The Wall Street Journal’s Coup Mentality

Anyone reading The Wall Street Journal correspondent’s depiction of Buenos Aires would have the distinct impression that she was describing the Argentine capital during the 2001-2002 depression:

“I noted a sense of foreboding hanging over the city. With the economy in a stall, consumer prices rising and capital fleeing the country, the porteños* from every walk of life seemed to bracing for a storm — and resigned to the hardship it would bring to this harbor city.”

The impressionable North American correspondent goes on:

“The city infrastructure looked defeated, too. The wide boulevards and grand 19th-century buildings are now tired and grungy, and the streets smelly. Angry graffiti and tattered posters deface walls, adding to the general feeling of lawless decay.”

Subsequently she arrives at a surprising diagnosis of this dramatic state of affairs:

“It takes a long time to destroy a nation’s wealth, but [here comes the surprise] a decade of kirchnerismo — government by Néstor Kirchner and now his widow, Cristina — seems to be doing the job.”

This is the confusing part. The alarming depiction of the situation in Buenos Aires is not referring to the calamities the country suffered after the collapse of former president Carlos Menem’s neoliberal economic model, which pegged the Argentine peso one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and was praised to the skies by both the IMF and The Wall Street Journal itself. At that time, the massive expropriation of the Argentine population by the banking system took the country to the lowest point in its history; Eric Hobsbawm makes the comparison with Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Hitherto, unimaginable scenes were witnessed in Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. A country that had previously enjoyed periods of full employment was subjected to the highest joblessness levels it had ever seen, and Buenos Aires experienced the worst moments of its history, as wide swaths of the middle classes descended into poverty, and homelessness became widespread. It was a scenario indescribably worse than that described by The Wall Street Journal correspondent.

Néstor Kirchner, followed by Cristina, set out from the worst recession ever experienced by the Argentine economy and successfully steered the country to social and economic recovery and a high level of development. They achieved this despite the woeful legacy of poverty, social exclusion, de-industralization, and privatization of state-owned companies, which began with the petroleum company YPF.

Ten years of systematic recovery of the economy have brought about the greatest economic growth in Latin America and radically reduced unemployment, allowing the Kirchners to win three consecutive presidential elections. In spite of this, the correspondent writes of the Kirchners’ destruction of the nation’s wealth. Clearly, the Buenos Aires of the “cartoneros” [trash pickers] escaped her notice. The “cartonero” phenomenon followed the collapse of the suicidal neoliberal policies so lavishly praised by The Wall Street Journal, with marginalized people, the middle class included, streaming into the capital to salvage anything they could find to sell, recycle or use.

The tendency in the columns of press organs like these is to turn everything on its head. The Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rúa governments, which destroyed the nation’s wealth, are depicted as those that created and increased it. The Kirchner governments, which have brought the nation back from the brink, are depicted as those that destroyed that wealth.

At the end of her article, the correspondent predicts a “social explosion,” which is, in fact, what took place at the end of the Menem and de la Rúa governments. She would have hit the nail squarely on the head had she written her article at that time, when extraordinary popular mobilizations were protesting the bankruptcy of the Argentine economy — the product of policies guided by the IMF and The Wall Street Journal.

*Translator’s note: Inhabitants of Buenos Aires.