In the West, whether it is anxieties over ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks, the malign influence of lobbyists and campaign finance on the democratic process, or suspicions of backroom deals in free trade negotiations, the political narrative about corporations is often over how the unaccountable multinational corporation is using its economic, legal, and media muscle to thwart oversight of its activities by once-sovereign states. In Latin America it can often seem the opposite way around, where an over-mighty executive can fiddle politically inconvenient economic statistics, intimidate the media or unilaterally nationalise even a large foreign company’s assets. Argentina’s ongoing debt dispute recently entered its fourteenth year with elements of both.

The story of Argentina’s decade-plus debt saga is a painful tale of American-style financial capitalism meets Latin American left-wing nationalism. Shortly after the catastrophic 2001 crash, the Argentinian government reneged on $81 billion in debt. Since then two restructurings have taken place in 2005 and 2010 that together saw 93% of the original creditors exchange their defaulted debt for cheaper new securities. But a few took a different path – they sold their bonds for a low price to hedge funds such as NML Capital. These funds then used the New York courts, under whose law the original bonds were written, to chase Argentina for repayment in full, principal plus interest. Barred from paying the majority of their creditors by the US Supreme Court unless they met this obligation, Argentina defaulted again last summer. Behind Argentina’s defiance is an iron determination not to revise the 2005 and 2010 settlements.

Argentina’s outgoing president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has presided over this odyssey since becoming Argentina’s first female president in 2007, though the roots go back further, to the 2003 presidency of her husband Néstor Kirchner and to the even earlier chaotic fiscal aftermath of Argentina’s 2001 default. Ms Fernández has upheld her deceased husband’s economic legacy in her own presidency earning admiration and scorn in equal measure from media observers abroad. The spectacle of American hedge funds using US courts to go over the head of Buenos Aires has been political catnip for anti-American nationalists in Latin America. While orthodox economists have argued that President Fernández locked Argentina out of international financial markets and has created a thriving black currency market through inflationary policies and by interfering with official statistics, progressives have cheered her on for standing up to fiscal speculators and big business. Continuing financial scandals like the tax evasion revelations at HSBC mean that seven years after the Great Recession Argentina’s tirades against hedge funds continue to win a sympathetic hearing from many.