For Argentina, Coronavirus Is a Matter of Life or Debt
The pandemic and its economic turmoil may help avert a ninth default by Latin America’s second-biggest economy.
But there’s a silver lining, too.
Photographer: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images
If pre-existing conditions were destiny, Argentina would be on ventilators. South America’s second biggest economy is deep in recession, unemployment is spiking and more than half of children under 14 are poor. President Alberto Fernandez’s government is barely on speaking terms with creditors and careening again towards debt default. And all this was before coronavirus.
Yet so profound are Argentina’s self-made misfortunes that an imported contagion and the economic turmoil it has wrought have thrown out an unexpected lifeline. Whether Fernandez will grab it is unclear, but in many ways his presidency and Argentina’s fraught relations with the rest of the world are at stake.