Kirchner To IMF Chief: Bug Off!

April 13, (LPAC)--On the eve of the annual IMF-World Bank meeting in Washington, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner sent a public message to IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato, who had used his April 12 pre-meeting briefing to once again criticized Argentine government economic policy for deviating from IMF rules :

"I am going to answer the President of the IMF: that they no longer can tell us what to do. That we have already seen what happened to us.... That the Argentines are making headway with our own ideas, and we have already forgotten about them. I am sure that there will not be another Argentine government that will go to ask them for instructions or money, because we know what hunger is. We know what we had to go through, the pressures we suffered, the number of unemployed, and the bankruptcy which the country went through, and the large indebtedness we had. Mr. Rodrigo Rato, with all due respect for your position, spend your time talking about somebody else, because we no longer remember you,"

Kirchner said in a speech announcing the country now has reached a historic level of reserves.

What the IMF can't stand, is that the Kirchner government adopted Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal as the model for its policies, and as a result, Argentina is enjoying the greatest economic growth in real terms of any country in Ibero-America. (For more on Kirchner's New Deal policies, see "South America: Two Systems of Ideas Clash, And FDR Is at the Center," in the.