Fossil, I agree that the warship "Libertad" from the Navy School is still one of the few honorable faces of the Argentine Republic. After all, the costs of that trip must be much less than the maintenance costs of a few modern missilistic warships operating in our Navy. Certainly there are so many expenditures to be cut here, that we can't beleive that we are accepting insuline donations from charity organizations in Spain, for example, or that a lawyer's association in Miami is organizing a campaign to consider 100,000 Argentinean illegal immigrants as "refugees".

Today President(?) Duhalde threatened to resign if not given what he calls the necessary "support" from the Congress and province governors, to fulfill all the IMF requirements. Those requirements include many healthy decisions (zero deficit, expenditures cuts, transparency, etc.) which they should have imposed many decades before. Unfortunately they also include irrational and anti-constitutional and anti-ethical measures: violate the rights of properties of citizens even in the poorest levels, break the contracts, drop the laws which protect people against banker's abuse and economic crime, free large capitals from any responsibility past or future, fire half a million employees (for a population of 36 million) without an employment program, and leave the national currency to float its value against foreign currencies in a situation of absolute distrust, after people have seen how their deposits disappeared in the banks' black hole.

LH, that's again the paradigm of modern capitalist governments: decentralize and delegate responsibilities, privatize (favouring the friends) and accomodate the laws fitting the needs of the large capital, and at the same favor the concentration of wealth in private groups. They don't understand why people can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps because they see people as a bunch of lazy ignorants who can't see the great horizons that they are signaling. When ex-minister Cavallo announced the establishment of the "corral" for everybody's funds, he said that "this is for the protection of the depositors", ignoring that 80% of people did not have even a single savings account (1.00 % annual interest rate, 240.00 dollars fixed annual expenses) and that his new regulation included the prohibition of cash collections.

Socialist Lula in Brazil is favorite for the next elections. Socialist Zamora in Argentina goes first by far in every poll. Pseudo-socialist Chavez in Venezuela overcame a coup which had been immediately celebrated by the IMF. Rumors of a military coup in Argentina are growing day by day, and we know that neither the US, Europe nor the IMF will say a word to defend democracy. At the same time, this democracy is unsustainable. The future of Latin America looks complicated.

Un abrazo - Andrés