Pablo Ibáñez
08/04/2020 - 10:21
- Clarín.com
- Politics
The final text of the agreement announcement, which was circulated just after midnight, traveled virtually between Olivos and the Palacio de Hacienda several times. On one side was Alberto Fernández, and on the other, the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán. It was a four-handed confection, which included chats and phone calls, various drafts and consultations with bondholders.
It was a ritual similar to the one that Fernández and Guzmán carried out in early morning from Sunday to Monday when,Hand in hand, they gave the final touch to the offer that would achieve, a few hours later, the OK of a large part of the bondholders.
Missing details and is a window of time until August 24 for the coronation of the pact that will allow Argentina to avoid default and ninth Fernández show, after 238 days of management, a winning card .
For the Government, according to the climate that radiated from Olivos in the long dawn, it is an opportunity to relaunch a management that started with little dynamics and later suffered the blast of the pandemic , whose social and economic damage cannot yet be quantified.
Fernández will speak this Thursday from the fifth presidential during an act for the PROCREAR plan and will seek to leverage the agreement for the debt swap to retake the initiative. He begins to leave behind one of "the cursed inheritances of Macrism" , they say in Olivos.
Last Monday, while Guzmán was with his team in Economics, Fernández reviewed data and reports with the chief of staff, Santiago Cafiero and Juan Manuel Olmos, chief of advisers. There were, in addition, Julio Vitobello -Secretary General of the Presidency- and the spokesman Juan Pablo Biondi.
In these weeks, Cafiero compiled the details of the plan for 60 post-pandemic measures that, together with presentations such as that of PROCREAR, will be the input with which the government will try to recover the center of the ring.
In Olivos, cautious but confident, they expected a high number of bondholders to finish entering the agreement on Tuesday afternoon.
Fernández, at midnight, praised Guzmán's technical prowess and negotiating judgment . "A lot of Alberto's political doll and a great capacity for Guzmán's labor", was synthesized by an official.
"The previous swap, with Néstor (Kirchner) and (Roberto) Lavagna, took a year: this closes in 6 months," one of the officials told Clarín from the Olivos table while they continued, as in an election, with the scrutiny of adherence to the exchange.
Fernández followed closely that negotiation. Although the visible face was Roberto Lavagna, seconded by Guillermo Nielsen, the now President was the head of the Cabinet and intervened in the process.
Fernández usually says that this background was like a training -beyond the differences in amounts, times and global situation- to face that negotiation that, in the initial roadmap, had planned to close in March but, COVID-19 through, will occur in August.
The President was contacted online with the minister who stayed in his office until 3.30 this Tuesday, when the communiqué that officialized the agreement Clarín had anticipated was released . In the middle of the morning , Guzmán zoomed in on a group of creditors. Added in an account, folder by folder, the accessions.
Guzmán closed a frenzied and extra-long day : He stayed until late in the morning in Economics, but he had visited Cristina Kirchner early -as Pablo De León told in Clarín-, he had held innumerable talks and in the afternoon made a teleconference with deputies of the Front of All ( FdT), including Sergio Massa and Máximo Kirchner.
Massa, one of the political interlocutors that the Government had with the bond-holding groups, stopped by Olivos in the afternoon. This Tuesday he will be at the forefront of the session where, with the support of the opposition - except for the left - the debt swap will be approved in local legislation, which already passed the Senate last week.
