Argentine President Alberto Fernández irritates Latin America with a single sentence

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Pope Francis, a native of Buenos Aires, likes to joke about Argentines’ reputation for arrogance. In 2015, he told then-Ecuador President Rafael Correa that his countrymen were surprised he didn’t choose Jesus II as his pontifical name.

He told a Mexican journalist about Argentines’ favorite form of suicide: “They climb to the top of their ego and throw themselves off.” It’s a way of laughing at themselves. In the case of President Alberto Fernández, however, it’s something else: He seems intent on becoming the protagonist of a joke about Argentines. With an irritating effect for the rest of Latin America.

Fernández managed to cover the brief visit of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to Buenos Aires – the first by a European head of government since the beginning of the pandemic – with a line from a song by Litto Nebbia that he mistakenly attributed to Octavio Paz: “The Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came from the jungle, but we Argentines came by boat. They were boats that came from Europe”.

The original phrase by the Mexican Octavio Paz, often repeated by Jorge Luis Borges, was much more ironic: “The Mexicans came from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, and the Argentines from the boats.”

The complaints are understandable, as are the jokes that spread throughout Latin America about the phrase of the Argentine president, who immediately apologized to anyone who might have felt offended. In Argentina, that’s all anyone talks about. It is safe to assume that the little phrase will haunt the country’s diplomacy for many years to come.

Nor is this the first time Alberto Fernández has behaved like a joking Argentine. On December 14, he uttered another unforgettable phrase to a group of local academics: “We are, in a way, the envy of the world.”

The underlying irony is that Argentina, under Alberto Fernández, has little to be envious of. It is already one of the countries with the most deaths from Covid-19 – at 83,000 – and its hospitals are on the verge of saturation, but it still refuses to receive U.S. vaccines (Moderna, Janssen and especially Pfizer), which will prevent access to its share of the 500 million doses that the government in Washington will donate.

It also will not be able to get its full share of the 20 million doses Spain will donate next year unless they all come from AstraZeneca. Ruling lawmakers decided to keep in the vaccination law the paragraph that allows them to sue pharmaceutical companies in case of “negligence,” an obstacle to the purchase of doses from the United States because, according to Peronist lawmaker Cecilia Moreau, these vaccines “are not necessary.”

Management of the economy is highly questionable, given skyrocketing inflation (prices have risen 17.6 percent since January) and negotiations with the IMF that are stalled at least until the October general election. According to the Catholic organization Caritas, the country is in an “unprecedented health, social and economic crisis.” Seventy-five percent of minors in Greater Buenos Aires live in poverty. Caritas claims that for every four children in Greater Buenos Aires, only one eats daily.

In this context, the Fernández government was forced to change the law on monotributos (simplified taxes), which, because it applied retroactively, left those who had paid on time as debtors. Months of debate in Congress came to nothing and it is time to start over. Discontent over the monotributo fiasco coincides with the 40 percent pay raise that both houses of Congress gave themselves after a year of reduced work because of the pandemic.

Source: El Pais