2023-07-22 05:55:30
The International Monetary Fund technicians acknowledge Argentina’s arguments with surprising kindness, but reject its claims with unsurprising harshness. This is how the negotiation with the IMF works: they run the arc when it seems that there is a consensus. More than a great technician you have to be a great negotiator. While that agreement does not finish coming together, the province of Jujuy bleeds to death in a conflict that hatched the management of Gerardo Morales, the governor who reformed the provincial Constitution under the shadow of vulture funds that control lithium mining companies. Both processes evolve in a scenario conditioned by imminent elections.
More than a great technician requires a skillful negotiator. It is a deduction that arises from the tortuous situation in which Mauricio Macri locked up the Argentines with the Fund. Sergio Massa will not be a better coach than Martín Guzmán, but his future as a presidential candidate depends to a large extent on this negotiation. You can’t go to the Washington bunker with just one card in hand, let alone assume they play on the same team.
The Fund requests adjustment. Massa will be fried if he returns with that imposition. Massa talks with China, which offers to cover the fees with yuan and speeds up the deal. There are meetings with Egypt, the other great debtor. It is already known that Ukraine, at war, will not pay. If Argentina and Egypt follow that path, the Fund would end up in a false squad. Massa rejects the adjustment and offers to increase collection and reserves. And he expects in return the advance of 8.5 billion dollars and the postponement of the controls until the government that emerges from the elections resumes negotiations.
Argentina explains that 20 billion were lost due to the drought and that the Fund is co-responsible for granting the unpayable credit to Macri. The managers nod, take pictures with hugs, and simultaneously circulate a document with demands for an adjustment that dynamite any agreement. Between smiles, the managers attributed the move to the technical bureaucracy of the organization. And they clarified that the text referred to a general situation. But they do not sign and delay the agreement to press on other fronts.
They know Massa’s situation. They press for more adjustment to put Massa against the wall and make concessions on another flank. And be careful, because there are raw materials such as food, gas and lithium that previously came from the zone of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
If they were important before, these elements are now essential for the central economies of Europe and the United States. An example this week was the agreement of the European Union with Chile and Argentina to supply themselves with lithium.
The dramatic consequences of a war into which the United States induced NATO with Russia to stop the fall of its hegemony, added to the fierce competition with China, will imply strong pressure to seize these riches without obstacles. This very complex picture is the one that is at stake in Massa’s negotiation with the Fund and also the one that is being resolved in this year’s presidential elections.
In Washington a wrestling. In Jujuy, one of the provinces richest in lithium, Governor Gerardo Morales hastened to reform the provincial Constitution to penalize social protest and to take away the original peoples’ priority rights over ancestral lands, as stipulated in the National Constitution. It is evident that he wanted to do it before leaving the governorship next December, as if it were a personal commitment.
The rush crystallized in a sudden process, which approved the reforms in complicity with a part of the local Justicialista Party, in record time and without even complying with the formality of prior consultations with the sectors involved, such as the original peoples.
In many of the lands rich in lithium there are settlements of indigenous communities, some of which have already claimed the environmental consequences caused by mining. That also takes everything without leaving anything for the communities. In Bolivia, the exploitation of lithium has been nationalized and in Chile it is regulated. The only country in which this activity is deregulated is Argentina.
And now Jujuy has the routes blocked by indigenous communities from remote locations. They are people who do not usually participate in political mobilizations due to the difficulties in getting around, but they are installed on the roads and it will be difficult for them to move from there if they do not annul the constitutional reform. And now they are asking for the resignation of Morales.
The governor, who was chosen by the presidential candidate of the PRO Horacio Rodríguez Larreta to accompany him in the formula as his vice president, rejected the dialogue and bet on repression. The conflict includes teachers, municipal employees and miners, but in some way it has already involved other sectors of the population.
In the figure of Morales, the PRO and radicalism propose a country in the Jujeño way, privatized, deregulated and with repression for the resolution of conflicts. With an add. As Senator Oscar Parrilli pointed out in this newspaper on Thursday, “two of the three companies that exploit lithium in our country, Allkem and Livent, and one of the largest operators in the world, merged into one company: NewCo. The main shareholders of Livent and Allkem are Blackrock, Vanguard, JP Morgan and HSBC.
“In other words, the two largest US investment funds in the world, the largest US bank and the British bank linked to global drug money laundering are the main beneficiaries of the normative and regulatory conditions that govern lithium mining in our country,” says Parrilli.
It is interesting that in the CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) meetings with the European Union, some declarative agreements were reached that at another time would have been impossible. Delegates from the region resisted strong pressure to introduce a declaration on the Russia-Ukraine war that would break the majority position of neutrality in the region.
Instead, they included a point calling for dialogue between the parties in Venezuela and two key points on the Malvinas: one calling for dialogue between Argentina and Great Britain, as established by the UN, and another recognizing the Malvinas as a disputed territory. These two points could never have been included if Great Britain still belonged to the EU, from which it withdrew after Brexit.
The European delegates made these concessions but at the same time the president of the EU, Ursula van Der Leyen, reached an agreement with Argentina and Chile for the European supply of lithium. Mauricio Macri left Argentina in a situation of relative weakness in the face of the needs of the Western powers. And at the same time, the country lacks regulations that other nations have. But he can strengthen her position precisely from those pressing needs of the Western powers.
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