Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner praised today what she perceived as Latin American successes in the Group of 20 (G20) summit in London, dpa reported. She highlighted the elimination of a graph from the summit's final document that had favoured the flexibility of labor laws. In comments to reporters at the end of the summit, Fernandez de Kirchner said she asked that the paragraph be scrapped based on Argentina's "disastrous" experience with such practices. She added that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also supported the move, arguing that he could not accept making the labour market more precarious. The Argentine president also named as a Latin American victory the changes in the credit-granting criteria at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Fernandez de Kirchner noted that the document acknowledges the "stigma" that many countries faced before the IMF, and the interpretation that conditions that were formerly imposed on loans had been "very harmful" for countries that implemented the IMF's recommendations. She added that the London summit showed evidence of a "change in discourse" by the world's richest countries in relation to the international financial system. "Reforms have been defined. Now (finance) ministers will start work to turn those reforms into a reality," she said.
