Days after taking office,
Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner speaks to the world

BY JOHNNY HAZARD

A political ad for Argentina’s new president.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, days after taking office, has already taken on Goliath. In her second reproach to the U.S. government since the latter attempted to link a Venezuelan empresario with the alleged triangulation of funds from the Venezuelan government to Fernández´s campaign, she said recently: “I think many times we [Latin American countries] will suffer, as we are suffering now, interferences, to put it kindly, from those who, it seems, only want to deal with employee countries and subordinate countries. We’re not going to give in. We’re going to keep fighting for the strengthening of Mercosur [of which she also just assumed the presidency]. We´re going to keep fighting for a multipolar world ... Unilateralism has created only tragedy, pain, and insecurity in the contemporary world.” (Finally, a president with balls.)

Her husband, ex-president Nestor Kirchner, meanwhile, gave a speech in which he demanded that the U.S. extradite the Venezuelan Guido Antonini Wilson and asserted that “Argentina is not a colony. They have to respect us.” Cristina Fernández’s comments end, at least for the moment, speculation about which side she’s on: whether she’d fall in with the camp of ostensibly leftist Latin American leaders who join their openly rightwing counterparts (Calderón in Mexico, Uribe in themselves to U.S. and Spanish interests, or with the camp of those who assert their own and their countries’ independence: In the first category, let’s label them with a neutral term—the Lackeys—we find Michelle Bachelet of Chile and sometimes Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil. In the second category (the independents, the nonaligned, the Bolivarianos, the radicals, the axis of evil, whatever you want to call them) we have Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez of Brazil, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Daniel moderate), Fidel Castro of Cuba, Lula and Vázquez occasionally, and now Fernández de Kirchner.

Johnny Hazard lives and writes from Mexico, and is a regular contributor to Southside Pride.