‘The Argentine joke’ and Cristina Fernandez as Pinocchio, headlines of Brazil’s influential magazine Veja

One of Brazil’s most influential magazines and with the largest circulation, Veja, included a controversial piece which questions Argentina’s economic and social statistics than come under the responsibility of the non less famous Indec.

Under the heading of “The Argentine Joke”, the article is not kind with Argentine culture and is illustrated with President Cristina Fernandez as Pinocchio, the long nosed child fiction marionette whose nose keeps growing for not saying the truth.

“Cristina Kirchner with her economic stats does the same as her militants with history facts, a coarse manipulation of reality” says Veja adding crudely that “falsifying history is in fact one of the characteristics of the (Argentine) national culture”, says Veja.

“To hide the wreck of her mishandling of the economy, Cristina Kirchner uses the fable of the present as intensely as she does with the past. Official economic stats have become a joke. The official annual inflation rate is 10%, the true real value is 24% with the projection of reaching 30% towards the end of the year”, points out the article.

Likewise Veja argues that as “with authoritarian governments it does not need to prove coherence”, and the country was forced to appeal to the freezing of prices to tame the increases but overall the rise in the value of goods and services runs quicker than that of salaries.

With a strong degree of caustic irony Veja says that “it is going to be fun to follow this tragic-comedy from the balcony, because for the Argentines it will inevitably become a tragedy”.

Veja’s circulation is approximately a million copies and is weekly reading for the political establishment and business community.