President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was sworn-in once more at the Lower House, and began her speech by remembering her late husband Néstor Kirchner and later made a strong plea to the Argentine judiciary, so all human rights violators in the last dictatorship are taken to trial.
After being sworn-in for the second time, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner began her second term with an informal speech before the Legislative Assembly in Congress.
In her speech, which lasted over 70 minutes, she evoked the memory of her late husband Néstor Kirchner several times and urged Congress to pass several bills that have been stuck on the floor for far too long; she praised the country’s current economic figures and chastised the banking sector over their financial speculation.
She also urged union leaders to be “responsible” and warned unions that she would not allow them to “extort” her by threatening to go on strike and staging protests.
She praised her administration’s achievements in the education sector, and asked teachers to comply with the mandatory amount of school days per year.
Fernández de Kirchner also explained that her administration’s “great challenge” is to improve competitiveness, for which she announced the creation of two state secretariats, the Foreign Trade Secretariat, and the Undersecretary of Competitiveness, which will be part of the Economy Ministry.
She vowed to work for a more “just, egalitarian and supportive Argentina.”
As she opened her speech, she said that “even though this was a day of joy, it’s not easy for this President to be here. I’m missing something. I’m missing someone.”
She then said that on the International Day of Human Rights, the international organization in charge of naming stars in outer space had chosen the name of a disappeared student from the University of La Plata to identify an asteroid.
The President then made a strong plea to the Judiciary, urging judges to take the rest of human rights violators during the last dictatorship to trial. She recalled her inauguration speech back in 2007 when she demanded for the first time that all of those responsible for state-sponsored terrorism from 1976 to 1983 be taken to court.
“Even though we have certainly made progress, all I ask the Judiciary is that whoever is inaugurated president next can finally stop mentioning this subject in their speech and we can always turn the page in this sad chapter of our history,” she said.
Ten minutes into her speech, Fernández de Kirchner began mentioning all of her Government’s economic achievements from 2003 onward.
“We have a country that has gone through its most important growth process and it’s GPD is one of the largest in the world,” she said.
“None of this would have been possible had we not changed the course of our economy. We took it back home, to the continent, to South America, to the Mercosur. Because we know that one of the best defences against a complicated world is national integration,” she explained.
“Fortunately all heads of state in South America, no matter what our normal differences were, know that in our future we are all holding hands,” she stated.
The President then praised the help of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Argentina’s development and wished well to her Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez.
She then explained that thanks to her government’s industrialization process the country managed to reach several economic goals and adopt certain economic measures that would have been impossible otherwise.
Fernández de Kirchner 58, won the October 23rd elections in a landslide victory, gathering an impressive 54 percent of votes and consolidating herself as the single most powerful woman in Argentina.
Fernández second term ends December 10th, 2015.
For more information, read «Cristina Reloaded,» editorial by Carolina Barros.
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