Argentina haunted by the ghost of the financial crack

The right-wing government of Mauricio Macri has managed to double the external debt of the country in just two years.

The recipe to achieve this has been to repeat the same mechanism of neo-liberal financial pillage practiced by all Argentine governments, from the dictatorship to the financial crack of 1998.
The country is haunted by the phantom of the so-called banking "corralito" by which citizens were prevented from taking their money from banks, while allowing foreign financial institutions to take huge amounts of foreign currency out of the country in cash.

Last week the Argentine society witnessed the turning on of numerous red lights of danger when the national peso went into free fall against the dollar. The government used, in a few days, more than 1,100 billion dollars in an attempt to give confidence to the "market", with a collateral damage of 800 million in short-term debt payments, while raising interest rates banking from 25%, to 40%, and asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a financial rescue of 30 billions.

Without going into the economic-financial mechanisms in itself, it is worth saying that basically the financial plunder consists in this case to attract what in Argentina is called sweet silver (i.e. easy dollars) through a high rate of profit in national



pesos in the short term, and that, in turn, return to leave the country, translated again in dollars, something similar to what economists call "swallow capital".

Beyond financial and economic mechanisms, the evolution of this situation will have to be followed very closely, since the Government of Mauricio Macri is the flagship of the oligarchic right of the region, in terms of the application of a neo-liberal agenda together with a strong alliance with the US.

A social-economic crisis in Argentine could clearly spread like a virus to other important Latin American countries, seriously affecting the marked trend of the return of the pro-American right to power in Latin America.
The previous financial crack in Argentina had, as a direct consequence, a social rebellion that knocked down two presidents in just one year, under the slogan “go away, all of you” and opened the way to the so-called progressive phase and the more than 15 years of presidential tandem Nestor Kirschner and his wife Cristina Fernandez (who currently leads the opposition in Parliament).

At the moment the ghost of the "corralito" has already managed to get the rate of approval of Mauricio Macri to the minimum since the beginning of his term, and has activated numerous social mobilizations all over the country.