Part
1
In
September, Argentine president Mauricio Macri accepted the 2018
Atlantic Council’s Global Citizen Award. In attendance were many of
world’s neoliberal power players and policy makers, among them
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine
Lagarde.
Facing
the crowd, Macri gleefully admitted that “with Christine, I have
to confess we started a great relationship some months ago,”
referring to a series of loan agreements with the IMF amounting to
$57.1 billion dollars. “I expect that this is going to work very
well, and we will end up with the whole country crushing on
Christine,” he continued.
This
dynamic of chasing an improved image with the world’s big banks and
the dominant economies in the West is emblematic of Macri’s
priority to secure a relationship with the IMF and improve the
country’s image with global financial institutions. But it comes at
a devastating cost for the majority of the population who will suffer
from neoliberal policy prescriptions of structural adjustment and
slashed social spending, as well as the resulting growing
unemployment and poverty.
Meanwhile,
Argentina’s debt to the IMF continues to climb.
In
June, Macri and the IMF agreed on a $50 billion loan. In September,
the amount increased to an unprecedented $57.1 billion over three
years. During an announcement from the presidential office in
August regarding recent agreements with the IMF, Macri told the
people of Argentina that this “decision will put an end to any
uncertainty that has come about regarding our image on an
international level.” In other words, seeking the approval of
the world’s international banks and global power players (the U.S.
included) is worth the conditions of austerity, the havoc wreaked on
the lives of Argentina’s poor, working and middle classes, and the
limitations that it will put on future generations of Argentina’s
leadership (a limitation that we have seen most recently in Mexico as
President López Obrador pushes back against decades of neoliberal
policies and conditions agreed to by his predecessors).
In order
to afford the repayment plan, the 2019 budget eviscerates social
spending, slashing it by 35 percent while increasing debt payments by
50 percent.
Christine
Lagarde recently defended the evisceration of social welfare, citing
a current program in its place that allocates $6 per person among the
13 million poor in Argentina for the last six months of 2018. This is
hardly enough for the country’s 3,965,840 unemployed (8.9 percent
of the population) and 12,167,610 residents living below the poverty
line (27.3 percent of the population), based on numbers that have
steadily increased since 2016 according to the IMF’s own measure
and the National Institute of Statistics of the Republic of
Argentina’s latest report.
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