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PRESS RELEASE

LaRouche: What Argentina Must Do Now

Dec. 21, 2001 (EIRNS)—Calling the collapse of Cavallo, De la Rúa, and the whole IMF showcase policy in Argentina "a Christmas present for all decent people internationally," Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche outlined six steps Argentina now should take:
  1. Argentina must immediately decouple the peso from the U.S. dollar. There can be neither dollarization nor devaluation. Each would be horribly destructive.
  2. This action of decoupling should be combined with the immediate implementation of currency and capital controls, of the 1950s style of measures that were the proven effective methods for protecting national currencies.
  3. Argentina must also immediately adopt the proven, dirigist measures to expand productive investment in industry and farming, with emphasis on medium-sized industrialized firms, as LaRouche has proposed many times, and was earlier the core of the proposals of FDR and Lautenbach, in dealing with similar crises.
  4. There must be an immediate freeze on all foreign debt obligations.
  5. The new Argentine government must initiate criminal proceedings against ex-Presidents Menem and De la Rúa, and Cavallo, for having systematically lied to the Argentine people in hiding the de facto bankruptcy of the country, for the past ten years, and who, in lying to their own people, in criminal fashion, further increased Argentina's foreign debt and systematically and corruptly sold out Argentina's most productive and vital national assets. These criminal proceedings must also include the corrupt foreign accomplices, who abetted in driving up the debt and selling off the national assets—no matter where they are, in the private banking sector, in government, or in international lending agencies.
  6. In dealing with foreign creditors and foreign powers, Argentina must recognize that its weakness is its strength. Argentina is merely a symptom of the current state of the global financial system. Therefore, whoever is pushing Argentina should realize that Argentina has the means to set in motion a process which will accelerate the true state of the bankruptcy of its foreign creditors—Spain, Italy, Germany, France, the United States and Japan. Argentina can reveal what is the true financial conditions of those countries and the global system.