President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will board a plane headed for Angola at 8pm tonight.
The visit is part of a mission to increase trade with the African country. The Argentine president will arrive in Angola at noon tomorrow in time for a trade fair organized for the delegation.
Accompanying the President in the official delegation are Foreign Minister Hector Timerman, Ministers Julio De Vido and Debora Giorgi and Commerce Minister Guillermo Moreno who led a similar mission with 200 businessmen two months ago.
A ship departed some days ago from Argentina to the African coast with a tonne of domestic produce to meet the Argentine delegation in Angola.
On the first business venture to Angola, Moreno was impressed by Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos. According to the newspaper Clarín, Moreno called Dos Santos a “Peronist partner.”
Angola’s standards of living are extremely low. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates are among the poorest in the world. The United Nations ranks the country 148 out of 187, according to the Human Development Index.
However, Angola has vast mineral and petroleum reserves, and its economy has grown rapidly over the past two decades.
During Fernández de Kirchner absence, Beatriz Rojkés of Alperovich will serve as Head of the Executive, as Vice President Amado Boudou is in Switzerland.
The business delegation is comprised of representatives from the food, textile, automotive, agricultural machinery, footwear, and leather goods industries as well as other businesses whose products are on the ship headed for Luanda.
Before returning, Fernández de Kirchner will sign bilateral trade agreements with Dos Santos, securing a step towards closer economic partnership between the two countries.
CFK reminds me of one of those early European explorers who arrived in the mysterious orient, or where ever, with a boat-load of exotic goodies to impress the ignorant natives. I think CFK will find the Angolans a little more hard-headed and not particularly interested in this whole “Peronist” thing. Remember, that part of the world has just emerged from decades of bloody revolution and civil wars and are more interested in getting ahead than revolutionary posturing. They probably haven’t heard of the Falklands, either.
What a condescending and ridiculous comment. It’s a trade mission between the 3rd largest economy in Sub-saharan Africa and the 3rd largest economy in Latin America, in the context of increasing political and economic interactions along the so-called “South-South” axis. The world is changing, these countries are finally gaining more control of their own destinies and comments like the one above only indicate that a few people haven’t quite caught up with the times yet.
Yes, but you don’t find presidential delegations from other countries bringing a ship load of goodies on official visits. If Argentinean products are that great, surely they are already in Angola, which is almost directly across “the pond” from Argentina. If Argentina concentrated less on out-dated failed nationalist socialist economic fantasies and encouraged and fostered a serious business climate where enterprise, risk-taking and hard work were rewarded instead of penalized, there would be no need for CFK to be followed around the world by that ship full of goodies. The world has changed since 1989, but CFK is firmly rooted in the 1940s Peronism and the “Class Struggle.”
Thank you, Celina. That was quite to the point.