''ARGENTINA'S POVERTY-STARVING ARTICULATES'' : 2/5

ARGENTINA'S MISERY could revive populism.............. Right On:

Cristina Fernendez de Kirchner, who faces a series of criminal indictments for corruption. Her unbridled spending helped deliver the crisis that Mr. Maciri inherited.

Her return would resonate as rebuke of market-oriented overhauls while potentially yanking Argentina back to its accustomed preserve : left wing populism, the uncomfortable proximity to insolvency.

The Argentina's peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year, prompting the central bank to lift interest rates to a commerce-suffocating level above 60 percent.

Argentina was forced to secure a $57 billion rescue from the International Monetary Fund, a profound indignity given that the fund is widely despised here for the austerity it imposed in the late  1990s, turning an economic downturn into a depression.

For Mr. Macri, time does not appear to be in abundant supply. The spending cuts he delivered hit the populace immediately. The promised benefits of his changes - a stable currency, tamer inflation, fresh investment and jobs - could take years to materialize, leaving Argentina's angry and yearning for the past.

In much of South America, left-wing governments have taken power in recent decades as an angry corrective to dogmatic prescriptions from Washington, where the United States, Treasury and I.M.F  have focused on the confidence of global investors as the key to development.

Left-wing populism has aimed to redistribute the gains from the wealthy to everyone else. It has aided the poor - while generating its own woes - corruption and depression in Brazil, runaway inflation and financial ruin in Argentina.

In Venezuela, uninhibited spending has turned the country with the world's largest proven oil reserves into a land where children starve.

Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of  market forces tempered by social programs. In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect.
 
But in the view of the beleaguered Argentines, the country has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember.

''We live patching things up,'' said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. ''We never fix things. I always say, ''Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis..

The honor and sad serving of the latest global operational research on Argentina. Poverty and Future, continues.