Argentina - February 18, 2025

The “mother of all scams”: an external debt contracted by the capitalists and nationalized by all the pro-employers’ political parties

The people have been paying for it for decades with hunger and misery

In the 1980s, the Videla dictatorship nationalized the foreign debt of the so-called “industrial capitans.”
The vast majority of the foreign debt became the private debt contracted by tycoons Rocca of Techint, Madanes, Mastellone of La Serenísima, Macri of Sevel, Fortabat of Loma Negra and a handful of other big capitalists and corporations such as Acindar steelworks, the Bank of Quilmes, etc.

The military dictatorship nationalized private debt when the criminals and gang of swindlers of the big capitalists defaulted on payments.
The state borrowed directly to meet private needs and took over the debt of companies, giving them exchange insurances and putting the State assets as collaterals.

This meant that the foreign debt multiplied per 6 between 1976 and 1983. Even the bourgeois justice system declared it “illegitimate”, “illegal” and “fraudulent” in judicial case #14,467.

The Radical Party, Peronism, the PRO party and now Milei, all and each of them, were and are guarantors that, with the funds taken from the Argentine people, fraudulent commitments were fulfilled that a handful of capitalists had contracted with imperialism while the gun of the military dictatorship were pointing to the temples of the workers.

Argentina emerged from the military dictatorship with a debt of 45 billion dollars, which at today's value is equivalent to more than 170 billion dollars. Thus began the scourge of the fraudulent foreign debt scam, which has robbed Argentina of its education, its public health system , thousands of jobs and imposed hunger on the workers, who are the ones who really pay for it with their blood and sweat.

Argentina has repaid dozens of times those millions and the interest rates, and yet, that debt with the IMF and private creditors amounts now to twice that millionaire sum that is strangling the nation. This is even after Menem in the 1990s handed over all the state companies to the creditors who held debt papers that actually had no value, since Argentina was in de facto default.

Supported by the pro-employers' politicians and their infamous regime, 25 capitalist parasites who today are part of the AEA group, where their trash handmaid Milei came from, contracted a debt for more than 170 billion dollars and like armed thieves they put a gun to the heads of the nation and the workers so that they would pay for their scam.
It was this regime of “democracy for the rich” that covered them up and saved them from going to prison, because they are the bosses of the pro-employer politicians and it is them who organized with Videla the genocide against the working class during the military dictatorship.

What Milei has just done is nothing more than a small business of fraud and theft that his bosses on Wall Street leave him as a tip.
This time it was obvious... very obvious: in 24 hours, 90 million dollars were stolen with Milei's signature endorsing the operation.

This is the stinking semi-colonial capitalism from whose sewer emerge all the pro-employer politicians who saved its businesses, debts and covered up the scams of imperialism and the big capitalists.

It is striking how the parliamentary left is subjugated, increasingly linking its fate to that of Peronism as the “opposition to Milei”, when it was not only Peronism that called for the Videla coup in the 1970s, but also, together with the UCR party, it guaranteed the greatest submission of the nation to imperialism. Milei continues this work, as did Menem before and also the Kirchners, a matter that today everyone wants to hide…

Speaking of “scams”… The imperialist bourgeoisie wants to punish its lady manager who administered their businesses for more than 10 years and “took them out of the hell” of the 2001 revolution, as her husband Néstor Kirchner himself stated.
These people feel “unfairly persecuted”… The Big bosses want to arrest these “Al Capones” for the taxes they didn’t pay and not for what they actually did. Here we have a similar case.
The Kirchner bourgeois gang was the one that, as a reward for controlling the masses, took over the infrastructure contracts and the state businesses. They led the oil companies in the south of the country and subsidized with inflation a crawling pseudo-national bourgeoisie that became rich again linked to the large-scale production of MERCOSUR and the imperialist transnationals.

Cristina Kirchner keeps repeating that capitalism is the best system for producing and distributing goods. One has to be very cynical. Really, very cynical. She says this to a country being ruined by the capitalists, with millions of unemployed, very high levels of poverty, retirees robbed of their pensions, suffering the biggest looting the nation has ever suffered in its history, which is saying a lot.
The scandalous deals with the Baring Brothers Bank of London in the 19th century are just a child's play compared to those made by the ruling elites in recent years.

The Kirchner gang did their job. The uprising of 2001 had tied the hands of the Argentine bourgeoisie with the risk of revolution hanging over their necks. The nation defaulted. “The Kirchners did it.” After putting the working class to work like slaves, this capitalist gang paid 10 billion dollars in cash to the IMF. They say that this is how they “got rid of it,” when they were their great servants during the last Fernándezes government, just as Macri had been before.
The Kirchner gang renegotiated the default of 130 billion dollars unpaid with private creditors in 2005 to a value of 253 billion dollars with interest included, payable until 2039 with a bond linked to the GDP. That is, every year the holders of Argentine bonds are given a reward for the percentage that the GDP grows...
Milei’s petty scam turns pale compared to such a handing over.

Recently, Stanley, the former US ambassador in Argentina, said that Mrs. Kirchner was one of the most outstanding political figures in Latin America… A true acknowledgement to the PJ for its role in recent years.

The parliamentary left no longer feels any shame. Their “great ally” in Congress “to confront Milei” is a party featuring some of the biggest stooges of imperialism and the IMF.

Only the working class, which is the only national class that has no business or deals with imperialism, will be in charge of liberating the oppressed nation with the only possible method: the proletarian revolution to put an end to capitalist Argentina, which has become a colony that the dominant elites today want to transform into a US protectorate. That is what Milei and his bosses are trying to do, to turn Argentina into a “state associated with the Union.”

The way forward is to return to the 2001 path, that of the mass revolutionary offensive, and to the battle cry of “They all must go away and not a single one should remain,” which all the bosses’ politicians and the parliamentary left made sure would never be heard again.
We must put an end to all the swindlers and traitors of the nation, starting by breaking up with the IMF and expropriating without compensation and under the control of the workers, as reparation for their theft and fraud, all the transnationals and imperialist banks.

To achieve this, it is necessary to carry out an anti-capitalist struggle of the working class and its allies, the impoverished middle classes, and defeat the union bureaucracy leaders that are subject to the bosses' politicians and the US embassy.

We must coordinate all who are fighting and unite the demands. We must open the way to a general strike.

Neither in Parliament, the notary of Wall Street, nor in a Videlista justice system...
Milei will be defeated by fighting on the streets with the General Strike!

The task is to fight to establish a revolutionary party that fights against the capitalist system and all its institutions, against its Videlista justice, the Parliament of Wall Street clerks, etc.

To achieve national independence, break with imperialism and recover land and food, the only way out is revolution.

The alternative is either a socialist and revolutionary Argentina, or a Wall Street colony that has been swindled a thousand times, plundered a thousand times.

Editorial Board of “The International Workers Organizer”