阿根廷是一個物產富饒,人文薈萃的國家,她以寬廣的林蔭大道、華麗的歌劇廳、與藝術殿堂似的戲院聞名,被人盛譽為南美的巴黎。現在這個美輪美奐的城市深深地被羞辱了,「世界看到阿根廷人敲撞銀行大門,以為我們是窮兇惡極的人。」瓦克史代恩說,「他們不曉得這是絕望的掙扎,而不是窮兇惡極。」
人們都認為在情勢好轉以前仍有一段更黑暗的道路要走,安妮‧匹替佛(Ann Pettifor)這位總部設在倫敦『除債更新組織 』(Jubilee Plus)的成員說這個國家正在哀號求救,冀望國際破產法庭為債權人與債務人伸張正義,給阿根廷一個重起爐灶的機會。對比強烈地,她指出去年年底同時破案產的阿根廷與安弄(Enron)所受的不同待遇,「安弄可以不用償債,阿根廷則須返還IMF、世銀、及西班牙欠款每一分錢。安弄必須攤開帳簿受公眾檢驗,美國業者藉此得以收拾殘局,阿根廷則是一團迷霧,讓專家不知所措。美國的投資大眾有一可資信賴的破產程序,不至於傾家蕩產,而阿根廷的主要債權人仍然咄咄逼人地索債。」
歷史可資借鑒的是當中產階級與勞工階級沒有出路時,他們就成了革命的火種,誠然今天的阿根廷已經進入政治風暴,民眾除了對足球代表隊有信心外,其他則付之闕如。每天為數19,000的人口掉到貧窮線下,於是政治人物、工會、企業、銀行、IMF、及美國等都成了人們憎恨的對象,而且愈來愈多。如果這個國家分崩離析無法運作時,一群失業者、中小企業、大學專家及文化精英所組成的聯盟或許會以政治革新作號召起來對抗當局,不過這並非惟一的選項。這個月就是20年前福克蘭群島戰役敗北,軍事政權垮台的一個月,這個國家的統治階級也正面臨權力喪失的掙扎中,撫今追昔,於是另一種走回專制政體老路的聲音又甚囂塵上。
沒有人知道經濟如果持續惡化啥事會發生,採用美元為阿根廷貨幣的論調,在經濟自主與反全球化經濟的民族主義意識高漲下,已經逐漸消退無疾而終了。愛麗夏‧卡斯陀認為阿根廷需要一個新政(New Deal)─羅斯福總統起衰救敝最成功的經濟方案,她相信這是將貝隆主義的後遺症,一個根深柢固的腐敗系統,徹底掃除的良機。不過這不是單一選項,路易士‧得立亞(Luis d'Elia),一位領導阿根廷阻路黨團,勞工階層採行法國農民與卡車司機霸佔公路不許車輛通行的抗爭路線,他在25年前也許就上了軍統(junta)黑名單,變成被捕失蹤的20,000人之一。他認為走回專制政體老路的可能性很大,他說:「極右派一直潛伏在我們左右,納粹意識形態(Nazi ideology )蓄勢待發,如果他們以目前危機為藉口來發動鎮壓行動,我一點都不奇怪。」
這不是杞人憂天,今天對英格蘭一戰,如果一記無心之失的後傳球(backpass),或者扣門未進(missed chance)的球可以被大作文章說成悲劇,那就更應該用心聆聽他的話。真正的悲劇不是輸掉球賽,而是阿根廷正在惡化的局勢。《全文完》
Do cry for Argentina, whatever may happen on the football pitch
Once a shining star of free-market capitalism, the country is now in economic meltdown. So where did it all go wrong? Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott reports from Buenos Aires
Friday June 7, 2002
(edited)
The header by Batistuta was routine, but for Argentina it was the first piece of good news in six months. Three points in the opening world cup match against Nigeria, with the expectation of another three today against the old enemy, England. One who will not be taking his usual place in the press box will be the doyen of Argentina's sports journalists, Horacio Garcia Blanco. A veteran reporter of nine world cups, Blanco was anticipating covering his 10th when his doctors told him that he needed a kidney transplant in Spain. It should not have been a problem because Blanco, 65, had the money to pay for the operation - $400,000 in a bank account. But there was one snag. Like millions of other Argentinians, Blanco has had his account frozen since Christmas. Banks only have to pay out if judges rule that there are special circumstances. Blanco's case was not considered serious enough, and he was offered just 10% of his money, not in dollars but devalued pesos. The operation cost a lot more and Blanco died last week.
For many Argentinians, Blanco's story summed up what has been happening to their country over the past four years, as it has been transformed from the blue-eyed boy of Latin American globalisation into a country imploding economically, politically and socially. Those who want to know what the Great Depression was like for America in the 1930s need look no further than Argentina in 2002.
Unemployment is 25%, the economy is contracting at a rate of 15% a year, the central bank is running out of money to defend the currency, half of all infants are suffering from anaemia, and a quarter of children are suffering from malnutrition in a country so rich in farmland that it produces enough to feed 10 times its own population. And unlike Americans in the early 30s, Argentina has no Roosevelt to tell them that the only thing they have to fear is fear itself. Outside the Casa Rosada, there are demonstrations every day against the Peronist president, Eduardo Duhalde. These are not demonstrations orchestrated by the young, but by the grande dames of Buenos Aires, banging away on their pots and pans like May Day anarchists but decked out in their best coats and with their hair nicely tinted for the occasion.
Argentina's middle class has been hollowed out. And it is angry. Very angry indeed.
Thousands of miles away at the tip of South America, there is a temptation to think that Argentina doesn't matter. It does. Having been used as a test-bed for free-market ideology, it is now the laboratory mouse for what to do when those ideas go badly wrong. These are uncharted waters. Countries are not allowed to go bust, even though, effectively, Argentina has.
So where did it all go wrong? All this was unthinkable as recently as the mid-90s, when the Peronist president, Carlos Menem, was praised in the west for taming Argentina's hyper-inflation and introducing a package of market-friendly reforms. For a while, Menem was every neo-liberal's wet dream. He pegged the peso to the dollar, abolished exchange controls, privatised large chunks of Argentina's state-owned firms and opened up the country to the full blast of foreign competition. The key to his early economic success was the dollar peg, since the commitment to convert pesos into dollars at a one-for-one exchange rate meant that Argentina could not fall back into bad habits and simply print money when times got tough. As a result, inflation fell from 5,000% a year in the late 1980s to virtually zero in the early 90s.
But the "miracle cure" contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. Being pegged to the dollar was fine when the US currency was falling, as it did for the first half of the 90s, because that meant that Argentinian exports to the rest of South America and Europe remained competitive. It was a different story, however, once the dollar started to rise sharply on the foreign exchanges from 1995 onwards. A rising dollar meant a rising peso, making Argentinian exports dearer in foreign markets. It meant Chilean rather than Argentinian wine on supermarket shelves in Britain.
The deflationary impact of the dollar peg was exacerbated by another development - the spate of financial crises in developing countries that started in Mexico in 1994 and spread to Asia, Russia and Brazil between 1997 and 1999. Star pupil of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) she may have been, but Argentina still had huge debts built up during the military dictatorship and by the democratic governments that followed. Foreign creditors demanded higher interest rates for financing Argentina's debts, further slowing the country's growth.
Now that Argentina has collapsed, its critics say that the problem was the government's failure to curb spending, its big-budget deficits adding to inflation, putting pressure on the currency and leading to last year's collapse.
According to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning former chief economist at the World Bank, this argument is false. "The accusation of budget profligacy is wrong. The underlying problem was the over-valued exchange rate. Fixing yourself to the dollar at the time when the dollar was rising was the big problem. The US could finance its huge deficits and Argentina clearly could not." According to Stiglitz, the obvious solution to the problem was to abandon the peg with the dollar and devalue, just as Brazil did in 1999. But Argentina did not. It listened to the IMF and cut back on government spending, intensifying the slump. Argentina in 2001 was like Britain in 1992, when the John Major administration insisted that the pound would remain pegged to the German mark even as unemployment edged towards three million and record numbers of people lost their homes and businesses. The lid blew off the volcano last December when there was a run on the banks and widespread looting. Attempts by the government to grant itself emergency powers were thwarted by a revolt of the middle class. Argentina went through five presidents in a fortnight, and bank accounts were frozen.
The economic consequences of stopping depositors from getting hold of their money have been swift and brutal. Without working capital, businesses have gone bust. Without cash in their pockets, consumers have been reduced to bartering or using the 15 local currencies that are in circulation as a means of exchange.
Fury is directed not just at the politicians but at the banks. There is a strong belief that the financial institutions saw what was coming and moved billions of dollars offshore. There are reports that rich savers were offered safe boltholes for their money through back-to-back loans, and that an injection of IMF money was used to bail out Wall Street by buying up Argentinian bonds. The allegations voiced not just by depositors, but by opposition politicians as well, are strongly denied by the banks. "Money was not spirited out of the country," says one banker in Argentina. "That's a lie."
The campaign to find out what did happen to all the money in the banks is being led by two opposition politicians, Alicia Castro and Mario Cafiero. Castro, of the Front for Change, and a critic of the free-market reforms of the past decade, came to prominence in parliament last month when she brandished the stars and stripes and said it should replace Argentina's flag. Cafiero says that detailed analysis of the banks' balance sheets shows that more money left the system last year than could be accounted for by the stampede of depositors to remove their cash. "The banks have done something wrong. They are worried that the law will be used against them. If they have nothing to account for, they should throw their books open and show that they have nothing to hide."
The banks say Cafiero's analysis is flawed and that the decline in their assets is the result of the economic crisis. But there is little doubt which version Argentinian depositors favour.
Marcelo Wakstein and his wife Susana had $75,000 deposited with the HSBC. It has been frozen since December, converted into pesos at 1.4 pesos to the dollar. The current exchange rate is around 3.7 to the dollar. The Wakstein family took their holiday at the bank this year, turning up with deckchairs and parasols in the lobby because the money that had been earmarked for a week on the beach was now frozen. "I put the money in the bank because I was afraid it would be stolen. Now I find it has been stolen," Wakstein says. A spokeswoman for HSBC says: "Our first policy is to abide by the law. That's what we have done here. We understand how upset people are. Our policy is to abide by what the government is asking all the banks to do. There is a threat of losing our licence if we don't do what the central bank tells us to do."
Despite months of delay, Duhalde has yet to find a way of unfreezing deposits that satisfies the depositors, compensates the banks for the losses made as a result of devaluation, and alleviates the IMF's fears that the country could slip into hyper-inflation. He is now trying desperately to cut a deal with the IMF that would provide a bail-out in return for the acceptance of stringent conditions. Until recently, the fund's tough-love approach was supported by ordinary Argentinians, who were convinced that any cash provided would find its way into the pockets of the country's notoriously corrupt political establishment.
But the IMF's insistence on two further conditions has altered the public mood. The first is that the government in Buenos Aires changes its bankruptcy law to allow foreign - almost certainly American firms - to buy up liquidated Argentinian firms at bargain-basement prices. The second is that Argentina scraps an economic subversion law that was originally passed to deal with leftwing terrorists in the 70s, but is now being used against bankers accused of spiriting millions of dollars out of the country. The fund says that the reforms are vital if the confidence of foreign investors is to be restored. Argentinians think otherwise. "First they came for our companies and they took them away," says a fly poster on the iron doors of Bank Boston, pitted with dents from hammer blows and, like every bank in downtown Buenos Aires, protected by corrugated cladding. "Then they came for our savings and they stole them. Now they are coming for our whole country. Argentina rise - now or never."
Argentina is a country rich in resources and culture. With its wide, tree-lined boulevards, glorious opera house and art-house cinemas, Buenos Aires is often called the Paris of South America. It feels its humiliation deeply. "People see us banging on the doors of the banks and they think we are savages," says Wakstein. "We are not savages. We are desperate."
The feeling is that the economic situation will get worse before it gets better. Ann Pettifor, of Jubilee Plus in London, says the country is crying out for an international bankruptcy court that would provide justice for both creditors and debtors, and give Argentina a fresh start. Contrast, she says, the different treatment of Argentina and Enron, which both went bust at the same time late last year. "Enron has had its debt payments suspended. Argentina has to pay the IMF, the World Bank and Spain. Enron is forced to open up its books, and the whole of US business is having to clean up its act fast. Argentina is still a big secret. At Enron, the advisers to the company are in shit street. The shareholders had a process. Compare that to Argentina. The IMF is still calling the shots."
History suggests that the combination of a dispossessed middle class and a working class with nothing to lose is a catalyst for revolution. Certainly, Argentina is a country in political turmoil. The country has faith in its football team, but in little else. Politicians, unions, business, the banks, the IMF and the United States are all included in a hate-list growing longer as 19,000 people a day drop below the poverty line. But the talk of a new politics - of an alliance of the unemployed, small businesses, university professionals and Argentina's cultural elite - to challenge the corruption of the old is not the only solution should the country become ungovernable. For the first time since defeat in the Falklands war 20 years ago this month spelled the end for the military regime, there is talk of an authoritarian backlash as the country's ruling class seeks to cling on to power.
Nobody knows for sure what will happen next if, as expected, the economy continues to deteriorate. Any talk of Argentina adopting the US dollar as its own currency has faded away amid rising economic nationalism and anti-globalisation sentiment. Alicia Castro wants a New Deal for Argentina and believes that there is a chance of sweeping away the entrenched corruption that is the lasting legacy of Peronism. It is not, however, the only option. Luis d'Elia, one of the leaders of the Piqueteros, workers who favour direct action along the lines adopted by French farmers and lorry drivers - blockading roads, stopping trucks from getting through - is just the sort of activist who, 25 years ago, would have been one of the 20,000 who "disappeared" under the junta. He thinks there is a real chance of an authoritarian backlash. "The right wing is always lurking in the shadows. It contains a strong Nazi ideology within it. I wouldn't be surprised if it invoked the current crisis to justify repressive measures."
That is the real worry. On a day when a careless backpass or a missed chance will be casually described as tragedy, his words should be heeded. Tragedy is not losing a football match. It is what is unfolding in Argentina now.
Source: 南方論壇 |