The former Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, referred to the new agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) And he strongly criticized Javier Milei’s strategy to avoid Congress through a Decree of necessity and urgency (DNU). In addition, he questioned the legitimacy of the loan and warned about the risks of repeating the 2018 stage.
According to Guzmán, the government seeks a new indebtedness with the IMF without going through Congress, as required by law. “Argentina has already burned many times with indebtedness with the IMF that ends up favoring speculators and leaving the consequences for the Argentine people,” he warned.
“What the government does with the DNU is to avoid Congress. They take out a decree because they do not want Luis Caputo, He admitted that they do not have the necessary votes for legislative approval. “The government is not encouraged to give the discussion because they are deceiving people,” he said.
For Guzmán, the supposed “urgency” of the DNU has no justification from the point of view of the legislative procedure. “In 2022, Congress took less than the IMF board of approved the agreement,” he recalled. In addition, he explained that once an agreement with the IMF Staff is reached, this must be treated by the agency’s directory, composed of 190 countries, which usually takes approximately three weeks. “There is no DNU that can hurry or avoid this process,” he said.
Guzmán said that if the IMF disburses funds without the approval of the Argentine Congress, he would be violating his own exceptional access criteria number 4, which establishes the need for broad political support for the approval of extraordinary loans. “If the IMF lends Argentina under these conditions, it will be an illegitimate agreement,” he warned.
One of the most forceful points of his criticism was addressed to Caputo, whom he accused of having caused the crisis of 2018. “How can anyone believe Caputo? How to trust someone who already timed US $ 45,000 million and left the Argentine people the debt? It is sung that they are going to the same thing,” Guzmán denounced.
“To say that this is not a new debt is hypocrites and chantas,” he added, and warned that, as in 2018, the funds will be used for leakage and financial speculation, leaving the weight of debt in the population.
The former Minister compared the agreement he signed in 2022 with the IMF with the current negotiation and stressed that his management did not contain new debt. “We never asked for a single dollar to the IMF. The agreement we made was to refinance Macri’s debt,” he explained.
He also stressed that in 2022 the imposition of structural reforms that usually accompany the loans of the IMF, such as cuts in retirement or labor reforms, was avoided. “None of that happened,” he said.
Guzmán criticized the current economic policy of the government, noting that it generates “stability without prosperity.” “If there was a path of prosperity, they would never have gone to the background,” he argued.
“Argentina is not in the direction of greater competitiveness. The country will continue to accentuate patterns of social and political instability,” He warned, and stressed that current measures have generated a “very large recession” that impacts science, education and infrastructure, key factors for the economic development of the country.
Finally, Guzmán referred to the scandal linked to investments in cryptocurrencies within the government and was blunt: “There are two possibilities: o The president is a scammer or is naive.”
With these statements, the former Minister of Economy made clear his critical position against the financial strategy of the Milei government and warned about the risks that the new negotiations with the IMF could bring.
Source: Ambito
