–President, there can be no doubts here… –said deputy Juan Manuel López.
– No doubt, deputy. There is no doubt –Martín Menem responded.
With an unknown emphasis, the president of the Chamber of Deputies closed a 35-minute chapter during which the Chamber of Deputies burned. It was the section of the session for the Base Law that started at 1:21 p.m. with a proposal from López (Civic Coalition) and, by voting, closed at 1:56 p.m. with the sentence from the Rioja native cited above.
But Menem was wrong: the process to incorporate and approve the tobacco chapter was a compendium of confusion. Broken blocks, mutant votes, protests, anger and even objections to the counting of votes. With an extra curiosity: the affirmative vote of a handful of Peronist deputies who before and after opposed each of the lines of the libertarian law.
“I warned that the Sarandí tobacco lobby and Philip Morris (NdeR: the largest tobacco company in the world) were going to break not only the blocks, but Congress. They ended up in a mess,” she said in the midst of shouting Cecilia Moreau when she tried to justify her abstention. To the unsuspecting, it may have sounded exaggerated. Was she? Everything creaked from the inclusion of the time, at the request of López and with the OK of the block chaired by Miguel Pichetto (who previously was a member of the lilito), the provincials and part of the UCR, of changes in the tobacco tax that eliminates a tax exception that, with judicial endorsement, benefits the Sarandí tobacco company, owned by businessman Pablo Otero.
Known as ‘Mr. Tobacco’, Otero is preceded by something more than that ridiculous and fictional nickname: he wages a trade war with the big tobacco companies, particularly Philip Morris, and appears syndicated as a sponsor of leaders of different parties and colors, to the instead of having terminals in the Judicial Branch.
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The photo of the Deputies vote is used to draw the link map. The PRO bloc, chaired by Cristian Ritondo, contributed thirty votes to try to prevent the chapter from being approved and La Libertad Avanza, led by Gabriel Bornoroni from Córdoba, brought in another 34. Legislators such as Marcela Pagano and Rocío Bonacci from LLA, or deputies like Alejandro Bongiovanni and Álvaro González, from the PRO, got up and left the premises, terrified.
These were exceptions in two blocks that opposed, almost completely, the introduction of a reform that ends Otero’s advantages that, they say in the market, allowed him to grow from 5 to 30 percent thanks to selling cheaper. Among the negative ones – who defended that the tobacco reform not be incorporated – were also Danya Tavella and Mariela Coletta, who make up Martín Lousteau’s space.
The radical multiverse, broken into a thousand pieces, offers these folds: Lousteau’s group rejected the tobacco products, Rodrigo De Loredo’s sector voted to incorporate the chapter and Facundo Manes decided not to participate. Let it double.
Two versions of Menem
The president of the Chamber, in a move that some read as mischief and others as naivety, facilitated the inclusion of the tobacco chapter. He believed, perhaps, what almost everyone assumed: that the votes were not there to incorporate, in the final sprint, the articles that López requested. But something unexpected happened: in addition to some legislators from the PRO and LLA who were absent, 21 deputies from Unión por la Patria (UxP) supported, in a minority, López’s proposal in the face of the massive abstention of the bloc led by Germán Martínez.
It was so unexpected that when Victoria Tolosa Paz voted in favor, out loud, there was applause from radical benches, the lilitos and pichettismo. Likewise, Ritondo was uncomfortable with the result and complained that the vote was incorrect and that it was done only once when it should have been done in two turns: first to accept whether the chapter was incorporated and then to approve it or not. It was done only once and Menem validated it.
It was one of the two errors attributed to the Riojan. The other, as he told Zenithal on Friday, was to enable the voice vote of legislators, in theory, out of time and regulations, which opened a controversy that could lead to the judicialization of the Bases Law.
Aside from that, something was clear: without the 21 votes of UxP, the tobacco chapter was outside the law as the PRO, LLA and part of the UCR wanted. The rebellion, which had among its protagonists Tolosa Paz, Eduardo Valdés, Pablo Yedlin and Carolina Gaillard – and was joined by Hugo Yasky and, among others, Pablo Carro from Córdoba –, in the end had a restorative effect: without those positive votes, the reform on tobacco did not enter the text and the massive abstention of UxP could be functional for the claims of the PRO and LLA that the tobacco case collapse.
Martínez, as block head, had justified his equidistance. “There is an infernal lobby of the Sarandí tobacco company and there is an infernal lobby of Philip Morris. “Aren’t we going to say it?” In a scrum, the Massista and La Cámpora legislators abstained. Others, with K terminals, became autonomous: Carlos Castagneto voted in favor, a fact that was observed because a very detailed judicial complaint by Luis Guinle, president of the Argentine National Chamber of Tobacco Companies, weighs against the former head of the AFIP.
Toto’s praise
“We took a photo?”. The Minister of Economy, Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo, made a request that his guest, the governor of Catamarca, Raúl Jalil, could not or did not want to resist despite the fact that, at that time, Deputies were debating the Base Law. The summit had been scheduled ten days ago, at the suggestion of a mining businessman who recommended that Caputo speak with the man from Catamarca. The minister, via his secretary, sent him an email to invite him. Sick of dengue, Jalil took several days to respond.
Caputo showed, like a trophy, the postcard with the Peronist governor. Jalil called to support the Bases law and joined Osvaldo Jaldo, from Tucumán, the first to change his skin and become a libertarian. “In the broad strokes, we share the vision,” he tells Zenithal an inhabitant of the first ring of Milei. In this atmosphere, the libido is focused on gathering votes for the Senate.
With Milei acting as minister, Caputo seems to aspire to stop being just an official with experience in the financial market and contribute some dose of politics to the libertarian ecosystem. In front of Jalil, he praised Néstor Kirchner. “Néstor managed the public accounts very well. In the macro, he was different from Cristina, who did everything wrong: Néstor took care of the surpluses… like us,” he told the Catamarca native.
The governor told him that one of the senators for his province, Guillermo Andrada, is heading towards having the attitude similar to that of Silvana Ginocchio, the deputy and wife of Jalil: rejection in general but support in specific chapters such as the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI) and, perhaps, the restitution of the Income Tax.
If this position is confirmed, for UxP it is a problem: the purpose of Peronism is to reject the law because the variable of introducing changes, so that it returns to Deputies, does not seem very effective. If the law is approved with changes, in Deputies only 129 votes are needed to insist on the original wording and erase the reforms introduced by the Senate. In last week’s vote, in almost all chapters, Bases had more than 130.
At Casa Rosada they estimate that they need to confirm 5 votes to safely go to the vote. They raise the expectation that UxP will drop one of the 33 and will try to convince ‘Camau’ Espínola and Edgardo Kueider, two wild Peronists. If it does not succeed, the rejection can reach the chamber with 35 votes, just two away from stopping the law. “The count changes every day and the one with the most firepower is the Government,” they say in the Peronist bunker.
In the spotlight
The Executive follows closely, above all, Claudio Vidal from Santa Cruz, who has two senators and can break, on either side, the trend. He needs, as in the case of other provincials like Lucila Crexell, to vote against because abstention favors the one with the most votes. Doubts abound about what Lousteau, who rejected the DNU, will do.
A seduction operation began on Vidal that could put Milei’s political-conceptual corpus in conflict: the man from Santa Cruz asks that the addendum be signed to reactivate the dams built with Chinese funds, that the Río Turbio and YPF carburizing complex not be privatized. do not withdraw, as you began to do, from the province’s conventional wells. It is so much so that the Santa Cruz police prevent oil company vehicles from leaving the province.
In Deputies, the Bases were modified so that Río Turbio can be privatized up to 49%, but it is a gaseous promise: with the superpowers to merge or reorganize organizations, Milei can defund the deposit and leave all the weight to the province. With the dams, several alternatives are being evaluated: one, among several, is to concentrate only on the Jorge Cepernic, which is at 40%, and propose the possible transfer to the province. It remains to be seen, in that case, whether China agrees. Foreign Minister Diana Mondino did not help.
Inflations
Caputo anticipates that April inflation will be close to 8 points. A study by Casa Tres, the consulting firm coordinated by Mora Jozami, reflects that half of Argentines believe that inflation “is going down” but the perception changes depending on the social sector: in the high sector 59% believe it, while in the under the percentage drops to 44%.
The report provides another piece of information that is linked to that view: almost 6 out of 10 respondents are not willing to pay more expensive rates even if that is the cost of improving the economy. The percentage is increasing compared to January. In the zoom by sectors, one in three Milei voters oppose paying more expensive rates.
The partial delay – at least in the subsidies segment – in rate increases has a double logic: it seeks to sustain the decline in inflation – which, as the Casa Tres survey shows, is a political asset – and at the same time avoids unrest of an important sector that does not want to pay more for services.
In this context, Milei closed April with an uptick in rejection of his government management. According to Hugo Haime’s report of the month, disapproval of the management went from 39% to 52%. For the consultant, there was a percentage that was still neutral, without a position, but that was broken in the last month and the “neutral-don’t know” massively migrated to rejection. In addition, Haime said, the waiting period for “results” was reduced. “People began to assume that this is not going to be resolved quickly, that it is going to be long,” he said.
The behavior that the two studies show separately can explain the pragmatic turn of the Government, which began to distribute promises. The Minister of the Interior, Guillermo Francos, negotiates with the provinces and advances with agreements executed by ‘Lule’ Menem. Misiones is a witness case: Francos traveled with Lule to meet Carlos Rovira, with whom they closed an agreement. Then, for the official photo, the minister went on to greet Governor Hugo Passalacqua. The missionary leader, according to the latest ranking by CB consultants, is the one with the best image among the provincials.
Milei’s envoys brought two secret promises: funds for works for 20 billion for the “second semester” of this year and the commitment that the Nation will respect the electoral logic of Rovirism. It means lowering two flags of the mileista ideology: one is to open your wallet to reactivate public works and the other is not to get involved in the political fight in the province. The latter in Misiones has a first and last name: Pedro Puerta, son of the former interim president, Ramón.
The promise of funds for works is recurring in the talk with the governors. The oath that they will not engage in electoral entry seems more difficult. On both sides of the counter, they look like white lies to buy time. The urgency caused even Karina Milei, after eventful weeks, to visit Victoria Villarruel to carry out an action to pacify the internal front. The sister was a force against the vice president to the point that, as LLA remembers, she was opposed to her being Milei’s running mate, despite which the now president chose her as her vice president. That episode is often cited to reflect that in the underlying political issues, the decision is Milei’s, even if it goes against her sister’s position.
