By Luz y Fuerza de Mar del Plata Trade Union
The national government, through the Minister of Finance, Nicolás Dujovne, and the President of the Central Bank, Federico Sturzenegger, announced yesterday the agreement reached with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The international credit agency will grant for a term of 3 years, up to 50 billion dollars in different installments.
The authorities, with the usual euphemisms, stressed that “the money will be used to support the government’s economic priorities, which include strengthening Argentina’s economy and protecting the standard of living of the Argentine people.”
However, despite the optimistic announcements, the Argentine society knows that going back to the IMF is going back to living something we already know, something we, all the Argentine people, the working class, the grassroots sectors, commercial sectors as well as small and medium industries in the country, suffered in the flesh.
To sign with the IMF means to sign a mechanism to deepen austerity policies against those who have less and in favor of those who monopolize wealth.
To resort to the IMF is to look at ourselves in the mirror of Greece, of Jordan, or of so many countries that have been beaten by neoliberal policies, taking away workers’ rights, dismantling social organizations and implementing initiatives of absolute precarization of labor.
The IMF is synonymous with exploitation, unemployment, greater poverty, subordination to the policies of the United States and the World Bank. “Reducing the deficit” as the IMF claims, will mean an even greater adjustment than we have been suffering in recent years. It means greater recession and inflation, less social investment in infrastructure and public works; it means less generation of employment, increasing rate hikes and the loss of purchasing power for the salaried workers.
Going back to the IMF is also the confirmation that there will be no industrial development in the country and it is as well the validation of an energy model that will continue to focus on extractivism on the one hand, with fracking and the serious consequences this means in terms of pollution, and on the benefits for multinational companies like Chevron, on the other.
The CTA Autónoma sustains that it is necessary to generate genuine work and get out of the process of reprimarization of the economy as a means of insertion in the world which being done by paying low salaries and running over acquired rights. The country’s financial business model and indebtedness with the IMF is a model of greater dependence, of which the big financial speculators will be the only beneficiaries and it will be the Argentine people, for several generations, who will have to pay the social and economic consequences.
To read the full statement in Spanish, click here.
