Is INDEC Another Victim of the Argentine Government’s Meddling?
Argentina’s National Bureau of International Accounts, known as INDEC in Spanish, has been suffering from the intervention of the administration of President Nestor Kirchner, who is obsessed with maintaining his country’s annual inflation below double digits. Guillermo Moreno, Argentina’s secretary of interior commerce, has been pressuring providers of such public services as transportation, health insurance and tourism to comply with this goal. Yet the future of INDEC, which is in charge of measuring such indicators as poverty, unemployment and the trade balance, is at risk because the institution’s credibility is now suspect, say analysts. According to rumors circulating around the capital, Guillermo Moreno threatens business executives and forces them to lower their prices, speaks in an authoritarian tone in those private meetings and even puts his feet on the desk as if he were a Mafia boss. Although those kinds of stories are frequently told in office corridors, they are very hard
