“Look for an agreement with the IMF that will sink us”

The former vice-president detained Amado Boudou demanded this Saturday to move forward with the “nationalization of public service companies<< to prevent further rate hikes and severely criticized Economy Minister Martín Guzmán, accusing him of seeking a “deal with the IMF that will sink us.”

“What is the minister doing in the United States? He’s trying a deal that’ll bring us downBoudou said during his participation in a zoom organized by Espacio Puebla, a union sector that joined the Frente de Todos in August 2020.

The former Minister of the Economy has also rejected negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to access a new program that allows restructuring the some 44 billion dollars that the multilateral credit body has loaned to Mauricio’s government. Macri.

“We said now was not the time to make a deal with the Fund. I believe the President (Alberto Fernández) made the wise decision to send an investigation to find out what happened to this criminal loan for support Macri, ”he added.

In this regard, Boudou considered that this investigation implies “to take a position in the negotiations” because, he noted, “to conclude an agreement with the IMF, in addition to being to the detriment of the Argentine economy, would be like cleaning the face of this operation. ”

“It is not possible to move forward in an agreement with the IMF until we understand what happened and why Argentina is graciously the country which owes the most to the IMF”, a- he insisted.

The vice-president, who is under house arrest, considered in the issue of the Fund that there is “a central political problem” because, he argued, “entering the Fund will hold up the issue of customs duties and the agro-exporter model. out “.

“No one doubts that tariffs are one of the central problems: gas between December 2015 and today has increased by 984%, and residential electricity in AMBA, 2,917%. Can anyone in their right mind think they can raise the rates? tariffs must fall, we cannot be silent on the issue of tariffs, ”he concluded.

Follow-up, in another chapter of friendly fire within the ruling coalition, he said “move as quickly as possible to a system of nationalization of public service companies”.

“Our task is to organize ourselves and that we do not allow all of these issues not to disappear from the public debate,” Boudou said to summon the Kirchnerian referents who were listening to him, including the former ambassador. Alicia Castro and journalist Cynthia Fernández, the legislator of the city of Buenos Aires José Campagnoli and the secretary general of the Association of State Workers (ATE), Daniel Catalano.

Closing his presentation, the former vice-president sent a message to Guzmán: “When the minister says it’s a flag, he has a budget surplus, no, it’s not a flag, it’s a tool.”

Boudou took the opportunity to reiterate a sentence that bothers President Fernández. “In Argentina, there are political prisoners and political persecutions. A democracy in which the interim vice-president (Cristina Kirchner) is the main political victim, has no destiny. ”

Alicia Castro: “It was bad for us in 2020”

In the zoom, multiple criticisms were heard against the Fernández government and even on actions to try to contain the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

It was Castro who said: “There is a problem because the government says we did well, and we did not do well, we did badly in 2020.”

The former ambassador to Venezuela and the UK noted that in Argentina there were 55,000 deaths from Covid-19 and compared the situation to other countries.

“China, which has 1,400 million inhabitants and 5,000 dead; Cuba has 300 dead; Vietnam, with 100 million inhabitants, has a hundred and more dead; Venezuela has few deaths, which will never be said because Venezuela is there to always speak badly, and a paradigmatic case is New Zealand, which has 26 deaths, ”he considered.

Then he raised questions about the new measures to deal with the second wave of the pandemic. “The government is now insisting with the same policy as last year, which is to flatten the curve instead of lengthening it. So they are offering us beds and respirators. We don’t want beds and ventilators, we do. want prevention, the borders are closed. “, he said.

The Frente de Todos intern and a request to amend the Constitution

Castro took the opportunity to describe what is the big intern of the government coalition Frente de Todos. In this regard, he considered that it was “a successful electoral alliance but that it is not constituted as a governmental alliance through the mediations and representations of Kirchnerism”.

“I mean Kirchnerism contributed at least 40% of the votes but something more important, values, history, what we could show. We weren’t going to show that (Sergio) Massa, for example, supported Juan Guaidó, who was one of those who persecuted Cristina into jail.. There are many differences within the Frente de Todos, ”he said.

For this reason, Castro called for “strengthening ideals in action” because, he noted, “the government is in a extremism center and the extremism of the center is not going to lead us to defeat the right. “

“As you know, and if we look at the history of our continent, every time a center-left government tries to take modalities from the right to get an electorate from the right, it fails,” he said. he warned.

Finally, proposed to go ahead with constitutional reform: “I think that should be one of our horizons because we don’t have the tools to change the state of things.”