BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — This Christmas, many Argentines will rise to a challenge written on the box of a best-selling board game "Deuda Eterna," or Eternal Debt: "Do you dare defeat the IMF?"
As Argentina's new, interim government declared Sunday it was halting payment on the country's massive foreign debt, Nelson Rodriquez rang up the till at the Toy Supermarket in Buenos Aires' Cavallito district. He'd just sold the next-to-last Eternal Debt game in his stock.
"I didn't dare put it in the window; people would have thrown a brick through," he said. "They hate those words."
In Spanish, the game's title is a wordplay on "deuda externa," or foreign debt.
For years, Argentina has dug itself deeper into debt on international markets, while maintaining a top-heavy government bureaucracy despite privatizing much of the country's industry.
When a bitter recession hit nearly four years ago, this once-prosperous country of 36 million found it increasingly difficult to keep up with payments and fell back on the International Monetary Fund.
In return for throwing a lifeline, the Fund made its customary recommendations: tighten fiscal policy and continue liberalizing trade and investment.
But at the time, tighter fiscal policy only succeeded in pushing South America's second-largest economy deeper into the slump.
So who's to blame? Argentina or the IMF?
"I think the way of linking the payments to austerity policy was not correct," said Oscar Liberman, president of a local think tank, Fundacion Mercado. "I also think there were people in the Fund who didn't really understand Argentina's situation."
But he said the IMF cannot be blamed for the Argentine crisis because the government "never presented the Fund with an alternative plan."
"When Argentina had to impose austerity, it always went for the easy way out," Liberman said — cutting lower-scale state workers' salaries and pensions rather than slashing its bloated, profligate government.
That finally backfired on the increasingly unpopular government of former President Fernando de la Rua last week, when Argentines' patience with his and the IMF's austerity policies snapped.
Thousands poured onto the streets, engulfing the country in its worst frenzy of looting and rioting in a decade. After two days, de la Rua was forced to step down.
When the new interim President Adolfo Rodriguez Saa took office Sunday, one of his first measures was to suspend foreign debt payments. The announcement got him a raucous standing ovation in congress.
IMF and U.S. Treasury officials were tightlipped about Sunday's announcement.
But on Friday, after de la Rua left office, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said Argentina was only partly to blame.
"There have been errors by international financial institutions," Vedrine told RMC-Info radio, adding that excessive and poorly timed demands had been placed on the country.
According to Peru's Finance Minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, "the IMF is partly to blame because it didn't sound the alarm in time and then took a tough stance at a moment when things got extremely difficult."
Many Argentines, who blamed de la Rua for putting the interests of foreign banks and the IMF above their own, generally welcomed the moratorium.
"If you have the option of feeding hungry kids on the street or paying the IMF, of course there's no contest," said Mariana Alfaro, who runs a small hotel in Palermo Viejo, Buenos Aires' bohemian quarter.
Toy store owner Rodriguez disagreed.
"I am a businessman," he said. "What you borrow, you must pay for."
But as he handed over the "Deuda Eterna" box, showing a fistful of crumpled dollars crushed in an upturned Uncle Sam hat, he gave a recommendation: "Read the rules, they're quite close to reality."
To play the game, which looks like Monopoly, players pretend to be Latin American countries, rich in natural resources. They must industrialize and produce goods to be exported to rich Northern Hemisphere markets.
There's just one catch.
"The capital is provided by the International Monetary Fund with all that implies: conditions, devaluations, etc.," reads the box.
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