Often compared to Argentina’s Eva Peron, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner created a legacy of her own in 2011 when she won a landslide reelection, securing 53 percent of the vote – the biggest win since a democracy replaced a seven-year military dictatorship in 1983.
Ms. Fernandez became the first female president elected in this South American country in 2007, and her reelection challenged critics who said she rode the coattails of her husband, former president Nestor Kirchner, into politics.
A veteran lawyer and legislator, Fernandez entered politics in the 1980s and became a senator in 1995. She and Mr. Kirchner, who passed away in 2010, were close political confidants, practicing unconventional economic policies based on state spending and, until recently, virtually ignoring bondholders trying to collect some of the billions of dollars in Argentina’s unpaid debt. Some say her economic policies put the country at risk due to high – and some say underreported – inflation rates.
Under Fernandez’s leadership, Argentina has made strides to address human rights abuses from the years of dictatorship and became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage. The president has moved toward negotiations with the IMF over paying Argentina’s debts after years of hostility.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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