Alberto Fernández says that “Argentina is not going to kneel before the IMF”

President Alberto Fernández said Wednesday that Argentina “is not going to kneel” before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and conditioned an agreement with the multilateral organization to renegotiate a debt of 44,000 million dollars to “not put at risk the future of Argentines.”
“If we still do not close an agreement (with the IMF) it is because we are not going to kneel, because we are going to negotiate until our people do not see their future at risk for paying a debt,” he said in an act of tribute to former President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), on the 11th anniversary of his death.
The only speaker in a stadium full of militants in the city of Morón, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Fernández evoked Kirchner, who after assuming in a defaulted Argentina, renegotiated a debt of almost 100,000 million dollars with private creditors and settled in 2006 in a payment a debt of 9,800 million dollars with the IMF, to which Argentina went again in 2018.
Meeting in Rome
The president, who is scheduled to meet with imf chief Kristalina Georgieva over the weekend in Rome on the occasion of the G20 Summit, insisted that “we are not going to make an agreement that postpones the Argentines who have been postponed any longer.”
“I will confront everything that is necessary and I will close (an agreement) with the Fund the day I know that this does not condition the future of Argentina,” the president warned.
At the event, Fernández called on the IMF to “take responsibility for the damage it did” by granting in 2018 to the government of former president Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) a loan for 57,000 million dollars, a record figure for the organization, of which Argentina received 44,000 million dollars.
Upon taking office in December 2019, Fernández renounced the outstanding disbursements.
Seek extended facility agreement
“I would like the (critical) newspapers of Argentina, instead of asking me to hurry up an agreement with the Fund, in any case, to tell the Fund to take responsibility for the damage it did by giving Argentina a debt that could not be paid,” he warned.
Argentina, which is beginning to show signs of recovery after more than three years of recession aggravated by the pandemic, seeks to replace the 2018 stand-by agreement with another extended facilities agreement.
The South American country should pay the multilateral organization, between capital and interest, about 19,341 million dollars in 2022, 19,589 million in 2023 and 4,936 million in 2024, according to estimates by the Ministry of Economy.

Original source in Spanish