How Wall Street Intends to Prevent Argentina from Joining the BRICS

The presidential election in Argentina, scheduled for Oct. 22, is shaping up as the first battleground between the newly-expanded BRICS-11 process, and the interests of the trans-Atlantic financial system whose domination is threatened by that same process. The plan is to shatter the Argentine economy through forced debt collection and capital flight, and in that way ensure the victory of their presidential candidate, Javier Milei, after discrediting the current government of President Alberto Fernández and its candidate, Economics Minister Sergio Massa.

The psychologically unstable Javier Milei has already sworn that, if he wins, he will pull Argentina out of the BRICS even before the formal admission date of Jan. 1, 2024. In addition, he intends to: eliminate Argentina’s currency (and thus its sovereignty) and replace it with the speculators’ dollar; break ties with China, Russia, and most of Argentina’s Ibero-American neighbors; and otherwise implement extreme neo-liberal policies that will deliver a coup de grâce to the nation’s physical economy.

Already today, the economic crisis is so grave in the country that Massa, who is currently negotiating with the IMF hit-men, was slammed in last month’s primaries, with the three leading candidates (Massa, Milei and neoliberal Patricia Bullrich) each getting about a third of the votes — a shocking setback for the current minister, who had expected to do far better. Fully half of the population now lives in poverty while, in compliance with the demands of the International Monetary Fund, inflation is at 108% and interest rates have been raised to 118%!

If Argentina can be destroyed by the bankers, its neighbor and ally Brazil (one of the five founding members of the BRICS) will be next. And the message will have been delivered to the world: “Try to break with our system, and we will financially ‘waterboard’ you and wipe you off the map.”

Patriotic forces in Argentina are aware of the bankers’ gambit and its significance, but most are at a loss over what to do. That reality has prompted the Schiller Institute to draft “An Emergency Program To Save Argentina, the Newest Member of the BRICS,” which specifies the immediate steps to be taken by the Fernández government and candidate Massa well before the Oct. 22 presidential election. Those measures, to be adopted both for Argentina and as an example for the world, include:

Declaring an immediate debt moratorium on the servicing of the foreign debt, including the $46 billion owed to the IMF, the largest amount owed by any country; imposing capital and exchange controls; and establishing a fixed parity between the peso and the dollar, as sovereignly determined by the Argentine government.

The SI emergency program also calls for a massive transfusion of productive credit and for the launching of great infrastructure projects as well as space research. Read the program here.