Buenos Aires, Oct. 20 (EFE) .- The president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, said this Sunday in the debate with the rest of the candidates for next Sunday's elections that Peronism "has always used the poor", while his Major adversary, the Peronist Alberto Fernández, accused him of multiplying it during his tenure.
"It is outrageous to hear them talk about poverty. I do not believe anything. They ruled 24 of the last 30 years. And the only great idea they had was to hide it," said the president in block on social development, environment and housing of the second and last of the televised debates for the elections.
Macri recalled that Fernández, head of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Peronist Governments of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and of the first months of Cristina Fernández (2007-2015), intervened the National Statistics Institute in 2007 and in 2014 wrote a article telling the president that it was "immoral to hide poverty."
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"They have always used the poor, they have always done clientelism," said the current president, who has been badly injured in the polls because of the serious crisis that has been dragging the country for more than a year and a half, which brought the level of poverty to 35 , 4% of the population in the first half of this year, according to the latest official data.
Earlier, Fernández had recriminated his opponent that when his term ends, the country will have 40% of the poor and reproached him for coming to power in December 2015, promising to reach "zero poverty and lied."
"Poverty multiplied it, that was very serious, but the most serious thing is how it multiplied hunger," said the leader of the Frente de Todos, who has led Cristina Fernández as vice president and has been a favorite in the polls since the August primary will beat Macri's candidacy, head of Together for Change, by 16 points.
For the Peronist, he must "embarrass" that Argentina, which has the capacity to produce food for 400 million inhabitants, cannot feed 15 million "who have been left homeless by Macri's policy".
"We have to deal much better and pay more attention to poverty and hunger. This government passed all limits and made people go hungry. We have to take care of those people, the president does not," he said.
In this sense, Macri argued that he wants to "occupy himself" and deals with poverty, and appreciated that during his administration he would be measured again statistically and "tell the truth".
"And taking care of ourselves, we managed to reach the lowest poverty of the last 25 years in December 2017. Unfortunately, the April crisis went back what we had achieved, but we still work on structural things," he emphasized, to assess the work of his team in aspects such as the infrastructure of disadvantaged areas.
"Enduring the Kirchner aggression is hard, but enduring that they say they are the ones who know is impossible … that they have the solutions to the problems they generated," he said.
For Macri, it is "incredible" that since Peronism they believe that the country forgot that they "lied 12 years".
"That they delivered the destroyed country in their economy and infected it with drug trafficking. But the worst of all is that I will have to listen to it in 3 weeks, telling me the same things. I hope to be earning heaven for life," the president concluded , in reference to an eventual third debate in case of reaching a second round on November 24. EFE
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