Kirchner’s slight-of-hand

New Argentinian president Christina Kirchner tries her hand at distracting Argentinians and the world from her domestic problems by raising the specter of another war in the Fauklands (AFP link);

Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands, which remain in British hands after the 1982 war between the two countries, is “inalienable,” President Cristina Kirchner said Wednesday.

“The sovereign claim to the Malvinas Islands is inalienable,” she said in a speech marking the 26th anniversary of Argentina’s ill-fated invasion of the islands, located 480 kilometers (300 miles) off shore.

The April 2, 1982 invasion prompted then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to deploy naval forces to retake the Falklands, known as the Malvinas in Spanish.

The short, bloody conflict led to Argentina’s surrender on June 14, 1982 after the death of 649 Argentines and 255 Britons.

Kirchner’s problems actually began before her election when it was discovered that she was using hundreds of thousands of dollars from Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chavez in her campaign. A courier from Chavez was stopped at the airport in Buenas Aires with a suitcase stuffed with $800, 000 in what is now known throughout the region as “maleta-gate“.

Yesterday, her latest challenge conditionally ended when farmers ended their three-week strike (Miami Herald);

Thousands of farmers on Wednesday lifted a three-week strike that produced food shortages at markets throughout this 40 million-person country and represented the biggest challenge so far to President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The farmers didn’t achieve their main goal, killing an increase in export taxes on soybeans and sunflowers, but they said they would wait, for at most 30 days, for negotiations with the government to move forward. Speaking at a rally in the central Argentine city of Gualeguaychú, a spokesman for the country’s four main farm associations said farmers would go back to blocking roads and withholding their production if negotiations failed.

Such measures have stopped tons of meat, fruit and other food from reaching markets, especially in Buenos Aires. Farmers began lifting roadblocks throughout the country Wednesday morning.

Farmers have criticized what they said are crippling price freezes, export bans and tax hikes that the government implemented. The moves have targeted the country’s powerful farm sector, which produces about 60 percent of Argentina’s exports.

Mary Anatasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal wrote that the farmers rose up against Kirchner’s “facism”;

Argentina has been growing fast — better than 8% a year — since 2003. But this has largely been the result of the combination of a natural bounce after a collapse and a global boom in commodities. Meanwhile, simmering just beneath the surface of the recovery remains the fundamental contradiction that provoked the 2001 economic crisis. To wit, while a strong peso made Argentines prosperous in the 1990s, it was incompatible with the rigid, closed economy. The situation is the same today: Either the economy is opened, labor markets are made flexible and the business climate improves or the government clings to a weak peso policy as a way to compensate for an uncompetitive economic model and inflation comes back. Take your pick.

By choosing the latter, the Kirchners have won the support of that segment of the Argentine economy loyal to the principles of 20th-century fascist Juan Peron. These include labor militants, government bureaucrats, the Peronist political machine and the likes of Mr. D’elía, whose thugs act as Mrs. Kirchner’s informal enforcers. But by generating inflation and provoking shortages Kirchneromics is also fueling widespread discontent.

So taking a page from Hugo Chavez’ book, who has alternately told Venezuelans that he was targeted by the United States and Colombia for assasination, Kirchner decided to fan the flames of patriotism by flexing her military muscles, just as the military junta did twenty-six years ago. But, I’d remind Ms. Kirchner that the war against Britain ended up costing the junta their jobs eventually.

Another Chavez acolyte, Daniel Ortega, is trying the same tactic in poverty-stricken Nicaragua by making noise about some islands in the Caribbean with Colombia (Reuters link);

The two nations, separated by Panama and Costa Rica, lay claim to the isolated Caribbean Islands San Andres and Providencia off Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, as well as several keys and some 50,000 sq km of fishing waters.

Colombia told the court in June border disputes were inevitable after the fall of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the one in question was “definitively settled” in 1928, when Nicaragua and Colombia signed a treaty granting Colombia sovereignty over the islands.

But Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s annulled the accord and argued it was signed while Nicaragua was under U.S. military occupation.

Many Nicaraguans consider the treaty a U.S. payoff to Colombia for arranging the independence of Panama from Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal.

If the US unilaterally abrogated a treaty, you’d hear the screaming from one corner of the globe to the other, but communists and socialist are stroked by the world’s Left and the media as a whole.

Category: Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez