The Minister of Public Works of the Nation, Gabriel Katopodisaffirmed today that in the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) President Alberto Fernández defended the official position of not applying adjustments and highlighted that the agreement reached to refinance the $44.5 billion debt “It allows reaffirming a path and a commitment to the country’s growth.”
In dialogue with radio Mitre, Katopodis affirmed that the president “proposed a very clear slogan that was ‘first you have to grow and then pay’. That slogan is reflected in this agreement. It was a negotiation where the president defended very firm priorities: without adjustment in education, without adjustment in science and technology, without adjustment in public works”
He also remarked that “another thing that the president was always clear about” is that “there was no way to set a horizon, an economic course with this load, with this backpack that they left us”, and that “in this negotiation we were not going and we are not going to deliver the public work”.
“In this negotiation we were not going and we are not going to deliver the public work”
For Katopodis, “this is an agreement that allows us to reaffirm a path and a commitment to the country’s growth.”
He pointed out that “what they wanted was for the zero deficit to be tomorrow, they wanted to repeat the history of failures, of agreements that put adjustments ahead, the reduction of spending and fiscal goals that were not only impossible to meet, but were expense of the middle sectors and the workers’ sector”.
In this regard, he recalled that “In the 1990s, public companies were sold in the name of these agreements, in 2001 pensions and workers’ salaries were reduced, in 2018 all public works were paralyzed”.
Instead, he noted that currently “We have a Ministry with more than 3,700 works throughout the country; when we arrived a little over two years ago there were 318, of which 70 percent were paralyzed due to lack of payment. Today we can guarantee to maintain this level of investment, more than 200,000 jobs are organized around public works”, in addition to the fact that we have had “15 consecutive months of recovery in the construction sector”.
He also referred to the trip that President Fernández will make to China next week and stressed that “there are very important infrastructure projects that we are carrying out to negotiate with the Chinese government; the Chaco-Corrientes bridge, or as it is one of the most important aqueducts in the country as it is in Greater Formosa”.
“These are great works impossible to face if we did not take this step,” concluded Katopodis.
