coming months.

The main vector of attack is clearly aimed at the country's public sector. There was no mention of measures to protect pensioners and the elderly - sections of the population that will be most affected by the new measures.

The IMF's recipe for recovery is buying up assets for next to nothing
“IMF staff welcomes the measures announced by Argentina's new Economy Minister Luis Caputo. These bold initial measures aim to significantly improve public finances in a way that protects the most vulnerable in society and strengthens the exchange rate regime . Their decisive implementation will help stabilize the economy and lay the foundation for more sustainable, private-sector-led growth ,” said a statement signed by IMF Communications Director Julie Kozak.

A very revealing statement that documents the dismantling of the state management system and opens the way to the purchase of assets by private companies and investment funds.

What arguments did the Argentine Finance Minister give to justify such a tough package of measures?
Louis Caputo said that the expenditure side of the budget chronically exceeds the revenue side. There have been budget deficits in 113 of the last 123 years.

Over the past 12 months, consumer prices have risen by more than 140%, and more than 40% of the population lives below the poverty line.

The budget deficit exceeds 5.5% of GDP. There are no dollars on the balance sheet of the Central Bank, which forces them to print money in the amount of approximately 20% of GDP. This leads to inflation, which may soon reach 300%.

He also spoke about the control of the peso exchange rate by the state, calling it an expensive fiction.

In general, the argument is, to put it mildly, weak. Especially when compared with the performance of the US economy. But he put the emphasis exactly where the curators from the IMF asked, state control is the root of evil.

What now?
Having secured the support of the IMF, the Argentine government is now dismantling the state apparatus as a unified system for managing the territory. The abolition of transfers to regional governments means that now each region (province) of Argentina will have the right to independently conclude agreements with TNCs for the development of mineral resources, the exploitation of renewable resources and infrastructure facilities.



This is a huge field for corruption and abuse. In fact, this means that the fragmentation of Argentina along territorial lines has already begun.

Against this background, despite the tragedy of the situation, the fate of civil servants, doctors, teachers, government officials, representatives of law enforcement agencies, rescuers, forestry and water management workers and many others is of no interest to anyone at all. They will be forced to survive on their own. As the empirical experience of the 90s shows, no more than 3-5% will be able to adapt well.

Naturally, with the fragmentation of Argentina along territorial lines, there can be no talk of any centralized transition to the US dollar. This is simply unrealistic in the absence of a unified management system, a Central Bank, branches of the Central Bank in the regions and local banks linked to the Central Bank. This entire costly and ineffective system, from Miley’s point of view, will now be dismantled and replaced with a convenient USDT, which can be promoted as a temporary solution, with the possibility of switching to programmable USDC. In any case, Argentina's economic independence is a thing of the past. In the new reality, this is simply a group of business entities fighting for the opportunity to sell their resources to TNCs.

https://rybar.ru/kak-vyglyadit-shokovay ... argentiny/

Google Translator

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They will march in Argentina against President Milei's adjustment plan


The mobilization also seeks to defend the right to protest, in response to the public order protocol announced by the Ministry of Security. | Photo: EFE
Published December 20, 2023 (3 hours 41 minutes ago)

This will be the first major mobilization against Javier Milei's economic plan, which coincides with the anniversary of the social outbreak of December 2001.

Social organizations, unions and defenders of human rights will march this Wednesday in the capital of Argentina in rejection of the adjustment plan and the anti-protest measures of the Government of the far-right Javier Milei.

This will be the first major mobilization against President Milei's economic plan, which coincides with the anniversary of the social outbreak of December 2001, which led to the resignation of the then president, Fernando de la Rúa.

The popular mobilization, in addition to condemning Milei's adjustment plan, also seeks to defend the right to protest, in response to the public order protocol announced by the Ministry of Security.


Among the groups that will participate in the march are the Polo Obrero, the Left Front, Patria Grande, the Communist Party, the Railway Union, the Memory, Truth and Justice Meeting, the Peace and Justice Service and the Teachers' Union Association.

According to the organizers, the march is scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m. (Local Time), one of the columns will depart from Congress and another will depart from the Obelisk, to converge on Plaza de Mayo where a document agreed upon between the different groups will be read.


"The President announced a declaration of war against the labor, social and democratic rights of the workers and the people: megadevaluation, tremendous inflation, he intends to freeze the value of Potenciar Trabajo and they remain without deliveries to soup kitchens and strong increases are coming of service and transportation rates," the organizations said in a joint statement.

The text also repudiated the protocol for maintaining public order to avoid street closures, which they described as "unconstitutional" and fought for "the defense of the right to protest."


The march on December 20 represents a challenge for the far-right president ten days after assuming power: the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, launched an 'anti-picketing' protocol last week, with which they seek to free the streets from being blocked by demonstrations. .

The security protocol also includes the application of the laws, which contemplates prison sentences, the collection of expenses incurred by the intervention of the security forces and even the eventual deportation, in the event that the detained protester is a foreigner.


As part of the agenda against social movements, the day before the head of the Ministry of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, announced that those who participate or promote street cuts will stop receiving social plans.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/argentin ... -0006.html

Google Translator

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Chile: Voters Reject Far-Right Constitution Proposal
DECEMBER 19, 2023


Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Photo: El País.

According to local media, the “Against” vote won in 13 regions, while “In Favor” only won in Maule, Ñuble, and La Araucanía.

Chile’s Electoral Service (Servel) reported that the “Against” won the constitutional referendum held this Sunday, December 17. The electoral event was held in Chile, in which a constitutional text prepared by the right and the extreme right was presented to the citizens for examination.

The electoral authority reported through social media that, with 96.30% of the votes counted, 55.76% of voters (6,810,716 votes) rejected the proposed Constitution prepared by the Constitutional Council. Meanwhile, it was supported by 44.24% (5,405,055 votes) of voters.

With this outcome, Servel reported that of over 15 million registered voters, 12,951,763 participated in the referendum. Of that total, 12,303,920 were valid votes, while null votes totaled 478,675, and blank votes amounted to 169,168.

According to local media, the “Against” vote won in 13 regions, while “In favor” only won in Maule, Ñuble, and La Araucanía. At 7:00 p.m. local time, 355,536 requests to excuse themselves from voting had been registered in Carabineros Corps offices.

The rejection of the constitutional text proposed by the Republican Party and the traditional far-right allows the continuation of the Constitution promulgated in 1980 during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), imposed by blood and fire after the military coup against socialist President Salvador Allende.

Although the majority of citizens rejected a constitutional text considered regressive regarding rights, this maintains the 1980 Constitution. The Constitution is the foundation of Chile’s neoliberal model, the current economic order, and profound social inequalities.

The demand raised during the social uprising of 2019 for Chile to have a new Law of Laws drawn up from a Constituent Assembly that represents all the people and their historical struggles remains unrealized.

For many, Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s lack of leadership is to blame for the dead end that is Chile’s constitutional ambitions and demands. Analysts expect frustration after the failed constitutional change project will bring new demands that will re-emerge in a few years when social friction brings back mass protests demanding a constitutional change.

A proposed constitutional text closer to grassroots demands was rejected during a referendum held in September 2022, when nearly 62% of voters, out of over 13 million, voted “Against,” and approximately 38% voted “In favor.”

https://orinocotribune.com/chile-voters ... -proposal/

‘Chile Needs a Communist Party’: Interview With Lautaro Carmona
SEPTEMBER 11, 2023


Members of the Young Communists of Chile accompanying the funeral of the CP President Guillermo Teillier. Photo: JCC.

The general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile says with the resumption of democracy, the Communist Party has made the case for its legality by reviving this slogan in the country.

On August 31, 2023, the President of the Communist Party of Chile, Guillermo Teillier, was buried in the historical cemetery of Recoleta. In this graveyard lies the remains of a range of important people, from former Chilean President Salvador Allende to the socialist singer Victor Jara. Both Allende and Jara were victims of the military coup d’état that took place 50 years ago on September 11, 1973.

Teillier, who was tortured for several years in prison after the coup, went underground after his release and led the efforts of rebuilding the Communist Party (CP) underground (since it had been banned), its armed wing (El Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez), and the broader popular movement that led to the restoration of democracy in 1990. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric attended the memorial before Teillier’s burial and called for two days of national mourning on August 30 and 31 to mark the loss of Tellier, who he said lived a “dignified life.”

At the funeral, the Communist Party’s General Secretary Lautaro Carmona emphasised the importance of Tellier’s leadership—at great personal cost—in the fight against the military dictatorship and in the fight in the past three decades to revive a socialist project in Chile. Despite attempts to bury the legacy of the Left—including the advances made by the Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende (who served as president from 1970 to 1973), the communists—who are part of Boric’s government—continue to struggle to advance an agenda to establish sovereignty over Chile’s economy and to improve the everyday living conditions of the people of the country.

This socialist project—which is written on the “las banderas Allendistas” (flags of Allendism), as Carmona said at the funeral—has recently been virulently attacked by the Chilean Right-wing media outlets and the Centre-Right.

Why has there been this fierce attack on the communists? When we spoke to Lautaro Carmona in his office in Santiago, near Plaza de la Dignidad, he provided us with a detailed explanation of the social and political context in the country.

There is, he told us, a widespread view in the Right-wing media that if they can sow doubt inside the government about the policies advanced by the Communist Party, then this would discredit the influence of the CP, tear apart the Left, and allow the Right to return to power for several electoral cycles.

During Chile’s constitutional council election in May 2023, the Right wing prevailed, but among the liberal and Left parties, the Communist Party got the highest share of votes. That result and the key role that the communists play in the government of Boric, Carmona told us, is the reason why the Right-wing media began this fierce campaign against the Communist Party.

The impact of the social explosion
In 2019, cascading protests broke out all over Chile. At the heart of the protests was a general sense of social despair, Carmona told us, one that mostly wracked the middle class. It was, he said, “an accumulation of frustration” with a system of permanent household debt being the only avenue to sustain a basic middle-class and lower-middle-class lifestyle.

One of the key elements of this debt has been debt for education, which is why the protests demanded that the government find a way to lift this “invisible weight” from the shoulders of Chile’s youth.

No government—not even the Center-Left governments of Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018) or Gabriel Boric (who came to power in 2022)—has been able to address this problem of educational debt. Proposals made to eradicate student loans are often tied to other issues—such as tax reform—and they scuttle any forward movement for debt relief.

“If you want to solve in your lifetime the problem of your debt, you have to take another loan,” Carmona said. The crisis of finances in Chile does not yet impact the financial sector, but its cost debilitates the lives of millions of Chileans.

These protests, Carmona said, need to be understood clearly. They demonstrate that a large section of the Chilean population has an “implicit level of consciousness” about their situation. The unhappiness with the system has been demonstrated in a range of ways, from the demonstrations (which were significantly halted by the pandemic), from the election of Gabriel Boric in 2022, and from the demand—imposed by the street—for a new constitution.

The public mood has remained frustrated with the existing debt system, but the political embodiment of this mood oscillated dramatically from support for the Centre-Left Broad Front election campaign in 2022 to the vote for the Right-wing Republican Party during the May 2023 campaign for the constitutional council.

The attack on the communists
The attack on the Communist Party in Chile is not new, as documented by Iván Ljubetic Vargas in El Partido Comunista de Chile (2014). Founded in 1912 as a worker’s party and renamed the Communist Party in 1922, the CP was first banned from 1927 to 1931, then again from 1948 to 1958. On September 22, 1973, eleven days after the coup, the military declared all Marxist parties to be illegal. The military assassinated six members of the CP’s central committee and disappeared 11 others in 1976.

The current attack on the CP builds on this long history of repression. The Right wing, Carmona told us, wants to use this attack on the party not only to dispute the views of the party but also to isolate the party from other sectors with which the CP has built alliances.

With the resumption of democracy in Chile, the Communist Party made the case for its legality with the slogan, “Chile needs a Communist Party.” Carmona told us that the CP might need to revive that campaign because it should not underestimate the attack against it. The Right wing wants to deepen the neoliberal model in Chile, a model that the communists are trying to undermine from within Boric’s government.

The party, Carmona said, faces two risks: “first, by not giving the attack enough importance, and second by believing that just because it is a campaign based on lies it is going to be ineffectual.”

There is a social problem that Chile must confront. Only 30% of Chile’s population was alive during the coup years, which means a majority might underestimate the danger of the Right wing, which continues to defend the coup and its neoliberal policies. The overall media landscape, with its frivolous programmes on television and in the Right-wing newspapers, Carmona told us, is not serious about the challenges facing the country.

The social movements and the unions, he said, are weakened, and often passive in their approach. Whether the people of Chile—along with the communists who have taken to the streets—will be able to overcome the deep legacies of the coup is not yet clear.

https://orinocotribune.com/chile-needs- ... o-carmona/

[blindpig]

Milei declares war on Argentine working class with presidential decree

Milei pushed forward more than 11 labor laws and modified 20 aspects of the Labor Contract Law. It will now be cheaper to fire, protests are restricted if not banned, and precariousness will be the order of the day.

December 23, 2023 by ARG Medios



The Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) 70/2023 announced by President Javier Milei on Wednesday December 20, proposes significant changes to the country’s labor regime, amid the proposed modification of more than 300 regulations. In addition, it advances a profound deregulation of the economy, proposes a “shock stabilization plan,” and aims to advance the privatization of public companies.

There are at least 11 labor laws that the decree affects. Firstly, there are more than 20 modifications to the Employment Contract Law 20,744, which determines the regime for hiring workers in the country as a basis for the rights and obligations of the parties.

Prohibition of stoppage of activities
In Chapter IX of the DNU signed by Milei, the concept of “essential services” is outlined and the possibility of strikes in almost all activities is eliminated. The DNU establishes the obligation to provide at least half of the services during an industrial action, in the case of certain activities considered of essential importance.

Regarding the provision of minimum services, in the case of essential services, in no case may you negotiate or impose on the parties a coverage of less than 75% of the normal provision of the service in question.

In the case of activities or services of transcendental importance, in no case may coverage of less than 50 percent be negotiated or imposed on the parties.

The following activities will be considered essential services in the strict sense:

Health and hospital services, as well as the transportation and distribution of medicines and hospital supplies and pharmaceutical services;
The production, transportation and distribution and marketing of drinking water, gas and other fuels and electrical energy;
Telecommunications services, including internet and satellite communications; Commercial aeronautics and air and port traffic control; including beaconing, dredging, mooring, stowage and towing of vessels;
Customs and immigration services, and others linked to foreign trade; and
child care and education levels: daycare, preschool, primary and secondary, as well as special education.
The following are considered activities of transcendental importance:

Production of medicines and/or hospital supplies;
Maritime, river, land and underground transportation of people and/or merchandise through the different means used for this purpose;
Radio and television services;
Continuous industrial activities, including steel and aluminum production, chemical activity and cement activity;
Food industry throughout its value chain;
The production and distribution of construction materials, aircraft and ship repair services, all port and airport services, logistics services, mining activity, refrigeration activity, mail, distribution and marketing of food and beverages, agricultural activity and its supply chain worth;
Banking, financial services, hotel and gastronomic services and electronic commerce; and
The production of goods and/or services of any activity, which were affected by export commitments.
Work trial period
The amendment extends the trial period for any employee from three to eight months. “Any party may terminate the relationship during this period without giving cause, without the right to compensation due to the termination, but with the obligation to provide advance notice,” establishes article 71 of the DNU.

Compensation
Article 81 of the DNU is the one that establishes the modifications in the compensation regime for seniority or dismissal. The amount of compensation for dismissal without just cause is reduced from two to one month’s salary for each year of service or fraction greater than three months.

The DNU establishes the possibility that employers “may choose to contract a private capitalization system at their cost, in order to pay for the compensation provided for in this article and/or the sum freely agreed between the parties in the event of termination by mutual agreement

In addition, the parties may replace this compensation regime with a labor termination fund or system, the cost of which will always be borne by the employer, with a monthly contribution that may not exceed 8% of the eligible remuneration.

Overtime pay
According to article 79, “collective labor agreements (…) may establish regimes that adapt to changes in production methods, the conditions of each activity.”

For this purpose, the overtime regime, bank of hours, compensatory francs, among other institutes related to the working day, may be collectively available.”

The “hour bank” allows companies to take monthly work hours (or annual days) and distribute them how they want.

New causes of dismissal
In article 80, the “just causes” for dismissal are modified and it is indicated that “participation in blockades or takeovers of establishments constitutes serious labor injury; “serious injury is presumed to exist during a direct action measure.”

Likewise, when “the freedom to work of those who do not adhere to the measure of force is affected, through acts, facts, intimidation or threats; and the entry or exit of people and/or things to the establishment is totally or partially prevented or obstructed.”

Changes in the law on private homes and agricultural work
Regarding private homes, article 50 of the Private Home Personnel Law No. 26844 was repealed, which aggravated the compensation for dismissal when the employment relationship is not registered.

Meanwhile, for rural personnel, article 15 of Law 26,727 on agricultural work was repealed, which prohibited the performance of outsourced companies in the sector’s regime.

Other changes
The modification of the employment contract law makes changes for the benefit of the employer sector:

Repeals article 132 bis, which sanctions companies that withhold contributions from the worker destined for social security organizations, or workers’ professional associations, and does not pay those amounts in favor of the organizations or entities to which they were destined.
Repeals article 80, which sanctions companies that do not provide proof of employment to employees when the employment relationship ends.
Modifies article 23, by which the presumption of existence of an employment contract is eliminated when invoices are issued as “monotributistas”, legalizing this form of job insecurity.
It modifies article 242, incorporating as a presumption of serious injury by the worker and just cause for dismissal, the exercise of the right of smell. That is to say, indirectly, the constitutional right to strike is violated, punishable by dismissal without compensation for workers who exercise it.
It incorporates article 245 bis, by which it authorizes the company, through the payment of compensation, to carry out discriminatory dismissals “for reasons of ethnicity, race, nationality, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ideology, or opinion political or union.”
It modifies article 277, allowing the company convicted in a labor trial to pay compensation in twelve installments.
What’s next?
The DNU will now proceed to Congress. The Chief of Staff has 10 days to send the DNU to the Permanent Bicameral Commission for Legislative Procedures of Congress. If the Commission does not issue an opinion on the DNU, the chambers can discuss it ex officio. Congress can only accept or reject the DNU, it cannot make modifications, amendments or additions.

If no chamber deals with it, the DNU remains in force. If only one chamber rejects it, but the other accepts it, it remains in force. If both chambers reject the DNU, it ceases to be in force.

The other power that can be issued on the DNU is the Judicial Power, which does have the possibility of rejecting separate articles or the entire norm. The president of the Supreme Court, Horacio Rosatti, already warned a few days ago that the measures announced by President Javier Milei “would fall within what constitutional law calls an emergency,” a situation that is outlined in the National Constitution, and demarcates the power of the highest court around “constitutionality control.”

“Everything seems to indicate that this mega-DNU would have been prepared by private legal firms. Second alarm, as serious as the first: who created this DNU? If they were private legal firms, it is very serious and cannot be allowed or normalized,” Vilma Ibarra, a lawyer and former senator, wrote on her networks, alerting another irregularity of origin that could lead to the DNU facing legal challenges.

On the other hand, there remains the political and social aspect, that is, the response to the DNU. The General Labor Center (CGT), the CTA, the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP) and unions in particular (such as Banks) have come out to reject the DNU and declare themselves in a state of alert. Governors such as Axel Kicillof from Buenos Aires to Sergio Ziliotto from Pampa, to the Justicialist Party (PJ), to Peronist leaders, from the ARI and the left, have repudiated the massive deregulation of the economy.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/12/23/ ... al-decree/

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Massive Demonstrations in Buenos Aires Following Milei’s Neoliberal ‘Mega Decree’
DECEMBER 22, 2023


The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, accompanied by various cabinet ministers, announcing the Decree of Necessity and Urgency in Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, on Wednesday, December 20, 2023. Photo: Presidency of Argentina.

The new far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, has given his first national broadcast in an attempt to explain the scope of his Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU). The initiative seeks to sweep away laws such as rental laws, Gondola laws, national purchase laws, and supply laws, among many others, with a stroke of the pen, in a move that numerous analysts have called unconstitutional. Milei has so far announced a series of 30 repeals of current laws and new provisions—including the privatization of public companies, the transfer of the Aerolíneas Argentinas (the country’s public airline) share package, the arrival of public limited companies in football, and changes in prepaid health care and social programs—although he added that over 300 laws are going to be modified.

Accompanied by his ministers and Federico Sturzenegger—the former president of the Central Bank of Argentina and the apparent mastermind behind this decree—the president attempted to justify his need for neoliberal deregulation, using the “inheritance” he received from former President Alberto Fernández as his excuse. Following this announcement, made this Wednesday, December 20, public protests erupted all over the country, accompanied by the banging of empty pots and pans (cacerolazos), as well as a massive spontaneous protest that surrounded the Congress building in Buenos Aires.

Milei’s government also announced that state retaliation would be enacted against anyone who might take to the streets against the far-right government. The minister of human capital, Sandra Pettovello, threatened that those who participate in or promote street blockades or protests would stop receiving benefits from social programs.

The official stated in a video published through social media that social programs for unemployed or low-income families will be withdrawn in some cases. Programs such as the Universal Child Allowance (AUH) and food cards, among others, will be suspended for anyone who blocks traffic.


Milei mentioned the repeal of the following laws, which was enacted through his bypassing of parliament, given that he does not have the required legislative majority:

Rental law.
Supply Law.
Gondola law (price control).
National Purchase law (promotion of local production).
Price control law.
The law of industrial production.
Trade Promotion Law.
Transformation of all state companies into public limited companies for subsequent privatization.
Land Law.
Repeal of the State companies regime.
“Modernization” of the labor regime to facilitate the process of generating employment.
Reform of the Customs Code to facilitate international trade.
Modification of the Fire Management Law.
Repeal of the obligations that sugar mills have in terms of production.
Liberalization of the legal regime applicable to the wine sector.
Repeal of the national mining trade system and the Mining Information Bank.
Authorization for the transfer of the total or partial shareholding of Aerolíneas Argentinas, the state airline company.
Implementation of the open skies policy.
Modification of the Civil and Commercial Code “to guarantee that obligations contracted in foreign currency must be paid in the agreed upon currency,” explained the president.
Modification of the regulatory framework of prepaid medicine and social work.
Elimination of price restrictions on the prepaid industry.
Incorporation of prepaid medicine companies into the social work infrastructure.
Establishment of the electronic prescription to streamline the service and minimize costs.
Modifications of the regime of pharmaceutical companies to promote competition and reduce costs.
Modification of the Companies Law so that football clubs can become public limited companies if they so wish.
Deregulation of satellite internet services, which opens the door to the company Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, with whom Milei had a “great conversation” just days ago.
Deregulation of the tourism sector “to eliminate the monopoly of tourism agencies.”
Incorporation of digital tools for automotive registration procedures.

Milei’s speech
“Today is a historic day for our country,” Milei said at the beginning his speech. “After years of decline, we began the path of reconstruction.” Milei then announced his “shock” fiscal stabilization plan to rebuild “the worst inheritance in history,” in reference to the economic crisis currently being faced by Argentinians. It should be noted that this crisis is mostly a result of Mauricio Macri’s neoliberal rule, alongside what many consider terrible governance from the outgoing president, Alberto Fernández.

“This country requires an urgent change of course to avoid collapse,” said the far-right president, questioning the “expansion of the State” and the failure of the schemes that had been applied for decades. Milei insisted that his shock therapy seeks to “dismantle the oppressive legal framework that brought decadence” to the country, and would allow them to begin to walk the path to “becoming a world power again.” The president questioned the level of inflation, a “hidden tax” that he attributed to the state’s public spending, alongside regulations on commercial pricing and trade.

The emergency decree bypasses democratic parliamentary control, and has been described by some local media as the “mega decree.” It consists of around 600 articles, and includes a series of modifications to regulations in the labor and productive spheres, healthcare, and an attempted reform of the state, mainly in regards to contracting and public spending. Among the DNU’s main initiatives are changes to the labor system, the simplification of some bureaucratic procedures allegedly aiming at modernizing the state, and repealing rental laws, which Milei had already promised to eliminate.

Presidential decrees, according to Milei, are a constitutional tool of the executive that has the force of law. Although it is not necessary to pass through Congress, the DNU can be invalidated with the rejection of both chambers; that is, the Senate and Deputies. This legal tool was designed to be used only in special circumstances of “necessity and urgency.”

President Milei is also preparing a series of policies that do require the approval of the Legislative branch, so these will be presented as parliamentary bills, according to reports from local media. Among these issues, the president points to tax reform, modification of the retirement system, political reform, and other central measures that comprise his so-called “chainsaw plan.”

The president announced that he will call for a series of extraordinary sessions in Congress, which goes into recess during January, in order to discuss a package of laws that “will allow progress in the process of change that society chose, in a context of crisis that requires immediate actions,” the government remarked in a press release.

Tension and protests
Milei’s mandatory national broadcast on Wednesday occurred mere hours after the first mobilization of political, social, and human rights organizations in the country, commemorating the anniversary of the social outbreak of December 19 and 20, 2001, when former president Fernando De la Rúa abandoned the presidential palace on a helicopter after massive protests against his neoliberal policies.

In addition to being the first major protest against the neoliberal “paquetazo” that Milei’s far-right government will apply, this mobilization of the public seeks to challenge the new ‘anti-picketing’ protocol announced last week by the minister of security, Patricia Bullrich, designed to suppress protests.

The protest of this Wednesday was met by the state through an unusual operation, in which the four federal forces participated: Federal Police, National Gendarmerie, Naval Prefecture, and the Airport Security Police (PSA).

There were numerous moments of tension and clashes between protesters and the police, although the organizations were able to march to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the headquarters of the government in Buenos Aires, where they read aloud a collective statement questioning Bullrich’s “adjustment” and the anti-picketing protocol itself for its criminalization of the protest.

(Alba Ciudad) with Orinoco Tribune content

https://orinocotribune.com/massive-demo ... ga-decree/

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Milei Sues Argentine Protesters for 'Extortion and Fraud'


Argentine President Javier Milei, Dec., 2023. | Photo: X/ @Agus_Martinez58

Published 22 December 2023

Fourten social organizations accused by the Security Ministry are expecte to pay US$74,557 for the costs of the police deployment.


On Friday, Manuel Adorni, spokesperson for President Javier Milei, announced that the social organizations involved in Wednesday's marches have been reported to the judges for extortion and defrauding the State.

"We filed the complaint in federal courts for the crimes of extortion and defrauding, which are related to the management of social welfare programs," he said.

This action aligns with the "Security Protocol" whereby the far-right President Milei threatened citizens and organizations with making them bear the costs of the protests.

His administration aims to have 14 social groups pay around US$75,000 for the costs of the security operation deployed on the protests against adjustment and privatization policies.

Adorni mentioned that authorities have identified 32 citizens who participated in the Wednesday march. They will have to respond in the trial proceeding in the Seventh Federal Criminal Court, overseen by Judge Sebastián Casanello and Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita.


The Milei administration claims that union leaders forced people to join the protests under the threat that they would not receive public assistance if they refused to march. This accusation is supposedly based on 1,100 calls made to a hotline set to receive such complaints.

On Wednesday, thousands of citizens self-organized through social media to protest in downtown Buenos Aires against Milei's proposed shock policies, which are aimed at facilitating the privatization of state assets, selling land to foreigners, and liberalizing prices of goods, services, and exchange rates.

The 14 social organizations accused by the Security Ministry will need to pay around US$74,557 for the costs of the police deployment, including the costs of fuel used by police vehicles and the average value of officers' work hours.

"This is the bill that we will deliver to social organizations. We will demand that they assume an expense that citizens should not pay," Adorni said, downplaying the possibility of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) calling for a national strike.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Mil ... -0009.html

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Argentina: Mapuche people are on high alert as Milei’s government takes office
December 23, 2023 Claudia Korol



The land recovery of the Mapuche people is now living a moment of extreme vulnerability with the entry into the government of Javier Milei, a president who vindicates the indigenous massacre headed by General Roca. Although an agreement was reached at the Dialogue Table in June 2023, which recognized the Rewe as a sacred place and authorized the return of Machi Betiana, the outgoing government did not implement the return of the land nor the reconstruction of the houses. In addition, the legislature of Río Negro approved reforms that favor mining companies without respecting the right to free consultation of the native communities.

The recognition of the ancestral rights of the Mapuche people will be one of the first issues to be addressed by the new government. The decision taken in previous months at the Dialogue Table between the Mapuche communities and the ministries of the Fernández government to recognize the Rewe, where the Machi Betiana Colhuan deployed her task of healing and spirituality, will have to be executed by a government whose president vindicated General Roca as a national hero, responsible for the indigenous genocide perpetrated in the Campaign to the Desert, and whose Minister of Security is Patricia Bullrich, responsible six years ago for the disappearance of Santiago Maldonado and the crime of Rafael Nahuel, the 22-year-old Mapuche murdered in the back, when the first eviction of that sacred territory was carried out, on November 25, 2017.

This November 29, the Federal Oral Court of General Roca, admitting the responsibility of 5 prefects in the crime of Rafa Nahuel, sentenced them in a clearly racist sentence, to absurd sentences between 5 and 4 years. Rafael Nahuel (Rafita), cousin of the Machi Betiana Colhuan, had been participating for two months in a land recovery operation together with the Lof Winkul Mapu near Lake Mascardi. His body was brought down from the mountain wounded by the young men Lautaro González Curruhuinca and Fausto Jones Huala (brother of the lonko Facundo Jones Huala, who is about to be extradited to Chile in extremely serious conditions, as he has been on a dry hunger strike for 25 days).

Lautaro and Fausto were arrested when they arrived at the base of the mountain carrying Rafita’s dead body. Lautaro later assured that they decided to take Rafita’s body down themselves so that they would not do to him what they did to Santiago Maldonado by disappearing him. Recent ancestral memory: the same day of Rafita’s crime, a wake was being held for Santiago, disappeared for 78 days, and then mysteriously “found dead” in the Chubut River. Santiago had disappeared in a repressive operation by the Gendarmerie, in which the Lof en Resistencia Cushamen was attacked. The blood of the Mapuche and of those who accompany their resistance was once again being shed in Rebel Patagonia.

The Mapuche people’s right to spirituality

The recovery of lands in which Rafael Nahuel participated had as its objective the creation of a space in a sacred territory where the Machi Betiana Colhuan could develop her spiritual and healing activity. The space of the Rewe was identified according to the Mapuche cosmovision and was recovered so that the Machi could be erected. We are talking about seven hectares, which means nothing in terms of the land dispute in Patagonia but is fundamental in terms of the Mapuche people’s right to spirituality, health, and life.

In the trial, it was demonstrated that the prefects fired at least 151 rounds of lethal ammunition. That they specifically went out to hunt and kill Mapuche. The stories seem far-fetched, but they are not. They are all chained together in the labyrinth of criminalization of the Mapuche people and repression of the autonomous communities that continues nonstop.

On October 4, 2022, the four federal forces of the Unified Security Command (Federal Police, National Gendarmerie, Naval Prefecture and Airport Security Police) created by Aníbal Fernández as Minister of Security of the Nation, once again raided and evicted women, girls and children of the Lafken Winkul Mapu community with tear gas and rubber bullets. The information was received with indignation at the 35th Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Trans, Transvestites, Bisexuals, Bisexuals, and Non-Binary in San Luis, which led to the call for the 36th Meeting in Bariloche, to demand the release of the Mapuche women prisoners, and the return of the Machi to the Rewe.

The Mapuche communities managed to meet with President Alberto Fernandez in December 2022, who convened a Dialogue Table, which began to meet with a safeguard commission, which included, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel and the Mother of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line Nora Cortiñas, along with other human rights defenders. After six months of dialogue, greatly hindered by representatives of the National Parks and the government of Río Negro, an agreement was reached on June 1, 2023, in which the State committed to recognize the Rewe as a sacred place, and to authorize the return of the Machi and the reconstruction of three rukas (houses) that had been destroyed in the repressive operation, and proposing another place for the rest of the community.

This agreement led to the release of the four Mapuche women imprisoned with their daughters and sons. However, the national government’s administration ended without implementing the return of the Rewe or the construction of the houses, and the delivery of a new territory for the community. According to what the president of INAI, Alejandro Marmoni, informed in a meeting held days before the end of his mandate with Machi Betiana and her mother, María Nahuel, the execution of this decision was suspended in order to favor the next government’s administration of Milei.

Now, the Mapuche community and Machi Betiana Colhuan face this new stage with enormous vulnerability, with no support from the Fernandez administration as it left office, they are now left to negotiate with the reactionary Milei regime. Already the legislature of Río Negro has rapidly approved a reform of the Land Law and other projects, adding mining and tourist activity as a possible purpose for the use of fiscal land, clearly favoring mining companies, and ignoring the right to free, prior and informed consultation of the native communities, who mobilized to reject this measure.

These days, spiritual leaders of different peoples are speaking out to demand the return of the ancestral territory to Machi Betiana, basing the importance of these ceremonial and healing spaces for the life of the Mapuche communities. We are talking about human rights and the rights of the people. The government has in its hands the possibility of recognizing them and acting in accordance with them.

Regardless, the community has indicated that they will return to the Rewe, their ceremonial and health space because otherwise it means the loss of strength and energy for the Machi and for the children who accompany her. This decision surely will be made with the support of spiritual leaders and native peoples from all over the continent.

Source: Contra Hegemonia, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... es-office/

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Being “Pro-American” Today Means Disaster for Latin America, with “Monroe Doctrine” Coming Back
Posted on December 23, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Before anyone over-reacts to the headline, recall that Kissinger said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” For Latin America, a new risk is that the US, frustrated with its setbacks in critically important parts of the world, will redouble efforts to exert influence in what we see as our back yard.

By Uriel Araujo, a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. Originally published at InfoBRICS



n their recent Foreign Policy piece, Carsten-Andreas Schulz (assistant professor in international relations at Cambridge University) and Tom Long, (affiliated professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City) argue that the Monroe Doctrine is making a come back in Washington, including talks about military intervention in neighboring Mexico. According to the two experts, the White House’s “warnings about China’s growing footprint in the Western Hemisphere carry a distinctively Monroeist undertone.” Latin America has, after all, been the stage of great power competition between the US and China, and also between the former and Russia.

In order to understand how a supposed outdate conception such as the Monroe Doctrine could possibly reemerge, implicitly and explicitly, in American discourses one has to keep the following points in mind:

1. In the de-industrialized world, geoeconomics meets geopolitics: insulating industries from geopolitical disputes is now increasingly hard.

2. In this context, we live in an age of economic warfare and the superpower who weaponizes the economy and its currency the most is the United States of America with the dollar leverage.

3. As part of that, the US-led West has been mostly pushing a New Cold War paradigm of “alignmentism”, wishing for nations to “pick up a side.”

4. At the same time, most of the Global South now, to a greater or lesser extent, pursues, non-alignmentand multi-alignment, as shown by Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Egypt – with echos even in Europe, as seen in the (thus far timid) German and French attempts at “strategic autonomy”.

5. Thus, American attempts to pressure partners and allies into some kind of unconditional alignment have the potential to backfire, as seen in Asia, and the Middle East.

6. To make matters worse, more often than not, Washington economic war-gaming hurts its partners and allies, as exemplified by US President Joe Biden’s subsidy war against Europe, with Taiwan being yet another instance, in the context of the chip war. Albeit often counterproductive, such an approach is still employed by the Atlantic hegemon, for reasons that might have to do with the inertial resilience of paradigms, embedded as they are in several institutions and policies, not to mention the hubris that often accompanies superpowers.

The above context provides a framework that enables one to grasp part of the logic behind American campaign pressures in Latin America. With regards to that part of the world, Washington is mostly interested in exploiting its resources, as exemplified by hydropolitics of pressuring Brazil over the Amazonissue, while keeping China, and also Russia, “away” – albeit without necessarily offering Latin American nations anything more attractive. In fact, in Latin America particularly it is arguably becoming increasingly clear that being “pro-American” simply does not pay off.

One has merely to consider initiatives of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, defeated in October 2022 elections. After being consistently “snubbed” by Washington, Bolsonaro ended up seeking cooperation with Moscow for its nuclear submarine project at the end of his term. Or consider the newly elected “pro-American” leaders in the continent (and they are many), ranging from center-left to the far-right, be it Javier Miley of Argentina, Luis Lacalle Pou of Uruguay, Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, or Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, among others. In each and every one of these cases, these leaders have brought huge economic, political, military or social problems upon their nations, due the complexities of their domestic realities, but always made worse by American pressures.

Argentina’s Milei is of course an extreme case. On November 29, he met with top US officials in Washington and took his economic team to a meeting with IMF officers. The IMF did not seem to be so happy about the meeting, though. Milei’s economic measures are controversial, to say the least – and could mean a “nightmare” to Argentines, according to Michael Stott, the Financial Times’ Latin America editor. They involve devaluing the Argentinian currency, the peso, by over 50% as part of “emergency” measures”.

During his campaign, Milei promised to “get rid” of the peso by replacing it with the dollar. Such a dollarization move, for all practical purposes, would take away the Argentinean Central Bank’s role in the country’s economy, while handing it to the US Federal Reserve – this amounts to fully giving up any autonomous monetary policy. This plan has not been abandoned. According to a statement signed by several leading economists (including the likes of Jayati Ghosh and Thomas Piketty), the poor exchange rate in this case would place the “burden of adjustment” on “working people”, bringing about a real wages decline and more inflation. “Geopolitically-wise”, he has pledged not to join the BRICS trade group.

The Argentinian president has employed vicious rhetoric against Brazil and China, which are among Argentina’s main trading partners. In response to such signaling, Beijing has reportedly suspended US$6.5 billion in credit swaps to the South American country.

While Washington demands its Latin American partners decouple from China, the truth is that the US itself cannot safely “decouple” from China or, to use the trendy term now, “de-risk”. In addition, Latin American countries such as Brazil need the nitrogen, potassium and phosphates (the three main fertilizers) supplied mostly by Russia and Belarus, and not all countries in the region are willing to sacrifice their own economies as Europe has shown itself to be – for the sake of cold war “alignmentism”. Moreover, in terms of intergovernmental organization and multilateral forums, all the US-led West has to offer to Latin Americans are the likes of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Lima Group. It is no wonder that BRICS has been gaining traction, as states seek alternatives and parallel mechanisms.

As mentioned, even Bolsonaro saw the light, albeit too late, and even a traditional American ally such as Colombia is currently negotiating with Beijing to build “an alternative to the Panama Channel” – not to mention, moving from the Americas to West Asia, Saudi Arabia’s recent pivoting to Asia in the context of the emerging de-dollarized world. Eventually, although it seems very unlikely now, even Milei might see it too. As is the case with so many other American approaches, today’s neo-Monroeism is bound to backfire.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/12 ... -back.html

[blindpig]

Argentina’s Milei Lays Off 7,000 Workers After Christmas
DECEMBER 26, 2023


Argentina's President-elect Javier Milei during his victory speech. Photo: EFE.

Argentinian President Javier Milei decreed the non-renewal of State worker contracts signed since January 1, 2023, including the national administration and decentralized organizations such as AFIP, PAMI and ANSES. In addition, an “exhaustive survey” of the personnel hired before that date was decreed.

It is estimated that this measure affects about 7,000 state workers. The cancellation of the contracts, which had already been anticipated from the president, occurs within the context of a tough fiscal adjustment program. According to Decree 84/2023, published today in the Official Gazette, “it is consistent with those objectives and the purpose of achieving better functioning of the public administration.”

Who is affected by the cut?
The Decree establishes that “the hiring of personnel for the provision of services carried out within the framework of article 9 of the Law for the Regulation of National Public Employment, Decree No. 1109 of December 28, 2017, and any other type of contracting that ends on December 31, 2023, or started on January 1, 2023, in the organizations included in sections a) and c) of article 8 of Law No. 24,156, will not be renewed.”

These sections of this article refer to workers from:

National Administration, comprised of the Central Administration and the Decentralized Organizations, the latter including the Social Security Institutions.
State Companies and Companies, including Public Limited Companies with Majority State Participation, Mixed Economy Companies and all other business organizations where the national State has majority participation in the capital or the formation of corporate decisions.
Public Entities excluded from the National Administration, covering any non-business State organization with financial autonomy, legal personality and its own assets where the national State has majority control of the assets or the formation of decisions, including non-state public entities where the national State has control of the decisions.
The Decree argues that this type of contracting is regulated by Article 9 of the Framework Law, establishing the standard for contracting workers to provide autonomous professional services necessary for the development of tasks, studies, projects or special programs. According to the Argentinian Government, this rule allows for a maximum duration of 12 months and, therefore, “they are close to expiring.” Thus, the government decided not to renew them.

What are the exceptions to these massive layoffs?
Article 2 of the Decree outlines some exceptions for contracts that will not be canceled. They are:

Those derived from quotas regulated by law or other types of special protections.
Personnel who have been working prior to January 1, 2023, and have changed their contracting modality.
Personnel that the head of each jurisdiction evaluates as essential for the functioning of the jurisdiction in a restrictive and well-founded manner, where continuity is necessary for operational reasons that cannot be postponed.
What happens to workers hired before 2023?
Article 3 of the document promulgated today establishes that contracts signed prior to January 1, 2023, may not be renewed for a period exceeding 90 calendar days.

In Article 4, the authorities of each jurisdiction are ordered to “carry out an exhaustive survey of contracted personnel to evaluate the renewal” of their employment during this period.

https://orinocotribune.com/argentinas-m ... christmas/

China Suspends $6.5 Billion Currency Swap With Dollar-Strapped Argentina
DECEMBER 23, 2023


Javier Milei (left) and his sister Karina arrive at the government house in Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 10, 2023. Photo: Julian Bongiovanni/AP.

China has reportedly halted a $6.5 billion currency swap deal with Argentina, and the suspension will persist until President Javier Milei demonstrates a clear commitment to engaging with Beijing, as per Argentine media reports.

The move comes only 10 days into the tenure of the new president, who campaigned on severing connections with China. This emphasizes the challenge that Milei will encounter in attempting to fulfill those campaign promises.

Asked to confirm the reports, Zhicheng Xie, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Argentina, refused to do so.

Likewise in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin declined to either confirm or deny the reports. He stated that China remains dedicated “to cooperation with Argentina on the basis of equality and mutual benefit.”

This funding is part of an agreement renewed on an annual basis since 2009, proving crucial for Buenos Aires given its limited holdings of dollar reserves. Argentina has leaned on such swaps as one of its limited credit options, particularly in light of the nation’s historical tendency to default on international debt.

China initially committed these funds in October, assuring former Argentinian Economy Minister Sergio Massa, that the primary purpose was to enhance imports and fulfill obligations to the International Monetary Fund.

Libertarian Climate Denier Javier Milei Elected President of Argentina


During that period, Massa, who was also a presidential candidate, lost to Milei. But following Milei’s inauguration on December 10, he reportedly contacted Chinese President Xi Jinping, expressing his interest in maintaining those agreements, as reported by Página 12, an Argentinian newspaper.

Shortly after, Argentina’s Foreign Affairs Minister Diana Mondino held a meeting with Wu Weihua, who was Xi’s special envoy to the inauguration. During the meeting, Mondino advocated for a prompt renewal of the agreement.

As reported by Argentinian news outlet Infobae, China’s decision to suspend the currency swap agreement was triggered by Argentina’s purchase of used F-16 fighters from Denmark, originally manufactured in the US. While the deal confirmation is yet to be officially announced, Infobae noted that Argentina’s Defense Minister Luis Petri met with Xavier Julian Isaac, the Brigadier General of its air force, on Monday to affirm Milei’s intention to acquire the F-16s.

Before Milei’s presidency, Argentina had been in discussions to acquire new Chinese JF-17 Thunder jets, a move that reportedly angered Washington, aiming to curtail Beijing’s influence in South America. The US not only approved the F-16 sale to Argentina but also committed to providing weapons, training, logistical support, and spare parts for the jets.

According to Infobae, China is awaiting “a clear gesture of goodwill or friendship” from Argentina to resume the currency swap. The news outlet mentioned that China’s ambassador to Argentina, Wang Wei, was recalled to Beijing for discussions on Milei’s plans and approach to projects prioritized by Xi.

Patricio Giusto from the Sino-Argentine Observatory in Buenos Aires expressed concern over China’s freezing of funds. Without the financial cushion from the $6.5 billion agreement, Argentina might need to renegotiate its debt with the IMF, seeking alternative funding sources, a task Giusto deemed “not easy at all.”

Giusto proposed that China’s discontent could extend beyond specific decisions, indicating a desire for a more substantial change in Argentine foreign policy. Buenos Aires’ recent decision to abstain from joining the BRICS economic bloc and the potential abandonment of a Belt and Road Initiative project suggest a potential reorientation in Argentina’s international alliances. This shift might prompt China to apply economic pressure in response.

“This interdependence we have with China is irreplaceable. We cannot replace it now with the US or Europe,” he said, adding that Milei’s administration should “try to understand better what China represents and how Chinese diplomacy works because there will be a lot of trouble ahead if this is not properly addressed.”

https://orinocotribune.com/china-suspen ... argentina/

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Social Organizations Reject Javier Milei’s Decree


President Javier Milei's decree has caused great unrest among the Argentine population. Dec. 26, 2023. | Photo: X/@fmamericanoti

Published 26 December 2023 (13 hours 23 minutes ago)

A new mobilization has been called for Wednesday in rejection of the DNU.

On Tuesday, social organization in Argentina mobilized in the Congress Square in rejection of the Necessity and Urgency Decree (DNU) issued by President Javier Milei.

Homeless people, UVA Mortgagees, Grouped Tenants and the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (Utep) took to the streets in the Congress Square in rejection of the adjustment against the people. They are protesting under the slogan "Adjust the caste, do not leave us homeless".

Utep demands the repeal of the Rent Law and access to land, one of the main measures dictated by the Argentine president. "This decree goes over the heads of the other powers of the Argentine Republic in the name of a freedom tailored to the caste they supposedly came to fight," said the union.

According to local media, "they are thousands and thousands. They are people who must renew their rent in the short or medium term. And with the DNU of President Javier Milei they were left in total defenselessness". The decree is not yet in force, but in fact the Rent Law no longer applies".


The tweet reads, "UVA mortgage debtors, tenants and social organizations mobilize in front of the National Congress in protest against President Javier Milei's DNU, which directly affects them."

Gervasio Muñoz, president of the Federation of Tenants said that "when Milei names as the first point of the decree the repeal of the Rent Law, it is clear that we have touched very sensitive interests of the economic power of Argentina."

He added, "the regulation of renting in Argentina is central for the egalitarian development of society" and said that "housing is not a dream, it is a right that is conquered and defended in the streets."

Likewise, the representative of Hipotecados UVA, Paola Gutiérrez, advocates the payment of fair and predictable mortgages over time. A public policy of access to housing cannot be left in the hands of the financial system, she argues.

A new mobilization has been called for Wednesday in rejection of the DNU, which has repealed the land law, aimed at preventing foreign ownership and appropriation of Argentine resources by foreign capital.



https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Soc ... -0016.html

Bolivian Coup Leader Añez Could Spend 20 Years in Prison


Jeanine Añez. | Photo: X/ @rtp_bolivia

Published 27 December 2023 (2 hours 16 minutes ago)

Previously, Jeanine Añez was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the "Coup II" case.

On Tuesday, the Bolivian Prosecutor's Office formally accused eight citizens in the "Coup I" case, which revolves around the acts of terrorism that occurred during the 2019 coup against then-President Evo Morales.

Prosecutor Omar Mejillones charged Santa Cruz Governor Luis Fernando Camacho, former Defense Minister Luis Fernando Lopez, former military chief William Kaliman, and former police chief Yuri Calderon as the perpetrators.

Accused as accomplices were the coup-based regime leader Jeanine Añez, far-right activist Marco Antonio Pumari, former inspector of the Armed Forces Jorge Fernandez, and former military chief Carlos Orellana.

After three years of investigations, the Bolivian Prosecutor's Office compiled 133 documentary pieces of evidence and 131 witness statements to support its accusation.


Among the case evidence are bank records showing Camacho transferring money to move people from La Paz to Santa Cruz during the 2019 coup. The Prosecutor's Office has also a technical report on phone call exchanges between Camacho, Lopez, and Kaliman.

Since Dec. 2022, Santa Cruz Governor has been in preventive detention in the Chonchocoro high-security prison for this case and other ongoing proceedings against him.

In the "Coup I" case, the accused face charges such as criminal association, misuse of public goods and services, and public incitement to commit crimes.

In connection with this case, Alvaro Coimbra and Rodrigo Guzman, who were ministers during the U.S.-backed interim government (2019-2020), were sentenced to two years in prison.

Previously, former Senate president Añez was sentenced to 10 years in prison in the "Coup II" case, where she was accused of illegally placing herself in the presidential succession line in 2019 when she self-proclaimed "Interim President."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0005.html