Dear Mrs. President

“It is less exact to say that I love my country than to say that it is always in my thoughts, and that it mortifies me constantly.”–Mario Vargas Llosa

It’s been a few weeks already since something has been pulling me by my trousers, urging me to sit down in front of the keyboard. But I’ve been resisting. I knew what I was going to write, I knew what it pained me to say, but I was resisting. And thus, like a black bird, I was flying in circles around this post, which full of anguish, I knew I had to write.

And I do feel a bit like a bird of ill omen sitting here, or maybe like that postman who knocks at our door, hat in hand, and doesn’t know how to tell us that the telegram bearing our name is dark, terrible. That’s more or less how I feel today. And I think of Mario Vargas Llosa and of his Peru, and of us and our Argentina. And I think of the self-imposed curse that seems to hang over the Latin American countries. In “A Fish Out of the Water”, the writer opens up his heart and tells us why he decided to become a presidential candidate in Peru twenty-odd years ago. And through his story, by explaining himself he lays a cloak. It is an all-covering cloak, and although it might not cover every person who lives abroad and continues to keep an eye on their country, it manages to do so with, I daresay, most of us. Just like myself and many others, Vargas Llosa deeply detests patrioterismo, deformed patriotism and its evils.

This fact notwithstanding joined by a tricolour thread that ties our hearts,we confess that whatever happens in our countries is, always, a reason for more happiness, more grief and more anger than anything that could happen where we live. That’s why fists are clenched and tears roll. Because it saddens me to see that, for many years and apart from the footie and steak, it is spoken of Argentina as if it were the horrid caricature of a country that is slowly dying. Just like Vargas Llosa’s Peru, “thanks the impossibility to govern ourselves with a minimum of common sense.”

And that’s why this piece of writing oozes dense anger and pessimism, and also because there isn’t much that’s new about it. Because it’s about what we all know, but somehow just knowing doesn’t help. Sometimes we need to have things spelled out for us so that we can really see how far they go. It’s not easy to translate one’s ideas from the mind to the page. Not when what one’s trying to write is confused with a drowning feeling of helplessness and anger. That’s why I’m writing this. That’s why I’m writing it to you, Mrs. President. Because I know that you, through the legion of henchmen that read, cut, paste, and inform in the corridors of power, will hear of me and of these lines. It won’t be the first time that you hear my name, nor will it be the last one.

The Kirchners confuse me. I get confused by their government. I get confused by their friends, their carnal and rather orgiastic relations with some of our Latin American neighbours. I get confused, and scared by, the blind and clumsy game that, hand in hand with Chavez, we have been playing for some years. All too close to the abyss.

They confuse me, and so do their close friends and their mates, because of what they’ve done with our country. And it’s the sort of confusion that, in the way between my insides and this keyboard, gathers frustration, fear, and a great deal of anger. Hatred, Mrs. President. Hatred towards your cowardice and nerve, that every time that either you or your husband decide to dodge questions and not answer them, gets mixed with haughtiness and abuse of power… and what a rancid smell you give off.

I hate your audacity, for it hurts me to know that, in Argentina, no serious journalist has the slightest chance of asking you, Mrs. President, a couple of honest questions. However, you oblige more than happily when it comes to having tea with supermodels that ask you about football and fashion. And no, Mrs. President, you’re not a centipede. But you do wear clothes that cost the same as a four-by-four. And even though you might love to tell the British press that whenever you open your mouth you base whatever you say on facts and not on words, and that adjectives are “all too dirty and are being too tampered with these days”, the people who once voted for you know that reality is a far cry from what you tell us. And the words “the oligarchy of the soy” and Clarin’s “boicot” suddenly come back to memory. Now, Mrs. President, there is a word for that: hypocrisy.

Now of course, since I mention the word “hypochrisy”, I dare bring back to your memory a name: Carlos Saul Menem. He was the emblem of corruption in the 90’s, and your husband and yourself mercilessly slaughtered him before the elections. It was obvious that after light was shed on the terrible state of the economy and the dodgy businesses that he had performed, there was only one man responsible for the unspeakable state of affairs in the country: Carlos Saul I, a.k.a. The Antichrist. Thus you and your husband decided to roll up your sleeves and embark yourselves upon a task of messianic proportions: cleaning the corridors of power of Menem’s minions, for they were as sacrilegious as the Big Fish. You had decided to make a cleaner, purer, more progressive Argentina.

And we believed you, Mrs. President. We did. And when the free press tapped our shoulders to tell us about dodgy deals and about people who, despite their more than reprehensible records were still sitting in Congress, many of us decided to just ignore it. Because at the end of the day, back then we thought “well, there’s no perfect government, is there?” and said “but hey, look how much we’ve progressed in the last few years…”

But later on, and now taking the role of social conscience, newspapers started to tell us about unsavoury characters that were still lurking around, about huge extensions of land that were being bought by your husband for a fraction of the real price in a place that, oh so beautiful, is unreal. And then they told us about Mr. Albistur and his not-so-healthy –for us- dealings with the presidential couple, and about secret briefcases full of money that were sent to you, Mr. President, by mysterious senders, and about sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and more drugs that were finding their way into the country thanks to our Mexican friends, and about a Justice that’s let its blindfold slip down again…

It is at this point, then, that we ought to ask ourselves Mrs. President: What is the difference between menemism and kirchnerism, between Carlos I, your most honourable husband and yourself? If I may, Mrs. President, let me tell you something.

Let me give you the answer: Kirchnerism, that colossal and bicephalic movement that you co-lead and represent, is two, one hundred, one thousand times worse than menemism. And it’s not because your government is proving to be as corrupt as that of Mr. Menem and co., and equally shocking and fond of lying. It’s because when you and your husband first sat on the presidential chair, five years ago, promised myself and other 40,677,347 Argentines that you were the change, honesty, the way forwards. And because we, in a trance of despair, need and hope believed you. And because now I cannot help but to feel stupid, because five years ago I believed that my vote, that our votes, could make the difference.