Una mirada inteligente e incisiva desde el centro del orden mundial sobre lo que es y se espera que sea el gobierno de Mauricio Macri.
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| Presidente Mauricio Macri |
"Macri's win in Argentina rouses investors," says a headline
in the Globe and Mail, while The Economist is crowing over "The End of
Populism" in Latin America. Normally reserved financial media are
celebrating Macri's victory because international banks and corporations that
have been largely shut out under former presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner
will now be invited to re-enter the Argentine market, which has the
third-largest GDP in Latin America, underpinned by enormous natural resource
wealth. In the nearly euphoric media coverage, coded warnings about the need
for a "highly sensitive fiscal adjustment" are being ignored.
Macri is being breathlessly promoted by investors not simply because
Argentina will now be open to global finance, but also because they are hoping
his victory signals a possible end to the tenuous leftist project in South
America's largest economies. In Brazil, Venezuela and Chile, leftist
governments are teetering or moving to the center. Argentina's outsized
influence as a leader in the fight against neoliberalism amplifies the
importance of Daniel Scioli's - and by extension, Kirchner's - defeat.
Argentine voters narrowly elected Macri, a wealthy businessman and former Buenos Aires mayor, as president on November 22, 2015. Macri was running under the banner of his own pro-business Cambiemos coalition party. (Cambiemos means "Let's Change.") He defeated Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires province, who ran as the candidate of President Cristina Kirchner's Front for Justice Party. His election ended 12 years of rule by the populist husband-wife duo of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, who have dominated Argentine political life since 2003 with their rejection of the neoliberal Washington Consensus.
I asked Claudia Oxman, a politically progressive linguistics professor
at Voces del Sur who distrusted both candidates, to characterize the election.
She said the country was moving from a "pre-capitalist" government to
a government offering "a fiesta for global corporations." The next
day, as if to punctuate her point, President-elect Macri named his cabinet,
which is filled with US-trained executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase,
Shell, Monsanto, General Motors, IBM, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF).
During the campaign, Sergio Carciofi, an attorney in Buenos Aires who
publishes a popular blog on politics and culture, described the difference
between Scioli and Macri to me in this way: "Scioli wants a state that
intervenes in the market. Macri wants a market that intervenes in the
state." For the past decade, most of South America has opted for state
intervention. Amid this wave, the Kirchners have been Argentina's imperfect but
emphatic response to the suffering inflicted by a ruinous, decades-long
succession of neoliberal regimes. The 2015 election changes that narrative.
For the past four decades, Argentina has been the international test lab
for neoliberal policies. The economic program that ravaged Greece and other
lower-income nations of the eurozone was first tested and refined in Argentina.
Argentina has been subjected to every variety of neoliberalism and is about to
be tested again. The potential global consequences of the 2015 election can be
understood only against the backdrop of the nation's often violent history as a
neoliberal proving ground.
Neoliberalism at the
Point of a Gun, 1976-1989
From 1976 to 1983, in a crude precursor of today's financialized
neoliberalism, Argentina was ruled by a US-backed, anti-communist military
junta trained at the US Army's School of the Americas. The junta
"disappeared" (murdered) 30,000 people and tortured tens of thousands
more while implementing the National Reorganization Process, a program designed
to stamp out all resistance from the left while privatizing state-owned
industry nationwide. The entire murderous fiasco, retroactively labeled the
"dirty war," was fueled by a 525 percent increase in annual foreign
borrowing backed by the IMF.
With their economic program in shambles within six years due to mounting
debt and inflation, the military dictatorship was unable to maintain control
after Argentina's humiliating defeat by England in the Falkland Islands war in
1982. The first democratic elections in nearly a decade were held in 1983,
bringing moderate Sen. Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín to power.
Alfonsín is revered in Argentina as a president of unimpeachable
integrity who started bringing junta leaders to trial until they forced him to
sign an amnesty law. However, he was unable to generate economic growth or
bring inflation under control after years of foreign borrowing and
mismanagement under the junta. The IMF and World Bank continued to insist on
austerity, and Alfonsín was forced from office by a collapsing economy before
the end of his first term.
The Go-Go
Neoliberalism of the 1990s
Carlos Menem, a provincial governor, won the presidency in 1989 running
as a traditional Peronist, acting on the concept of state intervention codified
under Juan Perón. Once elected, he quickly embraced the Washington Consensus
model of fiscal austerity, reduced wages and privatization. Menem, an infamous
Ferrari-driving, model-dating playboy, was a golfing buddy of George H.W. Bush
and George W. Bush. In an act that perfectly symbolizes the logic of his
economic program, his government awarded the lucrative Buenos Aires natural gas
concession to Enron in direct response to lobbying by the Bushes.
Menem also pegged the value of the Argentine currency to the US dollar
on a one-to-one basis, making the dollar the de facto currency. For a few
years, this gave Argentinians enormous purchasing power worldwide and the
illusion of "first-world" status, much like Greece, Spain, Italy,
Ireland and Portugal during the first few years after switching to the euro.
As an international currency underwritten by the largest economy in the
world, the value of the dollar rose dramatically during Menem's 10-year regime,
creating enormous fiscal deficits for Argentina, whose peso could not keep
pace. Menem responded with brutal budget cuts, wholesale privatization and
massive borrowing from the IMF. The dollar peg, like the abandonment of local
currencies for the euro 20 years later in Western Europe, was unsustainable.
Local economies lose their flexibility when they are tethered to global
currencies. The IMF demanded more severe cuts in social spending coupled with
lower wages in exchange for additional dollar-denominated loans, and Menem was
driven from office.
Neoliberalism in Crisis
and the Rise of Kirchnerism
From Menem's departure in 1999 until 2003, Argentina was in economic
chaos. After decoupling from the dollar in January 2002, the peso suffered a 390
percent loss in value. The government defaulted on an external debt of $100
billion the same month, the largest sovereign debt default in history. With
plunging GDP and soaring inflation, the middle class was wiped out almost
overnight, leaving 50 percent of the population in poverty. In a nation of
abundant agricultural production, there were ongoing food shortages as the IMF
continued to insist on austerity in exchange for the possibility of more loans.
Citizens were denied access to their bank savings in a desperate attempt to
preserve dwindling federal currency reserves. There were daily protests in the
streets, culminating in a succession of five different presidents in a two-week
period ending January 2, 2002. Nearly three decades of neoliberal economic
terror and domestic corruption had left the country in ruins.
Amid the chaos in 2003, little-known regional governor and civil rights
attorney Nestor Kirchner was elected president, and Argentina began to chart a
new course combining reconciliation with the past and targeted state
intervention in the economy.
Adopting a program of native Peronist solutions, Kirchner shifted the
focus of government policy to economic self-sufficiency, while key sectors of
the economy were re-nationalized. Spending on social welfare programs, health
and education was expanded. Wages and pensions were increased. Domestic
manufacturing was incentivized, while taxes on Argentina's wealthy agricultural
export sector were increased to offset domestic spending. Annual investment in
transportation, energy and communications infrastructure rose dramatically as
part of a long-term government plan. Kirchner was also supportive of ownership
claims by unemployed workers who had taken over hundreds of abandoned
businesses and factories to keep them productive during the crisis as part of
El Movimiento de Autogestión. Trials of war criminals for human rights abuses
during the dirty war accelerated under Kirchner after he overturned the
impunity laws imposed on Alfonsín. Foreign debt, including the IMF, was
restructured and repaid over a three-year period.
In the decade from 2003 to 2012, with Nestor Kirchner as president the
first four years, followed by his wife Cristina from 2007, the
debt-and-austerity-driven agenda of the global financial establishment was
rejected in favor of a focus on domestic development and investment. In
response, the Argentine middle class doubled to more than 18 million citizens,
while annual economic growth averaged 6.2 percent, reaching 8.2 percent in
2010.
The Election of 2015
and the End of Kirchnerism
During her second term, Cristina Kirchner faced an array of intractable
problems, ranging from fierce domestic opposition on the right, to reduced tax
revenue from agricultural exports in the face of depressed global commodities
prices. She also had to fight an assault from US vulture funds that were
essentially running their own foreign policy. These funds forced a technical
default on the nation and made Argentina a pariah on global financial markets.
Even with these allowances, Kirchner has been a much more divisive
president than her husband, who died in 2010. Self-consciously styling herself
as a latter day Eva Perón, her presidency veered into a near cult of
personality by 2015, punctuated by melodramatic television appearances, bitter
feuds with the media ending in press censorship, intentional class
polarization, the mysterious assassination of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman
after he threatened to implicate Kirchner in a criminal cover-up and endless
disagreements with other member nations of Mercosur, the South American trade
alliance.
Kirchner failed to provide the kind of governance necessary for deep
structural change aimed at building a sustainable alternative to neoliberalism.
Perhaps this is too much to ask of any individual leader, but Argentina is nonetheless
in the midst of an economic decline that is evident in daily life, with anemic
growth of only 0.5 percent in 2014, compounded by nearly 28 percent inflation,
ballooning deficits, high unemployment, increasing crime and a dual exchange
rate system that has caused many Argentines to hoard US dollars. At the same
time, a suspicious increase in the Kirchner family's personal wealth amid
widespread allegations of corruption drove many voters into the arms of the opposition
in the 2015 election.
Macri's New Model: Neoliberalism
With a Human Face
In the final days of the presidential election, Cristina Kirchner often
appeared in public, with Scioli warning of a return to the "savage
capitalism" of the past if Macri were elected. Numerous people in Argentina
have told me they were terrified of this outcome but nonetheless voted for
Macri to put an end to the corrupt cult of personality they thought Kirchner's
administration had become. Voters wanted change, and Macri ran an upbeat
campaign about going forward together with a program of national renewal, while
offering as few specifics as possible.
Macri is well aware of the fear most Argentines feel about
neoliberalism, a term that is widely understood in Argentina. Although he ran
as an unabashed free-market candidate, he has assiduously presented himself as
the harbinger of a new, more compassionate and inclusive model of capitalism,
calling his campaign a "revolution of joy" while running on a
platform of "zero poverty" and massive infrastructure spending.
Gone are the crude tactics of the dirty war era; nor will Macri be
bringing Menem's Ferrari out of the garage. In 2015, technocratic neoliberalism
has been repackaged with a "joyful" human face that wants to
eliminate poverty. On election night, Macri even managed to do an
entertainingly offbeat victory dance that spawned an amusing wave of video
spoofs on social media.
During his eight years as mayor of Buenos Aires, Macri has governed as a
competent technocrat who defines his primary constituency as upper-income urban
professionals. He made transportation and infrastructure a focus of his
administration, transforming central Buenos Aires into one of the most
pedestrian-friendly, multi-modal transit models in the world. Although Macri
has promised similar transformation and infrastructure spending for the rest of
the country, his investments and tax credits as mayor have been heavily tilted
in favor of the city's wealthiest barrios. In a troubling sign for the future -
and even with allowances for the government's unreliable statistics - municipal
debt, income inequality, unemployment and crime in Buenos Aires have risen more
sharply than in the nation as a whole during Macri's mayoral tenure.
In spite of his lack of specifics on almost every issue, Macri has given
a hint of the philosophy underlying his proposals with his "pobreza
cero" (zero poverty) plan. Out of a population of 40 million, the Social
Debt Observatory in Buenos Aires estimates the number of Argentinians living in
poverty at 11 million. As a solution, Macri is proposing the use of the
nation's social security fund to underwrite new low-income home mortgages. To
imagine an equivalent scenario in the United States, think of the federal
government using money from the Social Security Trust Fund to underwrite
millions of subprime mortgages, but packaged as an anti-poverty program.
Macri has vowed to run an administration of high ethics, and there is no
reason to disbelieve him. He is placing his considerable assets in a blind
trust and pledging to fire any official in his administration at any hint of
corruption or graft. The problem is not with Macri's personal ethics, but with
his blind devotion to technocratic market solutions, irrespective of how badly
the markets are rigged in favor of the financial and corporate sectors.
In this election, the desire for change and a creeping sense of
isolation from the rest of the developed world narrowly outweighed voters'
bone-deep fear of returning to the violence of unchecked neoliberal economics,
which Argentina knows more intimately than any other nation, including Greece.
With his optimistic vision of Argentine renewal, unity and prosperity, Macri
managed to defuse these lingering fears with enough voters to squeak out a
victory of less than 700,000 votes. The repac kaging
of Macri's neoliberal views as a grand project of optimistic national renewal
is likely to become the new model for pro-market forces across South America
and beyond.
Cristina Kirchner has pledged to continue leading the opposition,
opening speculation that she may run again in 2019. Her Front for Justice Party
still has sufficient votes in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate to resist much
of Macri's agenda, and there are other promising candidates from her party for
the next election besides Kirchner herself.
Argentine voters are weary of having to choose between populist
political intrigue on the left, and unfettered neoliberalism on the right.
Nonetheless, as Macri and his cabinet of corporate technocrats dance their way
into power, Argentina is once again the global laboratory for neoliberal
experimentation and resistance. As in the past, the outcome of this experiment
with a rebranded neoliberal "revolution of joy" is likely to
reverberate far beyond Argentina's borders."Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission."
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