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Nusa Dua (Indonesia) (AFP) – The Argentine president, Alberto Fernández, experienced a convulsive first day at the G20 summit in Bali, victim of “gastritis” which, however, did not prevent his meeting with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The Argentine president had pinned hopes on the second meeting this year with Xi, from which he made a commitment to expand his currency exchange swap agreements with the Bank of China by 5 billion dollars.
“President Xi informed us that he had authorized the Chinese government to freely dispose of 35 billion yuan in Argentina, which means 5 billion dollars,” Fernández said in a subsequent appearance.
The “swap” is an exchange of currencies between two countries, which has no cost while the currencies are not used but remains accounted for in the reserves, in this case of Argentina.
Until now, the amount of the exchange mechanism agreed with China amounted to 130,000 million yuan, about 18,500 million dollars, but Buenos Aires had been asking for an extension for months.
The Chinese state media did not record this pact in their reports on the meeting between the two leaders.
This agreement supposes “to have 5,000 million dollars more in the reserves at the time of arranging the action of the Central Bank for the strengthening of our currency”, affirmed in the same round the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa.
In the last meeting of presidents in February, on the occasion of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Argentina joined the Chinese macro-project of the Belt and Road Initiative, which, according to the Casa Rosada, will involve financing for investments of more than 23,700 millions of dollars.
“Hypotension and dizziness”
But the high-level meeting in Bali was on the air for much of the morning, in which the Argentine president “suffered an episode of hypotension and dizziness” that forced him to absent himself from the debates between the G20 leaders and go to the hospital for a review.
There, he was diagnosed with “erosive gastritis with signs of bleeding,” indicated the Argentine presidency. “He received the appropriate medical treatment, being in good health and resuming his activities with medical supervision,” she added.
“I thank you all for your concern. I’m fine, I’m working well,” Fernández later said.
However, the drop in tension meant that the Argentine, the only Latin American leader present in Bali due to the absence of the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro and the Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was absent from the debate sessions scheduled for the first day of the summit.
Due to a medical recommendation, he also did not attend the gala dinner organized by the Indonesian president and on Wednesday he will only have a meeting with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, and an act with the head of the Spanish government. Pedro Sanchez.
“Regain Peace”
In the first meeting of the day, focused on food security and nutrition, the Minister of Foreign Relations, Santiago Cafiero, was in charge of delivering the speech prepared by Fernández.
The foreign minister called on the leaders to “restore peace and contribute to global recovery” and underlined “the effects of war” throughout the world.
“In the northern hemisphere, the merchants of death trade lethal weapons, but in the southern hemisphere, food becomes more expensive or lacks and what ends up killing is not bullets or missiles, but poverty and hunger,” he said.
The foreign minister highlighted the especially negative impact of the war in Latin America, which has already been deeply hit by the pandemic and registered a 27-year setback in poverty levels, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ( ECLAC).
“Latin America and the Caribbean became the region in the world that lost the most years in life expectancy. Now we must face the effects of the war,” he said.
