Ignacio Zuleta
02/23/2020 - 18:26
- Clarín.com
- Politics
From dancing at the Ritz to strategic (secret) meetings in NYC
Martín Guzmán finished with a balance dinner of the G20 trip with the delegation that accompanied him to Riyadh in the fine restaurant Layali Al Daraa, which inspires his menu in delicacies of the Najdi culture. He got excited about financial love scenes from all his interlocutors, from Kristalina Georgieva to Steven Mnuchin (Trump's finance minister), passing by Frenchman Bruno Le Maire, who promised him a pass for a peaceful chat with the Paris Club to close the wrongs he inherited from Axel Kicillof. He delighted with the Minister of Finance of India Nirmala Sitharaman. "She is very prepared," he praised her. He was also fascinated, as a debutant in such high leagues, with the minuet of the big heads of this story, like the Georgieva, who greeted himself as if he were swimming with Christine Lagarde. Scenes from Puttin 'On the Ritz (Dancing at the Ritz, Irwin Berlin, fox trot, 1927) that occurred at the homonymous hotel in Riyadh.
There the minister and his companions - Miguel Pesce, Sergio Chodos and some others - collected the testimonies that the world is more globalized than they thought, but today with a human face that seems to spill the beatitudes of vultures of usurers and vultures the "economy of Francisco", which is the head of this IMF today, which seems more a therapeutic assistant who faces, together with the Fernández, the vultures. Live to see it . After the farewell of this Sunday - Pesce returns to Buenos Aires - the minister reappears at noon Monday in Washington, where he has armed commitments by Ambassador Jorge Argüello with IMF officials. With them will begin the major commitment that nobody believed that he would see in a Christian government, the revision of the numbers of the economy under article IV of the organism's letter. Cristina never allowed it. No one throws the numbers at me.
Guzman's tour continues on Tuesday with a discreet agenda, which the minister himself defined as "strategic meetings . " If translated journalistically, they will be meetings with creditors, banks and investment funds, to which the official will submit to the practice that will mark the negotiation: the vulture exam . It consists in investigating how much an investor is willing to admit as a cut in the invested capital. In the most pessimistic forecast, bondholders speak of a 50% cut . Who admits that, will be a good cooperator and will be distinguished; who does not accept it will receive the ominous medal of vulture of all vulture.
The fight in Buenos Aires subtracts support for renegotiation
With everything well on the trip - which strengthens the heart, as the vate says - what the minister is going to need is that the papale s not get wet in Buenos Aires . He asked for and achieved overwhelming support from the opposition to the renegotiation, with unanimous votes (45 to 0) in the Senate, but in the week that starts he will have to start over to retain that support. The barrage of officialism in the judicial field predicts an outbreak of those good ways that were seen in Congress. The opposition's trenches are back to review the retirement reform of judges and reject Jujuy's request for intervention in justice that seeks to benefit Milagro Sala, an emblem of Peronism as an anti-system.
Over the weekend the radicals buried Gerardo Morales and I helped "dig up the devil", a carnival ritual that under these circumstances came loaded with symbolism. Next to him were the Correntino Gustavo Valdés , legislators like Mario Negri or José Cano , and local government officials, such as Normando Álvarez García. He comes from being an ambassador to Bolivia between 2015 and 2019 and encouraged the dinners held by the carnivals with data on the crisis in that country that ended with the departure of Evo Morales. It was he who opened the embassy to protect several officials until they left that country.
In that encounter they committed themselves to the return of the great battles like those that fought against the Kirchners before 2015 . In those lides, the Morales-Ernesto Sanz duo made history from an overwhelming minority in the Senate and were able to trace it. They have confidence now. They prepared the meeting of the table of Change of this Wednesday and also a trip for the next week from a malón of legislators from all over the country to a mega act in Jujuy . That province is cabalistic for Change. There they closed electoral campaigns, except the last one, and Macri lost. The former president, like every football player, believes in the cabal and had to respect this and some other, because he invited Elisa Carrió on election day to the fifth Los Abrojos, ignoring another infallible cabal until then.
Alberto confuses to accumulate power
Bulle the explanatory offer around a prejudice that is not proven : that Alberto and Cristina are different and that they dispute for power with hurtful weapons. He formulated it, with the energy of his most rational pronouncements, Elisa Carrió. He pointed out that the vice president corners the president and engages him in a project of institutional dismantling that goes from pardons to defendants of the last Peronist government, to an emptying of the judiciary with a pension reform for that sector that will leave the courts without judges or prosecutors to provide justice service. There are records to the contrary, such as those that make Alberto say, in an inexplicable video for his intentionality, that during the government of Change the country "he suffered serious violations of human rights, and the rule of law was systematically violated through the application regional of the tactics of persecution of the lawfare ".
It is a cannon shot at the institutional system that comes from the President, who is also a lawyer who:
1) You should give some proof of those violations.
2) Explain why, being a professor of criminal law in a public university, adheres to that motto of the party struggle that is the "lawfare", an alleged pergeño of journalists and judges that is also to be proven as a novelty.
The confrontation of politicians with the judicial system is universal and is a common place in contemporary politics, where power is built with the exercise of control of the virtue of others. Just read it to Richard Nixon in his memoirs "In the Arena", which accuses the Watergate that produced his resignation, as a case of what is now called "lawfare" . The same was said by the military prosecuted for crimes against humanity, Menem for the weapons and other cases, De la Rúa for non-bribery of the Senate, and the Kirchners for suspicions of corruption. In all these cases the efficient engine was the judicial system, without intervention of the powers of the moment.
In Argentina, politicians, whether they govern or not, do not handle the judges , who constitute their own power. Some like it, others don't, but it is so. Either Carrió is right that they are different and that they are at war fighting for power, or the video is believed and they end up being the same. Those who look at the first hypothesis deepen that contradiction and rescue the President's phrases that he will not pardon anyone or that a justice reform will not include a tacit impunity clause such as changing judges in cases against former officials. That contradiction on Alberto's part reveals an elementary strategy: deepening the confusion about what he really thinks and says in order to expand his margin of freedom. He puts cards in several numbers on the table, adhering to judicial Christianity and at the same time denying it , when what he is doing is securing a margin to, in the end, choose one of those positions.
Peronism risks repeating history
The court rate is here the attitude of Peronism as a whole: are the governors, who constitute a league that controls the ruling party to be involved in a repetition of what they lived during the presidency of Cristinas , linked to a dialectical war with the opposition , the media and public opinion around the republican quality of its management? Peronism lost power in 2015 after a series of electoral defeats motivated in the division of that force. The reasons for that division were in the rejection of an important sector of the governors and of the Peronism that Sergio Massa represented, of the attempts of reelection, of reform of the justice, of fight with the public opinion and the means that expressed it.
That lesson will surely serve as a regulator of the attitude to the attempt of a sector of the Government to repeat a story that ended badly . It is not speculation. There are governors and legislators who have aligned themselves with the new government after being in dissent since 2009, but who already say that their position is conditional on those hegemonic projects not being repeated . One of the senators the most identified officialism with Christianity slipped before his colleagues that if the Government returns to those projects such as media law or judicial reform, the support will be withdrawn. Alberto knows this surely when he seeks to widen the margin of management to, at a certain moment, choose the path that will ensure governance. Cristina or the support of the governors . These are responsible for the fact that he has reached the presidency because they conditioned his support for Cristina not being the candidate. That is the vault key of the current government.
Creole rarities: the Senate, dominated by Cristina who is not a senator
In a deaf pulse, Alberto manages not to rearm a focus of power in a region that does not dominate, as is the Senate . For the first time in years, block chiefs of that House do not concentrate negotiations and decisions. Until last year, the Senate was a chamber in which Miguel Pichetto was carved by the federal Peronism bloc, Marcelo Fuente s as a delegate of Christianity, and Federico Pinedo as a referent of the then officialism. The departure of these three legislators opened a unique panorama: a Senate dominated by Cristina, who is not a senator. Hard to imagine such a small decrease in gravitation of that chamber, which is where the governors are presumed to be represented.
The federal par excellence chamber is now dominated by Peronism through a transmission circuit that ends in the vice president. The formal block is led by José Mayans , who had seconded Pichetto in the previous format. But the decisions are consulted with Senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti , the most Christian lawmaker. She, in turn, is referred to in Fuentes, who was confirmed in Thursday's session in the position of Parliamentary Secretary, one of the Senate superpowers, but in this case has a terminal in Cristina. The novelty is not that Peronism controls the camera, because it has since 1983 . Alfonsín had to agree everything with Vicente Saadi, De la Rúa with Augusto Alasino and Macri with Pichetto. All those interlocutors negotiated because they were senators. Cristina is not a senator, but neither does she negotiate and that is a new element of power to take this armed into account.
It is understood that the governors do not walk much by the Senate and yes by Olivos or in House of Government. Its governance depends on politics, which is the furthest thing from Cristina's intransigence, which shields situations in defense of her personal interest - such as the capture of the justice system - while Alberto has to deal with the public interest, That can only be done through politics, which is negotiation. There goes the cut between the president and vice and not so much at the level of anecdotes, which entertain, but do not explain much.
Judges: seek to force the opposition to defend privileges
The jujeña together is exceptional for an opposition that has so far collaborated with it as it never did any force before with the needs of the Government. From the opposition they see that the pension reform for judges can leave the Government vacant in about half a thousand places of national and federal magistrates throughout the country, for the mass withdrawal of those who will want to retire under current conditions, and not move to general regimes without mobility or relation to active wages. More than a reform will be a judicial revolution , which is not in the letter of any of the projects studied by the government, but arises from the facts that triggers the single threat of retirement reform.
The Government ties its initiative in the demand for opinion, which supports any reduction of differences in the treatment of retirees , whether judges, diplomats or teachers. Envy forces the opposition to put itself in the worst place, which is to appear defending privileges. A classic of the legislative life in Peronist governments: to build muscle with initiatives that the opposition shares to secure the vote, but at the expense of the weakness of its contradictors to defend what they do not share. It happened in the Kirchner cycle , when the Government then cornered the opposition with projects proposed by them. The media law was born with the government of De la Rúa and Gustavo López in the former Comfer, the retirement nationalizations, YPF and Airlines were flags of radicalism since the 1990s, with which they faced Menem. The last Peronist government refloated them to mount important legislative victories over those projects. They proposed what their opponents had defended before and forced them into shameful positions for defending what they did not believe. There is nothing worse for a politician to appear in that position . In Peronism that does not have much cost because "positions" matter more than principlism. The best compliment a Peronist can receive is that he "was well positioned," that is, in the right place at the right time.