Argentina’s Long Road to Ruin

“You’ve arrived in Argentina at a historic time of hyperinflation,” our tour guide, Celeste, said. On July 2, Argentina’s centrist economy minister,

Martín Guzmán,

resigned. The peso’s value plummeted 26% in the next 26 days. Three weeks later, President

Alberto Fernández,

a left-leaning law professor who took office in December 2019, sacked Mr. Guzmán’s successor.

The official inflation rate is now 64% and economists forecast it could reach 90% by December. Wages haven’t kept up, and the gap between the official and black-market exchange rates hasn’t been this wide since Argentina’s hyperinflation crisis of 1989-90, when inflation soared to 2,600%. Celeste told us that Argentina was one of the world’s seven richest countries at the turn of the last century thanks to its agricultural abundance. “People used to say someone is as rich as an Argentine.”

Buenos Aires’s elegant boulevards and Parisian-inspired architecture, built during those heady times, are still beautiful. But bad governance has taken a heavy toll. More than a third of Argentines live in poverty and tens of thousands of small businesses closed during the pandemic. Celeste, like nearly every young person we met, is plotting an escape to Europe or North America.

Mr. Fernández and his powerful vice president,

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,

who was the country’s first lady (2003-07) and served as president (2007-15), imposed lockdowns for more than eight months, lasting into 2021. Like many U.S. politicians, Mr. Fernández flouted his own decrees, hosting an unmasked birthday party for his wife and welcoming numerous guests, including a dog trainer, to the presidential palace.

Celeste showed us a memorial in the city’s Plaza de Mayo—thousands of stones bearing the names of Covid victims. The embarrassingly large tribute was initially removed by the government, but after a demonstration, it was left in place. Some 91% of Argentina’s citizens have received at least one dose of the vaccine, yet nearly 130,000 have perished from the virus. The country’s per capita Covid mortality rate is the eighth-highest in the world, according to Statista.

Argentina ranks 126th in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index and 96th on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, behind developing countries like Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kosovo. A bloated public sector weighs down Latin America’s third-largest economy. Roughly half the country either works for the government or depends on it for social welfare benefits.

A large table full of recent college graduates we met in San Antonio de Areco, in the country’s gaucho heartland, spoke of plans to use long-dead ancestors to gain European Union passports. Argentina’s universities are free, even for foreigners, but getting a job that pays enough to move out of mom and dad’s house is daunting for those without connections, they said. No one I met had confidence in the Fernández administration, but few held out hope that opposition parties would do better.

Mr. Fernández closed the country to foreigners from March 2020 to November 2021, crippling the important tourism sector. Even now little is being done to attract tourists. And while his predecessor sought to isolate

Nicolás Maduro,

Mr. Fernandez re-established diplomatic relations with Venezuela in April, arguing that human-rights violations have been “dissipating.” At the recent Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Argentine leader chastised the Biden administration for excluding Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

The left’s mistakes in Argentina—hypocritical and ineffective lockdowns, profligate social spending, high taxes, and too many restrictions on commerce—are eerily similar to the priorities of the American left. Argentina is a beautiful country with proud and resilient people who deserve better leadership.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the country’s best-known writer, was a believer in individual liberty. Perpetually mistrustful of government, Borges ran afoul of