Observer
July 10, 2011
Protesters on the streets of Athens this summer have been brandishing banners depicting a panicky helicopter airlift. Not Saigon at the height of the Vietnam war, but Buenos Aires in 2001, when Fernando de la Rúa fled from the roof of his presidential palace to escape riots in the streets.
Argentina, stuck in a painful recession since 1998, had done everything the International Monetary Fund had told it to do. After several bailouts, the government imposed wave after wave of eye-watering austerity measures, as prescribed by the "Washington consensus", and sought a voluntary restructuring with its private sector creditors, all of which will sound familiar to the Greeks.
Yet the economic crisis continued to worsen. In December 2001, as the government slapped a limit on cash withdrawals – the so-called corralito – to prevent a destabilising run on the banks, the IMF effectively pulled the plug, saying it could not complete the latest of many reviews of Argentina's economic policies – a condition of it receiving continued financial support. "Within a month of this announcement," as a subsequent internal IMF review put it, "economic, social and political dislocation occurred simultaneously".
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