Various former presidents, former foreign ministers and Latin American leaders associated with the leftamong which is the former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica, published this Thursday a letter in which they ask the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to “assume responsibility” for giving him the US$ 45 billion loan to Argentina in 2018when it was chaired by Mauricio Macri.
According to the signatories, the agreement between the fund and Argentina has an “absolutely impossible to meet” return timeand was handed over to the Macri government “in order to benefit him electorally and limit the next steps.” The former presidents demand “the immediate removal of loan surcharges and the granting of terms that allow economic growth without brutal adjustments or fiscal restrictions that subject the Argentine people to conditions of impoverishment“.
In total they adhered to the letter ten former presidents, among them Mujica, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from Brazil, ten former foreign ministers and twelve Latin American leadersamong those who are Lucia Topolansky and the front wing deputy Daniel Caggiano. In addition, the former Spanish president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapateroand the current vice president of Peru, Dinah Boularte.
In the letter they quote the Pope Franciscowho stated that “Markets must be backed by laws and regulations that ensure that they contribute to the common good” and not be speculative, to help meet the “social goals” that are “sorely needed during the current global health emergency.
“In a Latin American political scenario conducive to the projects of the popular field and in defense of the Great Homeland,” the letter continues, “Promoting a more humanistic economic policy is fighting for a more distributive and inclusive life model”they declare, and add that we must act “thinking of ordinary men and women”and questioning “the concentration of half of the world’s wealth by a small minority of the population”.
An “absurd” loan
JUAN MABROMATA / AFP
According to the letter, the loan was delivered to the Macri government “in order to benefit it electorally and limit the next steps.”
The IMF gave the Argentine government a loan of 57 billion dollars in 2018and to date Argentina maintains a debt of $45 billion. According to the signed agreement, the neighboring country must pay US$ 19 billion in 2022, another 19 billion in 2023, and 5 billion in 2024. The Argentine Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, declared to channel C5N in December that the loan is “absurd” and that “was not used for anything good”for which he believes that it is “necessary for there to be a serious evaluation of whether the IMF statute was complied with.”
For its part, from the Monetary Fund they regretted that the bases of the agreement weren’t “strong enough” to address “Argentina’s deep-seated structural problems”as the dollarization and the high inflation, they pointed out in a statement consigned by AFP. They also noted that the loan created “substantial financial and reputational risks” for the IMF.
