Ignacio Zuleta
01/24/2021 18:54
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 01/24/2021 19:08
"What happened, happened" (Alberto's message to Bolsonaro)
The air of global change - by
Biden
, let's say for reference - gives some a chance to reshape their agenda.
"What happened, happened",
Alberto Fernández said
to the strategic advisor
Flavio Augusto Viana Rocha
, who came from Brazil to mend the pieces of a broken relationship since the beginning of this government.
Viana, who devoured the roast for the few that Alberto served on Friday in Olivos, brought an encouraging message to La Rosada from the heart of that country:
Paulo Guedes
, Minister of Economy, wants to have a meeting with
Martín Guzmán
as soon as possible
.
That understanding will be completed on Thursday this week by
Daniel Scioli
, who will meet in Brasilia with the Deputy Minister of Guedes,
Carlos Alexandre Jorge da Costa
.
It will be a prior to another meeting,
that of Alberto and Jair Bolsonaro in March
, when the summit of FIESP, the business league of São Paulo, the main business club in that country, will be held.
This game of encounters reflects some changes.
On the one hand, the closing of a crisis between the president's environment and
Felipe Solá
, who have declared the end of the reduced relationship format, for almost the whole year, to brief messages by
and the minuet of anti-Felipe leaks that he downloaded Olivos over Solá.
The pledge of this end to hostilities is the acceptance by the Argentine government that
a period of frivolity is ending
, which arose from Alberto's assumption that Bolsonaro would fall sooner rather than later and that he would not finish his term.
It did not happen, and has accepted that there are other ways of approach.
The new agenda: more Mercosur and less Puebla
The first is minted by Scioli, who reopened the residence of La Ñata, in the riverside hamlet of Benavídez, for an
old-style rampage
with businessmen and officials, including Solá and
Gustavo Béliz
, to show Viana Rocha the principles of the method.
Scioli prides himself on having beaten the third-party dialectic, and having convinced Brazil of the error of believing that the Argentine government is the Chavista discourse, the one that made Bolsonaro say that Argentina had a Venezuelan destiny.
Speaking in silver, the revenue is to have refloated relations with that country at the business level, in order to rescue what with
Mauricio Macri
and
Bolsonaro
seemed condemned to death
, which is Mercosur.
This regional treaty is the most conspicuous product of the transition to democracy in the last third of the 20th century, and was surrounded by the succession of non-integrationist governments, from the remote influence of
Donald Trump
, to Macri and Bolsonaro, and now
Luis Lacalle
, who always dreamed of ending the Mercosur lock as a commercial protection zone.
With the understandings of this new hour, commercial and business agreements, Mercosur seem to recover some survival, and feed positions of
characters postponed by the Government
.
One is Scioli, who was at the center of Viana's trip and his announcements of summit encounters;
and the other is Solá.
The chancellor has as a project an
agenda to rebuild relations
with the new government of the United States, to get out of unilateralism.
In short, it is about rearming together with Chile and Brazil, axes of the region, to bring to Joe Biden's new cabinet an agenda of
matters of common interest
that does not pass through the inheritance received.
This means taking the country out of the spell of the Puebla Group or the Venezuelan ghost.
Trump was pushing things to the extreme, putting as his only final objective a military occupation of that country.
With Biden there will be another path, and the Solá Foreign Ministry believe that it can be traveled without inherited backpacks.
Guzmán, Guedes and the end of aid for the plague
Among the coincidences that feed this new turn between Brazil and Argentina, is the common inspiration of the two governments to face the crisis in their economies.
Guzmán took advantage of the visit to Chaco last Friday, to argue in depth (with slides, Cristina would say)
the end of the IFE
(Emergency Family Income)
and the ATP
(Assistance to Work and Production).
He did it in a "conversation" sponsored by his host
Jorge Capitanich
, at the local university.
There the minister confirmed what his officials had been advancing throughout the week: "The ATP was implemented during 2020 to protect work and production and has evolved towards the Repro system (Productive Recovery Program); today in day the measure to protect work and production is Repro, not the ATP program, and Repro will continue, which has been expanded to meet the needs of critical sectors. "
And Guzmán added: "The IFE was a measure for the toughest restrictions in a context of circulation that is not there today.
Today the programs are different
. There are certain measures that were adopted in the context of the strongest restrictions on circulation. restrictions are not present today, they have changed. So the measures must be different. "
With almost the same words, Viana explained it to Alberto and Guzmán during their visit to Buenos Aires: "The Federal Government (of Brazil) considers that it is not necessary to continue emergency aid and, instead, increase the amount allocated to Bolsa Família program, and trying to relocate the informal through microcredits and qualification and training programs. "
The technical talk in the locker room, more important than Guzmán
Capitanich gave a lunch on Friday at the governor's residence to Guzmán's team (the Secretary of the Treasury,
Raúl Rigo
; the Secretary of Provinces of the Ministry of the Interior,
Silvina Batakis
; the director of the Central Bank,
Diego Bastourre
; and the head of Cabinet of the Ministry of Economy,
Melina Mallamace
) to celebrate the appointment of
Santiago Pérez Pons
as super minister of merged portfolios of that province, who comes from being Rigo's chief adviser, and star, as Guzmán greeted him, in the making of the new 2021 budget. Capitanich rushed the conduct because he had to do.
Interested that Guzmán declared himself about his schedule, "Coqui" told him that he had to run to the Sarmiento club locker room -of which he is president- to give the team the technical talk before the game with Douglas Haig.
What talk?
The game strategy.
"He knows more than Bielsa,"
one of the guests at the table ironic.
The Chaco team does not go out onto the field without listening to Capitanich's strategic lines.
The same Cristina did with him when they were senators.
Sarmiento beat the Pergamino team 2-0 and is a semifinalist in the bid for promotion to the First National (former B Nacional).
Guzmán, who smiles all the time without explaining why, must have internally celebrated for all that he is learning about politics, now that he
is being passed around as a candidate
.
Do you also have to know about football? He asks himself.
Do I have to speak to Stiglitz about Gymnastics and Fencing?
Felipe gave Alberto a new opportunity to be his President
Felipe Solá gave Alberto Fernández a new opportunity to continue being its president.
The chancellor arrived in Olivos on Saturday morning
with the resignation in his pocket
and in his soul.
"Here you have it," Felipe told him.
"I don't want it. In any case, try to adapt a little more."
Solá has been a traveling companion of the President in the
anti-Christian
journey
between 2008 and 2019
;
they are well understood from common mischief in that past that has brought them to where they are today.
They said goodbye to power after the war in the countryside in 2008: one left the Cabinet headquarters and the other from the Peronist bloc.
They both have a privileged relationship with the media, and both are
experts in leaks
.
They fear each other, because of the ability to install stories about what they do, and they have had short circuits since they took office.
Alberto has a parallel chancery in Olivos, which he would have liked to occupy the office in Solá.
The Buenos Aires group of
Jorge Argüello
, Béliz,
Eduardo Valdés
;
They are foreign service widows.
They act in dispute with Solá, who has his own twist as one of the most experienced ministers.
He ruled the country with Peronist administrations for more than 40 years, and he allows tame errors that ignite the anger of the mestureros (see
El Cid
, version of the copyist Per Abad, or the series on Amazon) by Olivos.
Solá asked Alberto for an interview on Friday, after having dinner with businessmen in La Ñata together with Scioli and the envoy Viana Rocha who, incidentally, is an admiral who understands politics.
There he learned that on Saturday night there was a barbecue in Olivos between the Bolsonerista delegate, Béliz and the ambassadors Scioli and Reinaldo José de Almeida Salgado.
He wasn't invited, and that's why he
forced the date, which could have been the one at the end
.
A veteran in arm wrestling, on summits where oxygen is scarce, Solá avoided the reproaches that were owed to Alberto, and
agreed to withdraw his resignation
.
He had the pleasure of pointing out to the President that there were too many leakers in Olivos.
"I don't handle the press," Alberto clarified when Solá reproached the entornistas of the parallel chancellery for abusing the
"off-the-record"
resource
to mark the field for him.
- Why did you say that my opinion on Biden was a statement? It's what they told you, because it wasn't a statement, it was a tweet.
-But it wasn't the best time to say what you said.
- Who thinks that? If what I said is true and you know it, that the previous Trump administration wanted to divide us from other countries in the region.
-But it was not the time.
They admitted that
the opportunity
was
a mistake
, but Alberto preferred to prevent this
anger from causing
a change in the Cabinet.
Fallen from the sky, the Chilean foreign minister who was Argentine for a day
Solá dedicated a good part of the breakfast to adjusting the schedule
for this week's trip to Chile
, which they will do with
Ginés González García, Guzmán and Agustín Rossi
.
Also, a selection of border governors - none opposition: Salta, La Rioja, Catamarca, San Juan - up to a number that exceeds the Chilean protocols for the plague.
Meetings there can be up to 5, this time an exception will be made.
Ginés is an almost native star in Chile, after eight years as an ambassador.
Rossi once again carries the old slogan that at some point an Antarctic base be installed with the flags of the two countries.
The opportunity to advance is good, because for the first time in the history of Chile, it has
a pro-Argentine foreign minister
.
Alberto learned from the memory of Solá that
Andrés Allamand
was Puma, and maintains that the experience of wardrobe camaraderie in adolescence prints character.
Allamand joined the Pumas team in 1982 to play in South Africa with the team that beat the Springboks, selected from that country, with
Hugo Porta's
goals
.
That Puma team could not represent Argentina, because the country supported the blockade of
apartheid
and that is why it sought regional integration with guests from neighboring countries.
Allamand has never forgotten that he was Argentine for an instant, something few have ever achieved.
Neither did the date of the triumph against the South Africans: it occurred on April 3, 1982,
hours after the military landing in Malvinas
.
The team was called "South America XV".
It was made up of, among others,
Juan Pablo Piccardo
, who was a minister in the first Buenos Aires cabinet of Mauricio Macri.
He came from being the opener and captain of Hindú for many years and he was an extraordinary player.
He had the bad feeling that Porta got upstairs.
Among the forgettable for official history,
Alejandro Puccio
also played in that game
, who was condemned for the ominous kidnappings that his father plotted in the neighborhood of San Isidro.
He trained
"Michingo" O'Reilly
, the most radical of all the cougars in the world that have been.
Cristina vs.
Massa: Alberto correte (or the battle of the Magdalena channel)
As a parting gift, Solá explained to him, with a profusion of maps and elaborate explanations about knuckles and isobaths, the details of the new battle that is coming to the cabinet.
He will face Cristina -Senado- with
Sergio Massa
-Deputies-.
The hostage is the Minister of Transport,
Mario Meoni
, and the reason is the tender for the work of the Magdalena canal, which links navigation courses that include, in part, the Hidrovía.
Meoni, Massa's delegate in this business, was authorized by a decree (949/2020) to carry out the work to expand navigation that also benefits the port of La Plata.
Meoni departed from an agreement with the governors of the region who confirmed an agreement for the normalization of the Hidrovía concession.
The anti-Meoni brigade activated a dormant cell in the Senate, and in the middle of January the
Cristinistas
José Mayans
-formoseño- and
Jorge Taiana
-ex-chancellor who knows a
lot
about these diplomatic
details-
parliament
.
They asked to submit everything to a bicameral monitoring commission.
In Argentina,
when they want to tease you, they put a bicameral
, which is like the Bermuda triangle.
What falls there never ends as it entered.
They are inspired by
Tettamanti Schedule
, which was in charge of the Subsecretariat of Ports and Inland Waterways of the Nation, and which maintains that Meoni's decisions do not serve the best interest of the country.
These criticisms even include a confusion of channels to be maintained, dredged and tolled.
Peronism managed to prevent the Macri government from granting, under his mandate, the maintenance work of the Hidrovía, which is concessioned to the Emepa group,
whose directors were bound in the case for having paid
, according to their own confession, money for the extension of the concession in 2010 to the administration of Cristina de Kirchner.
Elisa Carrió
has a magnifying glass on that work and also questions what governments have done in those turbulent waters.
Dr. Fernández is notified that an acid rain is coming on Massa from the
Instituto Patria
, that they can splash him because he signed Decree 949 together with
Santiago Cafiero
and Meoni, and that he has time to come.
Politics puts the corset on the economy: there is cash
A system that favors temporary triumphs is a system that is not constrained by necessity.
It is a constant in Argentina, a country of income that keeps
USD 500,000 million outside the formal circuit
, in which the economic restriction never puts the corset on politics.
On the contrary, it is politics that adapts the economy to the needs of power.
For some it is a curse, for others a blessing.
It depends on where you were born and where you live.
This is proven by the luck of the companies with State participation, which Peronism has on the agenda to nationalize, the pitiful values of its assets and its shares.
The
most strident case is YPF
, which has been jumping like a madman's suitcase since the 1990s, with always Peronist administrations, between nationalizations, privatizations and re-nationalizations.
The oil sector –businessmen, unionists– discounts since the project to nationalize 100% of the shares will occupy the debate in 2021. The same will happen with other devalued companies, a temptation for the State, or a friend of the Government, to keep them for a few pesos.
They are
very valuable companies
, of international importance, that
today are worth coins
.
Think of some engineering and technology firm that produces turbines and even nuclear reactors.
It no longer bears the name of its founders, but it may fall into the hands of a friend because, in addition, it is in the Andean regions, where entrepreneurs thrive more than friends of the Government.
Pay and die, the last thing
This hypothesis explains the challenge that the government has proposed to
Guillermo Nielsen
as ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
It is not so much because of a controversy over the payment of the USD 400 million debt that it had to make, because the Government -Economy, the BCRA- facilitated the renegotiation of that tranche, without putting in the money.
A few days ago, the Central issued a Communication ("A" 7196, of January 6) in which it
authorized mechanisms that facilitated the process to renegotiate
that payment. The communication established that "for external debt operations (... ) that have been entered and settled by the exchange market as of 07.01.2021, it will be admitted that funds originated in the collection of exports of goods and services of the debtor, are accumulated in accounts abroad and / or the country, destined to guarantee the cancellation of the maturities of the issued debt ".
At the meeting of the economic team on Thursday, chaired by Cafiero, the comment was that these payments are never made, but are renegotiated with new commitments.
And the owners of the ball were there, like Guzmán and
Miguel Pesce
.
The comment was made regarding another payment that will be submitted to the
roll over
, one of USD 2 billion, committed to the Paris Club.
The fantasy of Cristina's infallible strategy is just that: a fantasy
The explanatory offer puts the accent on the hypothesis of the accumulation of force by Christianity to displace its partners, Alberto and Massa, from the center of power.
The President is wounded by the fate of the wars that the rulers face.
They are the first victims of these conflicts, and
facing the virus is a war situation
.
Massa has lost weight because in the end he is responsible for that institutional weakness of his Government, of navigating on the edge of 129 votes.
It also suffers from a calamity that is in its DNA: it can only prosper in a sector of the vote that already has an owner: Together for Change.
He was not wrong after 2009 when he migrated in search of that vote.
He reached the limit of the resistance of the material,
it served him to co-govern
the province of Buenos Aires for two years together with
María Eugenia Vidal
, but not to destroy Peronism, which he had abandoned.
Massa suffered the fate of all the renovators of Peronism who have been since Cafiero.
They take off, but
their heads always beat them
.
It is an exaggeration to believe that behind this push of forces there is a lucid strategy, studied and with chances to prevail.
It is not what the tradition of Christianity says, a tribe of Peronism that adds a leader like Cristina and, underneath, a cast of second-rate Peronism.
The top-brand products are in the provinces, which watch from afar how these metropolitan Peronists, who today occupy Olivos and Congress, are doing.
They are taking their time, but
there is no exam date yet
.
It may be October of this year.
