Amid increasing debate between government officials and the opposition trading barbs over anti-kirchnerites alleged plans to go back on some key laws approved over the past years, Buenos Aires City Mayor Mauricio Macri said the nationalization of YPF, the Universal Child Allowance cash transfer and the public pension system will not be at risk if he gets elected president next year.
“Not only will we maintain the Universal Child Allowance but we will give education (to kids) so that they can have a future, a job of their own and can develop (their lives) with a government that recovers the value of public education,” Macri told reporters today.
“The citizen must remain calm (because) in our project, where the state is needed, we will be present,” the head of the PRO party affirmed.
Macri made the statements following a heated exchange of accusations over the past days that brought pro-government gay-rights activist and director of the Sexual Diversity Memorial Archive Alex Freyre to the center stage when he said that a future administration led by Sergio Massa or Mauricio Macri would result in shortages of HIV medication and the deaths of AIDS patients, meaning right-wing opposition figures seek to reduce the rople played by the state in the protection of economic and social well-being of people.
“People will not die,” Macri assured saying Argentineans receive even more and better treatments in the City where people “from all over the country come to get cured.”
“The damage is already done,” the mayor said when queried about the possibility of modifying the administration of the pension system which was nationalized back in 2008.
In a similar tone, he questioned what he called the “confiscation” of Repsol’s shares in the now state-controlled YPF but said he “will not go back” with the decision fueled by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and approved by Congress in 2012.
“My job will by to make YPF to operate ok so that there is more energy. We will not go back because the damage has already been done.”
What about vulture funds?
In a radio interview, the PRO party head also vowed to “chase out vulture funds.” “I am not sitting there (in the negotiating table); they can not ask me how I would do so. I will see it when the time comes. I think they will settle (the dispute) in January,” Macri told reporters when asked about Argentina’s current billonaire battle against holdout bondholders that rejected the country’s 2005 and 2010 debt swaps.
Resuming his criticism of the government’s strategy in New York where talks have been held to settle the dispute after District Court Judge Thomas Griesa there ordered Buenos Aires to pay vulture funds in full, he said the Kirchnerite administration should “fix the issue.”
“We don’t like vulture funds. But I am sure that with the policy we are going to implement, vultures will never make a business with Argentina again. We will kick them out because we will be people that comply (with its debt obligations.”
“It is unacceptable that a government spends seven years without fixing a problem and seven years later says ‘I have no solution’. It is a fallacy, there is always a solution. It is not true there is a world complot against Argentina neither there are places in the world worried to help Argentina, everyone has its own problems”, he insisted saying it was the administration of ex late president Néstor Kirchner which choose New York as site of payment.
“We accepted to compete under certain rules and now we have to go and fix this problem”.
buenosairesherald.com