By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 16 2000 (IPS)

Argentine President Fernando de la Rúa’s international tour to the United States and the Rio Group summit in Colombia this week will culminate in a visit to Egypt, where he will take part in next week’s annual summit of the Group of 15 (G-15) developing nations.

In the past five years, De la Rúa’s predecessor Carlos Menem (1989-99) sent his vice-president to the G-15 annual summits in his stead. But, as an official with the foreign ministry’s office of international economic affairs, Adriana Molina, told IPS, “this administration is sending another message.”

The G-15 is currently made up of 17 countries representing developing regions: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe.

De la Rúa’s participation in next week’s G-15 gathering will be partly in response to a rule that the head of state or government of any participating nation cannot miss more than four summits in a row.

But the new government, in office since December, also means “to forge closer ties with countries of Africa and Asia that were ignored by the previous administration,” said Molina.

The main objective of the president’s coming visit to Cairo is to restore ties with Africa, a continent with which the Menem administration had virtually no contact, with the exception of South Africa.

“The idea is to reinforce the weight of this forum as an interlocutor vis-a-vis the Group of Eight most industrialised countries, and to set up a channel for dialogue,” Molina explained.

In that sense, while the search for new markets and trade and cooperation agreements is the underlying aim of De la Rúa’s trip to Egypt, his participation in the summit will also mark a major shift from the stance taken by the Menem administration, which abruptly abandoned its participation in the Non-Aligned Movement in 1990.

The decision to pull away from that forum was explained at the time as part of a policy aimed at leaving behind political associations with poor countries, and putting priority on relations with the world’s richest, developed nations, the potential source of the investment needed for Argentina’s economic development.

Under Menem, Argentina’s foreign policy was explicitly aligned with the United States, leading this Southern Cone nation to support that country’s decisions on the international scene as an ally.

During the Menem administration, Argentina was the only Latin American nation to send ships to back the US-led anti-Iraq coalition during the Gulf War.

In its bid to gain the confidence of investors, the Menem administration also sought to win a place in international forums like the United Nations Security Council and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — widely known as the rich nations’ club (which did admit Mexico).

As demonstrated during his first official visit to the United States, Monday through Thursday, De la Rúa still puts great store by Argentina’s strong relations with Washington.

But he would like that “friendship” to have a lower profile than it did under Menem, whose foreign minister Guido Di Tella described Argentina’s ties with the United States as “carnal relations.”

The president’s current international tour began with his trip to the United States this week, and his meetings with President Bill Clinton, bankers, investors and the heads of the multilateral financial institutions.

In those meetings, the president, who left behind mounting civil unrest in Argentina over a series of fiscal adjustment measures adopted by his government such as labour reforms, boasted that he was a “big miser” with respect to spending.

He also confirmed that his administration would stick, at all costs, to the currency board economic model that pegs the peso to the dollar.

But along with those statements aimed at generating investor confidence, De la Rúa quietly asked Clinton and creditors to take a more flexible stance with respect to the fiscal targets set for Argentina, to enable his government to strike some sort of balance between efforts to meet those goals and addressing the increasingly strident social demands.

The president apparently met with some success. While Clinton pledged to back Argentina’s request, it was reported that the International Monetary Fund agreed that getting slightly off track with respect to the fiscal targets was preferable to a rise in social unrest when the government has been in office for just six months.

De la Rúa won the October elections at the head of an Alliance made up of centrist and left-leaning parties. But since he took office — inheriting a serious fiscal imbalance and a deep recession — his government has adopted widely unpopular structural adjustment measures.

The second stop on the president’s tour took him to Cartagena, a resort town in Colombia, where close to 20 heads of state and government from Latin America and the Caribbean were meeting Thursday and Friday at the summit of the Rio Group, the region’s highest-level forum for political consultation and coordination.

The leaders underlined the need to “democratise” the architecture of the multilateral financial entities.

De la Rúa’s speech, meanwhile, focused on equity, and called on the international lending institutions to show “greater social sensitivity.”

He also maintained that Latin America must improve the “quality” of its democracies — interpreted as an indirect allusion to Peru, where President Alberto Fujimori was recently elected to a third straight term in a widely questioned poll.

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