Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner: Alliance with the BRICS Behind Assault on South American Nations

In a two-hour interview July 23, held at her home in El Calafate, Santa Cruz, former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner discussed a broad array of subjects, both national and international, and pointed to the absurdity of the charges launched against her by President Mauricio Macri’s “judicial party.”

“I’m not afraid of going to prison,” she said, explaining that she wouldn’t have implemented the anti-IMF, pro-growth measures she did as President had she feared going to jail. It used to take a military coup to impose the “policies of hunger and misery,” Fernandez said, but today Macri is using the corrupt judiciary and the media he controls to achieve the same effect, at the same time attacking the rule of law and trampling on constitutional rights, in order to intimidate opponents.

Asked about the destabilization of several South American nations, Fernandez pointed out that the strategic agreements that several governments, including her own, had signed with Russia and China, and the extraordinary July 2014 BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, must have set off “a red alert” in the U.S. After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and heads of state and regional organizations from Central and South America and the Caribbean gathered to discuss regional development; on top of that, she added, there was the BRICS New Development Bank, posed “as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund.” Surely, the U.S. felt its geopolitical interests threatened.

Internationally, Fernandez said, a new geopolitical map is being drawn in an increasingly complex world, in which global terrorism is the new ingredient, and there isn’t a clear strategy for dealing with it.

“There is a lack of leadership [willing] to sit down and come up with a different strategy, because if we continue…invading and bombing countries, the situation will get worse.” Leadership used to be a matter of individuals, she said. Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Charles De Gaulle, John Kennedy, Juan Peron, and Yasser Arafat were leaders of great stature, she noted, but today, the “only glimpse of leadership” similar to theirs is Vladimir Putin.

Then you have Macri, she noted, surrounded by his unsavory political cronies, many guilty of financial crimes, offshore accounts, etc.

“It turns out that every day, individuals are discovered who, if they don’t have accounts in HSBC and didn’t sneak money out of the country, they appear in the Panama Papers,” as does Macri.