In addition to closing the agreement that placed Argentina in the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s most important foreign policy program, President Alberto Fernández filled out the meeting he had with Xi Jinping, in Beijing, this Sunday (6), with jokes and praise.
In a moment of relaxation, according to reports to the newspaper Clarín by members of the Latin American entourage who attended the meeting, Fernández told Xi that if he were Argentine, he “would be a Peronist”, referring to the political current he and his deputy, Cristina Kirchner, are part of it.
Also according to the newspaper, the Argentine president took the opportunity to review the history of the political group and “its intentions to build a more industrialized country”, although, according to Fernández, “from time to time there would be a military coup or a neoliberal to go back”. The last of them would be the predecessor, Mauricio Macri, “who took a loan from the International Monetary Fund”.
It wouldn’t have been the only joke. The president, according to Clarín, told his Chinese counterpart that, in the 1950s, Argentine leader Juan Domingo Perón asked his economy minister to send food to China, at a time just after the revolution that brought the communists to power.
That minister was Antonio Cafiero, grandfather of the current Minister of Foreign Affairs of Argentina, Santiago Cafiero, who is accompanying the trip to Asia and who, during Fernández’s government, was also the Peronist’s chief of staff. In addition to China, the Argentine leader has already passed through Russia and will still go to Barbados.
In Moscow, where he met Vladimir Putin, Fernández asked the Russian president to support Argentina’s entry into the BRICS, a bloc formed by Brazil, India and South Africa, as well as China and Russia. On Sunday, he repeated his appeal to Xi, and, according to official sources, the leaders nodded.
As for the praise, Clarín defined, based on reports from government officials, that the dialogue with Xi was “very cordial” and said that Fernández thanked him for his cooperation during the Covid pandemic, with the shipment of Sinopharm vaccines to Argentina. . On the other hand, the Chinese leader reportedly said that he followed with interest the Argentine president’s speech in July last year, when he participated in a meeting of the Communist Party and political parties around the world as leader of the Justicialist Party.
In the most formal part of the meeting, China and Argentina signed an agreement that allows the South American country to join the Belt and Road Initiative, the main foreign policy project of the Asian nation through the construction of ports, railways, airports or parks. industrial. These infrastructures give China access to more markets and open new avenues of expansion for its companies.
China has already signed pacts related to the initiative with about 150 countries. According to the Ministry of Commerce, Chinese companies invested more than US$20 billion in projects under the program in 2021.
The agreement signed in Beijing could generate investments of more than US$ 23 billion for Argentina.
Source: Folha
