December summons the most uncomfortable ghosts in Argentina . They prowl driven by the economic crisis, fear and despair. Twenty years after the ‘ corralito’ , the financial crisis that blew up the country like a cluster bomb, with five presidents in just 15 days, the memories of that month of 2001 surface like a reflex action. The fake news of a potential reissue of past traumas has been on such a scale that the Central Bank (BCRA)He assured that there is no possibility that the savings in dollars will be confiscated again. The rumor had been fueled by a recent decision by the BCRA, which had prohibited financing trips abroad with credit cards in easy installments and Argentine pesos. The measure was adopted to take care of international reserves. For her part, Gabriela Cerruti, the spokesperson for the Government of President Alberto Fernández , ruled out a devaluation of the national peso.
But the restlessness does not stop, among other reasons because there is a common problem that unites December 2001 with this month of December, and that is the lack of dollars in the state coffers . Argentina has a long and conflictive relationship with the US currency. The dollar is something more than an instrument of savings and investment , unavoidable for real estate transactions . Sociologists Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis, authors of The Dollar. History of an Argentine currency (1939-2019) , they have described it as a “public artifact of interpretation of the economic and political reality that no citizen of the country can ignore”. Argentine companies and families have savings abroad or under the mattresses of their homes$304.097 million .
The days of the ‘corralito’
The problem goes back a long way and has always had strong devaluations as its counterpart. Nothing compares to the tremors of two decades ago. Those episodes, which caused 33 deaths and waves of looting , are read through the anxiety of the present. On December 2, 2001 , and after 10 years of a law that established parity between the local currency and that of the United States, fueling the dreams of a First World Argentina based on the sale of state-owned companies and a furious external indebtedness , the Government of the then president Fernando de la Rúaencountered an irremediable drought. Bankers, financiers and people related to political power arrived on time to withdraw their deposits and send them abroad. The savers did not, and for this reason, from that day on they could only withdraw $250 from their accounts. 70,000 million of the North American currency were frozen.
For De la Rúa it was the beginning of the end. The saucepans thundered . The Government declared a state of siege . Protests raged. On December 20, the president resigned. The first provisional president, Adolfo RodrÃguez Saa , suspended the payment of the external debt that represented 166% of the GDP. Weeks later, the provisional president, Eduardo Duhalde , depreciated the Argentine currency by 400%. The Argentine landslide had lasting effects on the lives of its inhabitants.
The Fund again
The catastrophe of the ‘corralito’ and the present have, in addition to the dollars, another protagonist in common: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) . De la Rúa’s fate was decided from the moment the financial institution refrained from continuing to finance Argentina. These days, the Fernández government is in a fight with the IMF with an uncertain ending. In 2006, Néstor Kirchner decided to cancel at once all the debt that the country was carrying with the Monetary Fund: 9,800 million dollars. But in 2018, a president of the opposite political sign, Mauricio Macr i, asked the IMF for money again: 47,000 million dollars. A large part of this unprecedented disbursement in the history of the entity fueled the mechanism of capital flightin the last two years of the right-wing Administration.
Fernández took office on December 10, 2019 under the weight of that debt, as well as that contracted with private creditors. In 2020 he managed to refinance this last liability. The agreement with the IMF has not yet arrived. Argentina should pay in 2022 and 2023 more than 38,000 million dollars. Fernandez said that he will not agree to an agreement on the basis of greater hardship for a society with 41% poor. A delegation from his government has traveled to Washington to negotiate with the organization. Meanwhile, Buenos Aires is cooked by the heat and the prophecies of new disasters.
An inflation without ceiling
Argentina has pierced the 50% annual inflation ceiling of October 2020. Everything goes up, despite the fact that the prices of public services, fuels and medicines are frozen and purchasing power is deteriorating so fast that 33% of middle-class households are now poor. Each point of inflation condemns families who are at the limit of subsistence. To avoid further social misfortunes, the Government ordered last October that the prices of more than 1,400 products be frozen until the beginning of 2022. But the ‘Careful Prices’ program has not prevented the November CPI from being higher than 3%. The authorities seek to avoid at all costs that the proximity of Christmas brings the bitter surprise of a greater escalation.
Inflation is a long-term disorder in this country. In 2015, during his electoral campaign, Mauricio Macri said that it was “easy” to solve the problem. His presidency ended in 2019 with a 50% price hike. Alberto Fernández won the elections with the certainty that he would address the causes that caused the disaster. So far he has not been able to. The specialists assure that if the Government accepted the requirements of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to sign the long-awaited agreement, the tariff and exchange arrears would be eliminated, with which the annual inflation of 2022 would exceed 75%.
