Buenos Aires — Argentina is a beautiful and charming country filled with people eager to show it off to visitors. But even they admit that, economically, they feel they are living in a Twilight Zone episode that never ends. A lot of them hope that Sunday’s election will usher in real change and put the nation “on the path to becoming a normal country,” in the words of the Acton Institute’s Alex Chafuen, an economist from Argentina.
The economy is likely to shrink 2.5 percent during 2023, while inflation is expected to hit 200 percent by the end of the year. More than 40 percent of the population is classified as living in poverty. Argentina has defaulted on its international sovereign debt three times in the past 20 years, and this week its unreliability prompted its neighbors Bolivia and Paraguay to stop shipments of bananas and pineapples. “Yes, we really have no bananas today,” Josh Mills, an American businessman in Argentina, quipped to me.
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