I Cry for You, Argentina

Perhaps there is no better observation of the government of Mrs. Cristina Kirchner, Argentina’s President, than the one given by Mario Vargas Llosa, the latest Nobel laureate in Literature. When asked about it, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that Mrs. Kirchner was leading a government riddled by corruption. “I love Argentina,” he told me recently in New York, “and it hurts me to see what is going on in your country.” The death of former president Néstor Kirchner will only make things more difficult for Mrs. Cristina Kirchner.

Mrs. Kirchner has made serious mistakes on several fronts. Among them, using rough tactics, government officials have dismantled the INDEC (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses) of its technical personnel and replaced them with those loyal to the government. As a result, that institution has lost all credibility. According to Argentina’s government, inflation in 2009 was below 8%. However, according to independent economists and consumer groups inflation ranged between 15 and 18% during that same year.

This doesn’t faze the president, who continues to insist that Argentina has a phenomenal economic growth rate. The astronomical raise in subsidies for poor families, however, belies her assertions. In a country’s usual paternalistic culture Mrs. Kirchner has taken that paternalism to extremes. Work ethics, an essential component of the social fabric necessary for a country’s development, is rapidly being eroded.

Mrs. Kirchner has also developed a confrontational style of government. As with many authoritarian leaders, she states that he who is not with her is against her and is to be treated accordingly. She has surrounded herself with a coterie of sycophants who seem to isolate her of reality. One of her ministers attends some meetings with a gun, which he ostentatiously places on top of a table before starting the discussion. She doesn’t seem to realize that people are increasingly against her policies and condemn her imperious behavior.

While Mr. Lula, Brazil’s president, incorporated 30 million poor into the middle class through his economic policies, more than 25% of Argentines live below the poverty line, a situation that has been sharply criticized by Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, Buenos Aires’s Archbishop, the Catholic Church’s highest authority in Argentina.

“We are noticing a situation of dramatic poverty and unemployment,” said Cardinal Bergoglio in 2009. “More and more people are sleeping in the streets, and they have become disposable materials,” he added. Cardinal Bergoglio’s words followed a message by Pope Benedict XVI to the Argentine government demanding action to combat “scandalous poverty.”

“There is no other country with such social regression, such social shame,” stated Bernardo Kosakoff, director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Argentina. I can easily believe this statement. As I write this, I am seated at a popular restaurant in Buenos Aires. Through the window I see a very old woman bent under the weight of the largest plastic bag I have ever seen full with garbage, which she collects from garbage cans placed on the street.

This is happening at the same time that the Kirchner’s personal fortune is increasing at outrageous levels. The Anti Corruption Bureau is conducting an investigation into alleged malfeasance by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, after a sworn statement by the president and her former husband stated that their assets had grown 158 percent in a year.

While quite efficient in their own financial affairs, the Kirchner’s have failed to create the conditions for Argentina’s future development. With the death of former president Néstor Kirchner, whom many people believed was the real power behind the throne, Mrs. Kirchner has the opportunity to change policy and exert her own mark in Argentina’s government. The country desperately needs it.

César Chelala is a writer on human rights and foreign policy issues.