Argentinian Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner presented Saturday her book "Sincerely" for the first time outside her country, in Havana as part of the XXIX International Book Fair held in Cuba.
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With the presence of the island’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel, the event revolved around the presentation of her best-selling memoir, which the former president said is a compilation of everything before and after and those events in between her late husband’s and her presidency.
Fernandez also spoke about the current administration under President Alberto Fernandez and the four years ahead of them. “We will keep our promises to the Argentinian people without a doubt,” she mentioned.
The VP went on to focus mainly on the most pressing matter currently affecting the South American nation: its large contracted foreign debt.
“Never, in the entire history with Fund after the military coup in 55, was the sum of this magnitude due to the IMF. And let's also say that the Fund had never lent a similar amount to any country,” Fernandez said, referring to the US$56.3 billion loan with the fund to be paid in a three-year period, the biggest disbursement in the institution’s history.
As part of the conditionalities imposed by the agency, former President Mauricio Macri’s administration implemented a strong neoliberal program with harsh austerity measures that pushed the nation into a recession.
“The first thing we have to do to pay off the debt is to get out of the recession," Fernandez suggested, adding that when her administration was over they “left the country with US$0 debt to the IMF, we had become independent from that conditioning of development models.”
For this very reason, Vice President Fernandez proposed that a "never again" policy be implemented on foreign debt in Argentina.
Argentina's Congress approved on Feb. 5 a law that enables the government to take the necessary formal steps to restructure the massive sovereign debt of the country issued under foreign legislation.
The approval took place in parallel with the end of the tour undertaken last week by President Fernandez through Europe in search of support for the negotiations that Argentina also intends to open with the IMF.