Once spirits were tempered, Chile was the first of these three nations to begin the journey to recovery that comes after political pacification, implementing an economic order that would enable the massive incorporation of citizens to productive activities.

This is still a pending issue for Iraq as well as Cuba. And it shows that the economy requires an institutional framework without which it is impossible to consolidate any long-term project. Growth requires certain conditions without which any recovery is nothing but circumstantial. The long-term is something else.

That explains the concerns that exist in wide sectors of society as to the Argentine process, because even though economic variables may seem favourable, the political-institutional construction is still a pending issue. Political parties were destroyed along with the independence of powers in the country’s last crisis five years ago. Ever since the ruling peronism has made shamefully unsuccessful attempts to dismantle the basic institutions of the republic without anybody caring much about this abyss.

Meanwhile a picture is shown of economic flourishing that has a lot -perhaps too much- to do with the typical rebound following a fall and with price controls, frozen rates, tax increases, and bans on exports which are the state policy of the Kirchner administration.

Along with the pressure cooker that authorities fill when they foster consumption and discourage saving and investment, they feed the ideological confrontation that in the seventies unleashed a terrible wave of violence, resulting from the acts of terrorists trained in Cuba who forced the national government to come out and fight until its destruction.

The remnants of those armed gangs currently lodged in public office try to carry out a “vendetta” against those who defeated them, and they are dragging the whole of society to a suicidal division. The Kirchner administration is betting on its victory in the presidential elections next October due to the disagreement they foster between the different sectors of society, but they don’t seem to understand that, once unleashed, violence is incontrollable.

For Argentina, institutional frailty is a way of life, the official excuse to harden the control of the state over the life of its citizens and the way to intervene in the development of basic economic and non-economic activities. Successive administrations have tried, though unsuccessfully, to revert this decadence. In this case, what is striking is that the current Argentine government is not working along this line, but it is betting on the system’s structural weakness and encouraging its precariousness.

* María Zaldívar is a TV journalist from Argentina and Bachelor of Political Science (UCA, Catholic University of Argentina).

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