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ENGLISH VERSION
Blank cheque for the shady
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| HERALD STAFF |
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VERSIÓN ESPAÑOL
Cheque en blanco para manejos oscuros
El delito y la inflación, dos de las más grandes preocupaciones del público, parecen ser dos frentes completamente distintos, pero existe una relación precisamente en la manera criminal en que el gobierno manipula los datos de la inflación. La esencia de toda estrategia para combatir el delito es dejar bien en claro el mensaje “el delito no da rédito”, pero la combinación de los resultados de las encuestas del último fin de semana para las elecciones presidenciales de este mes con el puesto vergonzosamente bajo de la Argentina en los índices mundiales de corrupción presentados por Transparencia Internacional indica de manera muy convincente que el delito sí da rédito, en la política al menos.
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Crime and inflation, two of the biggest worries on the public mind, might seem to be entirely different fronts but there is a relationship precisely in the criminal way the inflation data are being manipulated by the government. The essence of any successful crime-fighting strategy is to drive firmly home the message: “Crime does not pay” but the combination of last weekend’s opinion poll results for this month’s presidential elections with Argentina’s disgracefully low ranking in Transparency International’s worldwide corruption league suggests very strongly that crime pays in politics at least. An impeccably neutral opinion survey last weekend attributed 39.8 percent of the vote to the ruling Victory Front party’s candidate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 28 percent ahead of her nearest rival (the Civic Coalition’s Elisa Carrió) and with more support than all other presidential candidates put together (you can tell that it was an honest job because a pro-government poll would surely have found a way of nudging the first lady’s vote over the magic 40 percent figure). The lowly Transparency ranking (which places Argentina on a par with Burkina Faso and Bolivia) is substantiated by the fact that corruption cases are pending against over 100 government officials right up to ministerial level — thus Felisa Miceli has already lost her job as economy minister while Federal Planning Minister Julio De Vido is up to his neck in scandal, not to mention the charges against Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno for tampering with the inflation and other data published by INDEC statistics bureau.
So how can a government for whom honesty plainly is not the best policy be so far ahead in the opinion polls? However gullible people might be about anything else, they surely cannot be fooled into disbelieving their everyday experience of prices rising in the shops. The main explanation is that both the government’s popularity and the inflation have a common root in the rapid growth of the past four years. The government does not need to be honest about the reasons for this growth (part of which have nothing to do with its policies since they stem from an astounding worldwide growth averaging over five percent while that part of today’s growth which is owed to government policies comes from a stubborn insistence on claiming the fruits of growth now rather than saving anything for the future) — all it has to do is to admit to the problems of growth and it will have gone some way towards restoring its credibility.
Yet ultimately it is the people who should contemplate the consequences of electing a government without credibility. An administration elected on the basis of false promises can always be punished in future elections but a people re-electing a government known to be deceitful is opening the door to the worst tyranny.
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