Puppets on a string

Even conspiracy theorists who assume that Argentina is swarming with foreign agents and their native hirelings, nasty individuals they call sepoys and accuse of being in the pay of Queen Elizabeth II, are prone to underestimating the country’s imperialistic enemies. These wicked creatures are far more cunning than they think. Disguising themselves as patriotic progressives, they have taken over Argentina’s government and are now busily destroying what still remained standing after the great crash of 2002.

To keep those South Atlantic islands safe, the Anglo-Saxon imperialists have contrived to dismantle Argentina’s Armed Forces. Though for their own dastardly purposes politicians in London pretend to be afraid of them, they know perfectly well they would be hard pushed to send a single soldier anywhere near Her Majesty’s possessions; Argentine warships sink of their own accord and for want of spare parts warplanes fall from the skies. When the former defence minister Nilda Garré finally quits active politics, the grateful Crown could well make her a baroness.

Also in line for an earldom, dukedom, barony or, at the very least, a gong, are the dowager President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and the people responsible for energy, transport and a great deal else. Before the imperialist agents got down to work back in 2003, Argentina enjoyed energy self-sufficiency. Thanks to their efforts, oil and gas production have dropped through the floor and electricity utilities have become so ramshackle they could break down at any moment, leaving even more Argentines in the dark, and the cost of importing what the country needs to keep going is so high that the government is fast running out of ready cash.

That canny analyst Vladimir Lenin once remarked that the best way to “crush the bourgeoisie is to grind it between the millstones of taxation and inflation”. Taking their cue from him, imperialist infiltrators have pushed taxation up to record levels and stoked inflation so successfully that Argentina would currently boast the highest rate in the entire world were it not for the achievements in this field of the South Sudanese. By the end of the year, it will have overtaken them.

The despised “bourgeoisie” has not taken too kindly to the imperialists’ decision to deprive it of any possibility of clinging to whatever money it still has by swapping rapidly shrivelling pesos for Yankee dollars. In addition to staging huge pot-bashing protests, the remnants of Argentina’s once ubiquitous middle class are boycotting the property market which, it has just been reported, has shrunk so much it is back where it was at the end of 2001. Also doing a disappearing act is construction, which provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of relatively unskilled workers; as well as striking a fierce blow against the bourgeoisie, the puppet government has kicked the proletariat where it hurts most.

One of the prime objectives of imperialists determined to finish off Argentina has always been to isolate it on the international stage. They are close to success. With the willing collaboration of Cristina and her ministers, who to widespread amusement have gone through the motions of forging strategic alliances with such powerhouses as Angola and Azerbaijan, they are trying to get Argentina to join the doomed dictators’ club whose leading members are the bloodthirsty religious fanatics ruling Iran, Venezuela’s apparently moribund caudillo Hugo Chávez, Cuba’s economically-challenged gerontocracy and North Korea’s chubby young tyrant Kim Jong-un. Unlike Chávez, Cristina has yet to declare herself an admirer of North Korea’s hideous regime, but she will soon do so if the anti-Argentine imperialists have their way.

The immediate political and social consequences of battering the economy with a wrecking ball and inanely picking fights with the rulers of most respectable foreign countries may have been disappointing for those locals who are appalled by the incompetence of the current government and would like to see it replaced, but that is not what the imperialists are after. As far as they are concerned, the longer Cristina and her friends can continue to weaken Argentina the better it will be for them. From the point of view of those sinister foreigners who, conspiracy theorists insist, for two centuries have been doing their utmost to prevent Argentina from becoming the superpower bestriding the southern hemisphere God, destiny or some combination of the two evidently desired, populism has proved to be a wonderfully effective partner.

According to Winston Churchill, in 1917 the German High Command sent Lenin (yes, him again), “in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia”; to his mind the Bolshevik and what he stood for were “the most grisly of weapons”. Populism as espoused by Juan Domingo Perón and Mr and Mrs Kirchner may have been less deadly than Lenin’s Bolshevism, but injected repeatedly into a country’s bloodstream it condemns it to a terrible wasting disease from which it may never recover. Would leading members of Argentina’s sophisticated political elite consciously subject their own compatriots to such a dire fate? That seems so unlikely that it is not really surprising that many people attribute the country’s misfortunes to the activities of a sinister cabal headquartered somewhere in London or New York.