Opinion Sur
Vulture funds are still operating, this time threatening the successful process of debt restructuring that Argentina carried out with the approval of almost 93% of its creditors. The modus operandi has been described in several publications and in well-founded presentations of the Argentinean Government to United Nations, OAS, UNASUR and other regional and international forums. It is clear that vulture funds based in tax havens act as speculators specialized in extracting from nations and their peoples enormous amounts of value they did not generate themselves. In simple words their actions are a fraud they manage to commit by taking advantage of legal loopholes in regulations that certain judges pass. Their owners and those who run them are multimillionaires with fortunes often of doubtful origin; they do not need the money they claim, they also know their conduct is illegitimate and that it will affect millions of victims, which they do not mind. They count with the complicity of lawyers, communicators, politicians and organizations of civil society that receive a portion of the extracted resources as fees or donations.
It infuriates to verify that the New York State Judiciary and the United States Supreme Court itself validate the actions of vulture funds based on contractual clauses they interpret in their favor. Their rulings might have whatever grounds they want to acknowledge but, ultimately, they are part of some sort of judiciary hypocrisy that ignores the consequences on the real lives of the peoples. In practice, the judicial doctrines they invoke end up condoning abuses, serious injustices, punishments on innocent victims from the societies that are trampled. These magistrates cause serious harm when they do not manage to rise above and interpret the deep meaning of laws so that, instead of granting oxygen to financial speculation, prevent speculators such as the vulture funds to keep profiting frantically at the expense of others.
Let’s hope this painful episode can be used to mobilize social and economic forces of this globalized world to transform the financial system, blocking the way of these serial predators and their accomplices.
Cordial greeting,
The Editors
