Category Archives: Argentina

What Macri’s win in Argentina means for Latin America

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Though I’m in Rome (and Malta and Napoli for the week), I write for The National Interest tomorrow about the implications of outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri’s victory in Argentina’s presidential election.argentina

The piece argues that former Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri’s victory (and the first defeat of kirchnerismo since its arrival in Argentine politics in 2003) is a game-changer for Latin American politics for three reasons — by restoring fiscal and monetary sanity to Argentina, paving the way for a wave of pent-up investment; by ending Argentina’s standoff with its creditors and bringing the country back into global debt markets; and by isolating the anti-democratic populist left, including Venezuela, where questionable and unfair legislative elections will take place Dec. 6.

Read it all here.

Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms

Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.
Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, now governor-elect of Buenos Aires province, celebrate on the night of the August primaries.

When Daniel Scioli emerged on Sunday night to declare victory in the first round of Argentina’s presidential election, it was clear that he did not expect to win the presidency outright and that he would face a runoff — even though no official election results were yet announced.argentina

When the first results finally came at around 11 p.m., they showed a far closer race than anyone predicted. At one point, Scioli’s rival, outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, was actually leading Scioli. Ultimately, Scioli narrowly won the presidential election’s first round, but Macri’s support was so unexpectedly strong that he now enters the presidential runoff campaign as the odds-on favorite to end 12 consecutive years of kirchnersimo.

At stake in the presidential showdown is the legacy of one of the most important bastions of Latin America’s populist, statist left.

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Macri, the candidate of the center-right Cambiemos (Spanish for ‘Let’s change’) coalition, has gradually expanded a political movement that was once limited to just the most affluent corners of Argentina’s capital. The son of an Italian immigrant, Macri joined his father’s business in the automobile sector before becoming the president of the popular Boca Juniors football club. He first entered politics in 2003, waging a failed run to become mayor of Buenos Aires. He lost that race, but he used the experience to form a new urban, liberal political party, Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal) in 2005 and, two years later, he won the mayoral election.

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RELATED: Kirchner 2019 comeback could
complicate Scioli presidential bid

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As the standard-bearer of the Cambiemos coalition, he merged his own Buenos Aires-based movement with the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civil Union), a long-lived liberal party that has stood as a contrast for decades to the dominant left-wing populist peronismo. Most voters believe that Macri is the candidate most likely to lift capital controls and bring Argentina back into global debt markets, even if it means a peso devaluation and strong measures to tamp down inflation. Nevertheless, with economic neoliberalism still widely discredited after the economic crisis of 1999-2001, Macri has taken efforts to reassure that he will not subject the Argentine economy to immediate radical change, and he’s even gone out of his way to praise the values of peronismo.

Despite doubts, the Macri campaign’s plan seems to be working. He swept the city of Buenos Aires, along with the provinces of Mendoza, Córdoba, Santa Fe and Entre Rios in Sunday’s vote.

Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)
Scioli leads departments shown in blue; Macri in orange; and Massa in violet. (Clarin)

His success in Sunday’s general election took Argentines somewhat by surprise. When election day began, it was conceivable that Scioli, a former vice president and currently the governor of Buenos Aires province, might have scored a first-round victory in the presidential race. He boasted the support of outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the governing Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), an electoral coalition anchored by Argentina’s peronista ‘Justicialist’ Party. A former motorboat racing star, Scioli took a lead in polls early in 2015, and he’s consistently held an advantage to become Argentina’s next president. Despite rampant inflation, health scares, political intrigue and a slowing economy, Kirchner’s approval ratings have generally improved over the course of the last year — so much so that everyone expects her to try to return to the Casa Rosada in the 2019 election. Most recently, in Argentina’s compulsory open presidential primaries on August 9, Scioli won 38.4% of the vote versus just 30.1% for Cambiemos.

What a difference two months can make. Continue reading Macri, Argentine opposition flex muscle as November runoff looms

Tactical voting considerations cloud outcome of Argentine presidential election

Sergio Massa (center) confers with former finance minister Roberto Lavagna and Córdoba governor José Manuel de la Sota. (Facebook)
Sergio Massa (center) confers with former finance minister Roberto Lavagna and Córdoba governor José Manuel de la Sota. (Facebook)

A surprisingly tighter race than expected for Argentina’s presidency is making it more likely that frontrunner Daniel Scioli will win outright in the first round on Sunday, October 25.argentina

Back in August, Scioli, the outgoing governor of Buenos Aires province and the presidential nominee of outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the governing  Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), demonstrated his strength by winning around 38.5% of the vote in Argentina’s somewhat unique ‘open primary’ contest.

His nearest contender was Mauricio Macri, the more conservative and economically liberal outgoing mayor of Buenos Aires, who is leading a broad center-right coalition called Cambiemos (which loosely translates as “Let’s change”), which won about 30% of the vote (including the other challengers who competed with Macri for the coalition’s presidential nomination).

Far back in third place was Sergio Massa, one of Kircher’s first cabinet chiefs, now the mayor of Tigre and the leader of an alternative peronista group, the Frente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front), which won just 20.5% of the vote.

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RELATED: Kirchner 2019 comeback could
complicate Scioli presidential bid

RELATED: Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

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A one-time frontrunner after leading his new group to the top result in Buenos Aires province during the 2013 midterm elections, Massa’s appeal seems to have stalled through 2014 and earlier in 2015. His electoral alliance choices turned out to be weaker than expected, and he lacks the voter base that both Scioli (as leader of Argentina’s most populous province) and Macri (as leader of Argentina’s capital city) can boast. Moreover, as Kirchner’s approval ratings improved over the course of 2015, so did Scioli’s standing, as he won back disaffected peronistas who might otherwise be tempted to join Massa’s alternative group.

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Since August, Scioli continues to lead the pack, while the movement in the race has come in the battle for second place — most polls are now showing that Macri is losing votes and that Massa is gaining. There are many potential reasons.

Explaining the Massa popularity surge

It could be that Argentines feel that Macri is still too close, ideologically speaking, to the economic neoliberalism of the 1990s that many voters feel was responsible for destroying the economy in 1999-2001.

It could be that Macri has been tarred by association with Fernando Niembro, a businessman who had been one of the coalition’s leading congressional candidates from Buenos Aires until suspending his campaign in September following an indictment on money laundering charges. That connection has made it hard to argue that Macri will make doing business in Argentina more efficient, transparent or graft-free.

It could be that Macri has done so much to signal that he will not introduce radical change that voters are doubting his authenticity, ability or resolve. He’s already pledged not to re-privatize the Argentine state oil company, YPF, or the airline company Aerolíneas Argentinas. If there’s one thing that Macri is not, it’s a peronista. But he has spent much of the post-primary period embracing peronismo. Earlier this month, Macri even unveiled a new statue of Juan Perón in the capital, awkwardly arguing that he shared the values of peronismo:

“I am not a Peronist but I have social justice in my heart,” Macri said as he unveiled the statue of Peron last week. “I want to invite all Peronists to work with us to create the Argentina we all dream about.”

But Massa’s improvements could also come from a belief that Massa represents a better chance for gradual ‘change,’ with a better shot of defeating Scioli if the race continues to a runoff on November 22. There are still real doubts about Scioli’s ability to run an independent administration with so many Kirchner loyalists in key positions, including the vice presidency. Continue reading Tactical voting considerations cloud outcome of Argentine presidential election

Kirchner 2019 comeback could complicate Scioli presidential bid

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There’s no constitutional impediment to stop Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from waging a 2019 presidential bid. (Facebook)

Despite Daniel Scioli’s seemingly easy rise over the course of 2015 to become the frontrunner for the Argentine presidency after the October 25 general election, the most persistent criticism he faces is that he will not be his own man in office, but instead a puppet — or even a placeholder — of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Term limits are forcing Kirchner to step down, after eight years in office that followed four previous years when her late husband, Néstor Kirchner occupied the Casa Rosada. This year’s election will be the first since 1999 when a Kirchner hasn’t been on the ballot, and there’s already plenty of speculation that Scioli is just a transitional figure designed to bridge two eras of kirchnerismo.

There’s probably something to those rumors. Kirchner herself succeeded her own husband, in what was widely discussed as a plan to pass the presidency between the two (a plan that went sideways when Néstor died in 2010). If her party had won a two-thirds majority in the 2013 midterm elections, it was entirely plausible that they might have amended Argentina’s constitution to provide her a path to a third consecutive term.

There’s nothing necessarily nefarious about Kirchner’s plans, if true, to return to the presidency in 2019. In Latin America, where executive-strong governments are often checked by strict term limits (in many cases, presidents are limited to a single consecutive term), it’s not unusual for popular former presidents to return to office. That’s currently true for two of Argentina’s neighbors — Uruguay reelected left-wing Tabaré Vázquez to the presidency last December after a four-year stint out of office; Chile did the same, where the center-left Michelle Bachelet returned to office, after an equal four-year break, in December 2013.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the sinking popularity of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, a widespread corruption scandal and a tough economy, the widely-loved Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is openly considering a run in the 2018 election after eight years out of office.

Even in the United States, it’s still a good bet to assume that the wife of a former president will face off for the presidency in 2016 against the son and brother of two other former presidents.

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RELATED: Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

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But for Scioli, the Kirchner legacy is much more complicated, and the specter of a Kirchner restoration could drain much of his credibility as an Argentine president — especially among a business class that hopes he will (however gently) reverse course on nationalization, capital controls and Argentina’s freeze in global debt markets, pushing Argentina to a more orthodox economy.  Continue reading Kirchner 2019 comeback could complicate Scioli presidential bid

The big winner from FOMC’s decision on interest rates? Daniel Scioli

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Beleaguered emerging markets across the globe breathed a sigh of relief Thursday afternoon when the chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, explained that the Federal Open Markets Committee would not (yet) be raising the federal funds rate, expressly due, in part, to weak economic conditions in emerging economies where tighter US monetary policy could exacerbate macroeconomic conditions.USflagargentina

When it comes to world politics, the FOMC’s decision could give the strongest boost to the ruling party’s presidential candidate in Argentina, who currently leads polls ahead of the October 25 general election.

Many economists argue that seven years of interest rates at the zero lower bound have created a bubble in emerging economy assets. Investors looked to developing economies with potentially higher rates of return outside the developed world while the Federal Reserve was flooding the global economy with liquidity, not just by lowering interest rates to zero, but through several rounds of quantitative easing.

It’s already been a tough couple of years as investors have pulled back from developing economies, beginning with the Fed’s decision to begin tapering off from the peak of its QE bond-buying program. But the slowing Chinese economy and depressed prices for oil and other commodities (not, perhaps, entirely unrelated) have made life particularly difficult for emerging economies.

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RELATED: Scioli leads in Argentine race after primaries 

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By keeping interest rates at zero, the Federal Reserve will lessen pressure on those economies. Continue reading The big winner from FOMC’s decision on interest rates? Daniel Scioli

Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

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There’s some bit of good news for each of the three contenders battling to win the Argentine presidency on October 25 after Sunday’s primary contest.argentina

Since 2011, Argentine elections have features an all-in primary contest in which every candidate competes both in absolute terms against all the other candidates and both for his or her party (or coalition) nomination. No one doubted that each of the three major contenders would win his inter-coalition primary:

  • Daniel Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires province, ran unchallenged for the nomination of the governing ‘Justicialist’ Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the bloc won nearly 38.5% of the vote.
  • Mauricio Macri, the more center-right chief of government of the city of Buenos Aires, easily won the nomination of the three-party Cambiemos coalition, with over 24% of the vote nationally.
  • Sergio Massa, the one-time frontrunner, former Kirchner cabinet chief, Tigre mayor and leader of the peronista, if not kirchneristaFrente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front), easily won the nomination of his own coalition, with over 14% of the vote.

Argentina primary

Those results, though, overstate Scioli’s strength. While the Kirchner-backed candidate has plenty of reason to be thrilled with the primary vote, Macri was facing two opponents for the Cambiemos nomination and Massa faced an own opponent for his own coalition, ‘United for a New Alternative.’

When you add together the votes for the coalitions, Macri can expect to enter the final campaign sprint with something more like 30% to Scioli’s 38% — with Massa’s coalition winning around 20.5%.

argentina primary bloc

There’s no doubt that Scioli’s success demonstrates a perhaps surprisingly united Argentine left, with reform-minded voters pulling away from Massa and towards Scioli (pictured above). Despite a scandal-plagued year, Fernández de Kirchner’s approval ratings are on the rise and, although inflation and other economic woes still plague Argentina, the economy is generally doing much better than neighboring Brazil or Chile and, in any case, better than in 2013 and 2014. Unlike his opponents, Scioli benefits from a truly national political network, which was clear on Sunday — the FpV won more votes in all but three provinces. As the governor of the country’s most populous province, he currently serves 16.3 million of Argentina’s 41.5 million-strong population. Moreover, Fernández de Kirchner and the current government will be doing everything in its power to bolster Scioli’s chances in the next two months.

Though she cannot herself run for reelection, Fernández de Kirchner’s close ally Aníbal Fernández (currently chief of cabinet) narrowly defeated Julián Domínguez in the hard-fought primary to win the FpV gubernatorial nomination for Buenos Aires province (and to success Scioli). Furthermore, Fernández de Kirchner is believed to have influenced Scioli to appoint as his running mate Carlos Zannini, a Kirchner loyalist and the presidential legal secretary since 2003. The fortunes of Zannini and Fernández mean that Fernández de Kirchner will wield strong influence in any Scioli administration.

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RELATED: What to expect from
Sunday’s Argentine presidential primaries

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Nevertheless, Scioli’s allies worry that he will be forced into a November 22 runoff against Macri. Scioli’s 38.41% support is a bit short of the 45% he will need on October 25 to win the presidency outright (alternatively, he could win with 40% of the vote so long as he defeats his opponent by at least a 10% margin). The primary results suggest that, barring a massive turn among Massa’s supporters to the ruling party, Macri will get a chance to take on Scioli directly.

Since 1983, the end of a brutal seven-year military junta, no presidential election has advanced to a runoff.

Continue reading Scioli leads in Argentine presidential race after primaries

What to expect from Sunday’s Argentine presidential primaries

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On August 9, Argentine voters will take part in a compulsory open primary — the dress rehearsal for the general election set for late October.argentina

It’s the first presidential election since 1999 where a Kirchner won’t actually be on the ballot. Nevertheless, kirchnerismo is very much on the ballot, and its standard bearer, Daniel Scioli, the candidate of the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), served as the late president Néstor Kirchner’s vice president between 2003 and 2007.

The country’s pre-game primary, however, is a relatively new feature to Argentine democracy. The outgoing incumbent, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, introduced open primaries in time for the 2011 elections — mandatory for both parties and voters alike. Candidates must win at least 1.5% support in the primary to advance to the general election. In a country where polling is still more art than science, and where political parties and coalitions are still more personality-oriented than long-term ideological vehicles, the primary is the most reliable test of electoral support before the October 25 election.

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RELATED: Everything you need to know
about Argentina’s impending default

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If polls remain as tight as they are today, and no candidate wins (i) either 45% of the vote outright or (ii) at least 40% of the vote (and leads the nearest candidate by more than 10%), the country will choose between the top two finishers in a November 22 runoff.

So this Sunday’s primary could be the first of three showdowns for the Casa Rosada. Continue reading What to expect from Sunday’s Argentine presidential primaries

Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes

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In one of the most important tests before Argentina’s general election, the hand-picked successor of outgoing Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, the chief center-right presidential candidate, only narrowly won a July 19 mayoral runoff.buenosairesargentina

Just three weeks out from Argentina’s crucial national presidential primary, the Buenos Aires mayoral results are being reported as a drag on Macri’s presidential campaign, and that’s true — to a degree. Macri’s long-serving chief of cabinet, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (pictured above, left, with Macri, right), garnered just 51.6% of the vote in a two-way race he was once expected to win easily by a double-digit margin. So while Rodríguez Larreta’s victory extends a three-term governing streak for Macri’s conservative Propuesta Republicana (PRO, Republican Proposal), it fell too far short of expectations. After all, Buenos Aires is the PRO’s heartland — Macri’s reach barely extends beyond the city to the larger Buenos Aires province, let alone the rest of the country.

With an open presidential primary taking place on August 9, however, and the October 25 presidential and parliamentary elections following shortly thereafter, the city’s mayoral election was a key test for Macri, who is trying to succeed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, herself term-limited from seeking reelection.

Macri essentially occupies the conservative side of the presidential campaign — he hopes to win by picking up support from Argentine moderates and disenchanted kirchneristas without seeming too neoliberal. The winner of the 2015 election will be the first president in 12 years not to be a member of the Kirchner family, and Argentine voters may be ready for a modest change after the 21st century version of peronismo, as personified by the late Néstor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who hopes to guide the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) to yet another term.

Macri, for his part, wants to contrast the strength of his eight-year stewardship of the relatively wealthier city against the record of the FpV’s 2015 presidential candidate, Daniel Scioli, since 2007 the governor of the surrounding (and more impoverished) Buenos Aires province, and of Tigre mayor Sergio Massa, another center-left peronista who broke in 2013 with kirchnerismo to form the Frente Renovador (FR, Renewal Front).

It’s no surprise, by the way, that three politicians from the Buenos Aires region are vying for the presidency — the city, an autonomous federal district, together with the Buenos Aires province, is home to nearly 50% of Argentina’s 41.5 million citizens.

Argentina’s Goldilocks election

All three candidates — Scioli, Massa and Macri — have indicated they would pursue a more investment-friendly administration, and Macri, in particular, benefits from heading the most business-friendly government during the Kirchner era.

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RELATED: Everything you need to know about
Argentina’s impending default

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Macri nevertheless emphasizes that he’ll introduce only gradual shifts in policy, lest voters worry he’ll return to the economic policies of the disastrous 1990s.

Presumably to win Fernández de Kirchner’s support, Scioli last month named as his running mate Carlos Zannini, a fierce Kirchner loyalist who has served as the president’s legal secretary since 2003. But Scioli has emphasized that he wants to remove, however slowly, the capital controls of the Kirchner era, and to govern in a less interventionist and inflammatory manner.

Massa has positioned himself in between Scioli and Macri and, though his poll numbers seem to have dipped, seemed like the wide frontrunner following his breakout performance throughout Buenos Aires province in the October 2013 midterm elections.

Why the Buenos Aires mayoral race probably
won’t be important to the October election

While there are a lot of reasons why Macri could still lose the presidential race, it’s not particularly clear that either Scioli and the governing FpV or the upstart Massa should take too much comfort from the Buenos Aires mayoral election.

Continue reading Tight Buenos Aires victory slightly complicates Macri’s presidential hopes

15 in 2015: Fifteen world elections to watch in 2015

2015Photo credit to letyg84 / 123RF.

Over the past 12 months, the world witnessed a pivotal general election in India, presidential elections in Indonesia, congressional midterm elections in the United States, European parliamentary elections and elections (of varying competitiveness) in over a dozen of additional countries in the world, all pivotal in their own ways — Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, South Africa, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Serbia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Belgium, Sweden and independence referenda in Scotland and Catalunya.

After such a crowded 2014 calendar, it’s not surprising that 2015 will not bring the same volume of electoral activity. But there’s still plenty at stake, especially as volatile oil prices, Chinese economic slowdown and the return of recession in Europe and Japan could stifle global economic potential. The most important of those elections that will determine policy that affects the lives of billions of people worldwide.

Without further ado, here is Suffragio‘s guide to the top 15 elections to watch as 2015 unfolds — beginning in Greece, where the government fell earlier this week.  Continue reading 15 in 2015: Fifteen world elections to watch in 2015

Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default

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It ultimately took an American hedge fund to unite the Argentine people behind the increasingly unpopular presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Now, after a prolonged fight that has its roots in Argentina’s last debt default over a decade ago, a fight that has weaved its way through the corridors of power in Buenos Aires, via the banks of New York and London, into the highest court of the United States, and with consequences that will reverberate from Brasília to Caracas, Argentina is now defaulting, once again, on its debt obligations.

How did Argentina end up in this situation? And what will happen if Argentina, which technically entered default at midnight earlier today, doesn’t arrive at a deal with its creditors?

Here’s a primer on everything you need to know about the Argentine default — and why it’s such an odd, twisting and ultimately fascinating story about Latin American politics, global finance, US constitutional law and the ‘north-south’ dynamic of international relations. Continue reading Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default

ESSAY: How Gabriel García Márquez introduced me to Latin America

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Whenever I go to México City, I marvel at the way its indigenous history integrates into the fabric of the city. Nahuatl words, like ‘Chapultepec,’ meaning grasshopper, and ‘Xochimilco,’ a neighborhood featuring a series of Aztec-created canals, pepper the geography of the city. Those are just two of hundreds of daily reminders rooting Latin America’s largest modern megapolis of 8.9 million in the language and traditions of its pre-Columbian past. It’s where the Virgin of Guadalupe, a young Nahuatl-speaking girl, apparently revealed herself to Juan Diego in 1531 as the Virgin Mary, instructing him to build a church, launching one of the most compelling hybrid religious followings in the New World. Even the inhabitants of the notorious Tepito barrio worship Santa Muerte on the first of November with bright flowers, cacophanous marimba and not a small amount of marijuana, in celebration of the magical chasm between what is, for many Tepito residents, a gritty life and an often grittier death.

It’s the way that México City blends the mysterious and the mundane, matches the sacred with the profane and so blends the line between the indigenous and conquistador that it’s hard to know who conquered what. For all of those reasons, I often think of it as the unofficial capital of realismo magico.

So it’s natural to me that the literary master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez, made his home in México City for much of the last six decades of his life. It’s also where García Márquez died on April 17 at age 87.

It was his uncanny ability to blend the realistic with the magical that largely won him such adoration worldwide. But what makes the writing of García Márquez and the other authors of the 1960s Latin American Boom so electrifying to me is the way that it blended the literary with the political. Certainly, García Márquez’s writing was about family, about love, about solitude, about power, about loss, about fragility, about all of these universal themes. But his writing also explicated many of the themes that we today associate with Latin America’s culture, identity, history and politics.

His death wasn’t entirely unexpected. García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer all the way back in 1999 and by the beginning of the 2010s, he rarely made public appearances anymore due to the grim advance of Alzheimer’s disease. By the time I made it to Latin America for the first time, he was already approaching 80, and I knew I’d have little chance of meeting him.

That’s fine by me, because I always considered him, through his work, my own personal ambassador to Latin America. Over the course of several treks through Latin America, Gabo still accompanied me through his writing — and along the way, he shaped my own framework for how I think about Latin American life.

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(8) Going up the Argentine Andes 2

When I was planning my first trip to Latin America, I brought with me a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I saved the novel for this very occasion, a trek from Buenos Aires to Mendoza and then by bus over the Andes to Santiago. Technically speaking, I was on the wrong end of the continent for García Márquez. I packed some Neruda, some Allende and some Borges — and some Cortázar, too (mea culpa, I still haven’t clawed enough time to read Hopscotch).

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Nevertheless, García Márquez’s words transcended the setting of his native Colombia. Hundred Years, published in 1967, just six years after the Cuban revolution that undeniably marked a turning point in its relationship with the behemoth world power to the north, it came at a time when Latin American identity seemed limitless, and García Márquez mined a new consciousness that wasn’t necessarily Colombian or even South American. So much of the story of Colombia’s development from the colonial era through the present day is also cognizably Bolivian, Chilean, Mexican or Argentinian. After all, García Márquez, already a well-known figure, went on a writing strike when Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile in 1973, ousting the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende, who either committed suicide or was shot on September 11, the day of the coup.

It was an intoxicating read. The sleek brown corduroy blazer I picked up in Buenos Aires with the affected hint of epaulets on the shoulders soon became what I called my ‘Colonel Aureliano’ jacket. Besides, where better to buy a Spanish language copy of his work than El Ateneo, perhaps the most amazing bookstore in the world?

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Hundred Years, of course, came highly recommended from the world that had discovered García Márquez decades before I was even born. It became an instant hit upon publication, catapulting García Márquez’s popularity beyond his more established peers, including México’s Carlos Fuentes and Perú’s Mario Vargas Llosa.

Bill Clinton, in his autobiography My Life, confesses to zoning out of class one day in law school to finish it:  Continue reading ESSAY: How Gabriel García Márquez introduced me to Latin America

More thoughts on Venezuela and Argentina

I discussed the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina today on SiriusXM’s Cristina channel on ‘From Washington Al Mundo’ with Mauricio Claver-Caroné.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

It was an absolute pleasure — and Suffragio readers should check out the entire program on SiriusXM.  But in the meanwhile, here’s the audio from my segment.

The segment picks up from my piece last week in The National Interest, which tracks the similarities between the economic crises in both countries, but also the other similarities in their politics, their history, and the way that past governments handled neoliberal economic reform in the past.  So there are a lot of common threads that go beyond basic macroeconomic coincidences to the cultural, political and historical.

I also noted today that it seems like Argentina is a half-step or so behind Venezuela in terms of its economic crisis.  It’s only just now starting to feel the real crunch of a dollar shortage.  The headline this week is about a ketchup shortage, and that’s the kind of headline that featured in Venezuela last year — shortages of everything from toilet paper to holy water.

Anyway, please do check out the audio if you’re interested — I’ve only started to do television and radio interviews, so I’m learning as I go.

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.

Despite lame-duck challenges, CPK and kirchneristas win Argentine midterms

(163) Plaza del Congreso

The big story from the Argentine midterm elections is the rise of Sergio Massa as the frontrunner for the 2015 presidential election and the likelihood that the era of kirchnerismo is coming to an end.  The fact that Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has been absent from the campaign trail following emergency brain surgery earlier this month, which followed her party’s weak showing in August’s open primaries, only seemed to amplify the narrative that her presidency is entering its lame-duck phase.argentina

But amid the hype over Massa’s rise and the curtail calls for kirchnerismo, it may have escaped attention that Fernández de Kirchner’s ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) actually won Sunday’s midterm congressional elections.

Voters elected one-half of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Argentine National Congress.  Before the elections, Fernández de Kirchner and her allies control 132 seats — and that’s exactly the number they will control after the elections:

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It helped that the Front for Victory was defending just 38 seats in the midterms, which certainly limited exposure and potentially greater losses for the kirchneristas.  But make no mistake — Fernández de Kirchner and her allies will continue to control Argentina’s legislative branch for the final two years of her presidency, even if it will become trickier to pass bills into law.

In absolute votes, the Front for Victory and its kirchnerista allies far outpaced any other broad coalition of parties at the national level, winning 11 of the country’s 23 provinces:

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Two other blocs each won about a quarter of the vote. Continue reading Despite lame-duck challenges, CPK and kirchneristas win Argentine midterms

Kirchner health problems complicate midterm elections campaign

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Even before her latest health scare, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was appearing increasingly like a lame-duck president.argentina

Prevented from running for reelection under the two-term limit in the Argentine constitution, Kirchner’s ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory) was already struggling in midterm elections that will determine nearly half of the Argentine legislature.

But Fernández de Kirchner was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove blood from the surface of her brain, which followed a previously undisclosed subdural hematoma suffered after the president fell in August.  She was instructed by doctors to rest for 30 days, all but guaranteeing that the leading figure in Argentine politics would be on the sidelines as the country votes.

That might actually be good for the FpV’s chances, given the unpopularity of kirchnerismo these days — a decade after her husband Néstor Kirchner first won election, Fernández de Kirchner leads a government that’s struggling to stop inflation, slow rising crime and turn around a weakening economy.  The Argentine government’s dysfunctional exchange rate policy has led to the emergence of a black market for US currency.  Moreover, Fernández de Kirchner is still battling some of the holdout creditors from Argentina’s 1999-2001 debt crisis even as Argentina remains shut out from capital global markets, which has left the Argentine treasury sometimes grasping for liquidity.

Meanwhile, her former ally Sergio Massa is leading the charge against her in the province of Buenos Aires, by far the largest province in Argentina (it’s home to 15.5 million of Argentina’s 41 million residents). Massa, also a center-left peronista, served as the chief of the cabinet of ministers from 2008 to 2009 before winning election as the mayor of Tigre.  But he’s broken with Fernández de Kirchner in the midterm elections, and he’s founded a rival entity, Frente Renovador (Renewal Front).  As Tigre mayor, he’s focused on crime prevention, and as he looks to the national stage, he’s also emphasized reducing crime and corruption.  As a peronista alternative to kirchnerismo, Massa has defined himself as a business-friendly, center-left candidate, who’s embraced the push for greater social and economic justice over the past decade, but who prefers a less unorthodox approach to economic policy.

Massa’s Renewal Front defeated the Front for Victory in August’s open primaries — a sort of dress rehearsal for the actual midterm elections — by a margin of 35.1% to 29.7%, a gap that could grow on Sunday as Massa’s popularity has grown.

Argentines will choose determine one-half of the composition of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) of the lower house of the Argentine National Congress and one-third of the composition of the 72-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.  Due to the staggered nature of elections, and the fact that the Argentine opposition did much better in the 2009 midterm elections than in the 2011 general election (when Fernández de Kirchner easily won reelection), the FpV will only be defending 38 of its 116 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.  So there’s still a wide chance that the kirchneristas will still control the legislative branch of government — in any event, the FpV will almost certainly remain the largest party in the Congress, and because of the regional nature of Argentina’s many opposition parties, the FpV will still probably win the largest number of votes in the October 27 midterms, notwithstanding its unpopularity.

But the once-high hopes that the FpV would consolidate its 2011 gains and win a two-thirds majority — enough to amend the Argentine constitution to allow Fernández de Kirchner to run for a third consecutive term — were long ago shattered. Continue reading Kirchner health problems complicate midterm elections campaign