Lally Weymouth is a senior associate editor at The Washington Post.

During their 12-year rule, Presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Néstor Kirchner isolated Argentina from the world, cut it off from the global economy and drained its treasury. Now the country has a new leader: Mauricio Macri, just two months into his first term, is trying to restore Buenos Aires’s standing. His immediate task is to end a dispute with U.S. creditors that began after the country defaulted on its debt in 2001; American hedge fund managers argued in a U.S. court that Argentina shouldn’t be allowed to pay new bondholders until it paid off the old ones, thus freezing it out of international credit markets. Macri spoke with The Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth in his office in the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s White House, about the economy, Venezuela and alleged Iranian terrorists in the nation’s capital. Edited excerpts follow.

Many people thought you were not going to win the election in November against the Kirchners’ handpicked successor.

We made possible what was really impossible. At some moment the Argentinian people decided to change and move forward, and lose the ties with our past and to better our future.

Does that mean no more of the Kirchners? It seems like they left you in a difficult situation.

Yes, unfortunately they succeeded in isolating Argentina. But the Argentinians have decided that this is the time to move forward. In addition to incredible natural resources, we have unique human resources. Even if what we have inherited from the past government is not the best scenario, it will not stop us from developing the country and fulfilling my principal commitments.

Is your government stuck with a lot of the debts accrued by the Kirchner government? I heard they left bills for the advertisements they ran attacking you during the campaign?

Yes, hundreds of millions. It’s pretty incredible. TV, newspapers and radio.

You have already lifted a lot of controls on exports.

Exports, imports, outflows, inflows — we have unified the exchange rate.

You let the peso float against the dollar, and it devalued by 30 percent, correct?

Yes.

People were apprehensive about that.

They were afraid it would cause a worse crisis than the one we were suffering. But I was sure that our problem wasn’t the exchange rate. Our problem is trying to reduce inflation. My main commitment that I assumed during the campaign is to gain a country with zero poverty.

You lifted foreign exchange controls so one can take dollars out of the country. You have also attacked subsidies?

Yes, keeping the electricity subsidies for lower-class people and reducing them for the other social levels.

What do you plan to do next?

We are trying to solve all the conflicts that we inherited with the world — starting with the holdouts [among the U.S. hedge funds mulling the bond deal]. I am quite optimistic. We have already reached an agreement with some of them, and we expect to reach a reasonable agreement with all of them in the next couple of weeks.

Do you think you’ll reach an agreement with the founder and CEO of Elliott Management, Paul Singer, whose firm is one of the remaining holdouts?

Yes, we have an open and fair attitude to a final agreement; that is what we have already expressed to the [American] mediator named by the judge [Thomas Griesa, a New York federal judge presiding over the case].

You need to get inflation under control.

Yes. . . . The origin of this inflation is that we had a government that, even though it increased taxes, still accumulated increasing deficits. We are committed to reducing our expenses so as to keep reducing inflation. We expect to come back to one-digit inflation in less than three years.

What is the inflation rate now?

Now it is at 28 or 30 percent.

Since 2005, when President George W. Bush came to the Summit of the Americas in Argentina and there were riots against him and the United States, no U.S. official has set foot in Argentina. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government was widely viewed as anti-American. Is this a new era in Argentina-U.S. relations?

That is right. I am ready for a long-term, mature relationship that is productive for both of us. We want to be part of the 21st century. There is no room for isolation. . . . The only people who were damaged were Argentinians. [The day after this interview, President Obama announced that he will visit the country in March.]

On your election night, you had Lilian Tintori, the wife of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, onstage with you.

In the tough moments that we suffered under the military government here, we had many refugees from Argentina going to live in Venezuela. Venezuela always cared for our human rights. So I am doing exactly what they have done in the past for us.

People were impressed, thinking at last someone in Latin America is speaking out to defend human rights in Venezuela. Are you willing to be the new voice who speaks out for human rights in Venezuela?

I am ready to be the voice to defend human rights in the whole world. Argentina wants to be part of the nations that are battling against terrorism and drug trafficking and defending human rights and democracy.

You made drug trafficking a priority in your campaign. A lot of drugs transit through Argentina to Europe. Reportedly, some drug-traffic proceeds go to fund the Islamic State and Boko Haram. What can you do to curb the growing drug trade in Argentina?

First, we have to recognize we have a problem. The last government always denied that we were having a huge increase in drug trafficking in Argentina. Now we are starting to work seriously on the matter, purchasing radar to control our frontiers. But things are not going to change overnight.

The previous government refused to acknowledge it existed?

They did the same thing with inflation. They fired the experts who worked at the National Bureau of Statistics and started to declare what they wanted, not what was really going on. Now we are committed to work with the truth. Ruling a country means that you have to be committed to the truth.

You have a minority in the National Congress, and of course you need to pass laws. But so far you seem to have been successful in reaching out to and making alliances with parts of the opposition.

In Argentina we are changing to a whole new generation of politicians. They share my idea that Argentina has to be part of the 21st century and has to have an important role in Latin America and the world. Under my agenda of zero poverty and improving the quality of our democracy, many leaders of the opposition are willing to work together.

You rescinded a deal that the Kirchner government made with Iran to jointly investigate the terrorist attack on a Jewish center in 1994, which Iran is accused of having sponsored. Do you have a plan to seek justice for the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was about to testify about Iran’s involvement when he died under mysterious circumstances?

Both subjects are related. The prosecutor was denouncing the president and her cabinet, saying this [agreement] was illegal. Suddenly, a couple of days after this, Nisman was found dead. So now we have to solve both questions — was Nisman right to denounce the [deal]? Second, why is Nisman dead? His family and others are saying he was murdered. So we need to know the truth. Again, for me, ruling a country is saying the truth.

What’s the path to economic growth?

We are talking about renewable energy in addition to shale gas [and food-prodution]. ... Strategic sectors can grow a lot, and we can double our exports in less than 10 years.

You missed the most prosperous years, before commodity prices started falling in 2015.

The best years for Latin America, yes. It depends on what happens in the future with China.

How does the China slowdown impact Argentina?

It affects everybody in the world. But the prices we get, especially for our agribusiness produce, are good.

The government of the last president depended on China a lot.

Yes, but they didn’t build up a long-term relationship. China was a way to solve short-term problems [with currency swaps]. My idea is to transform this relationship in a strategic way. We need to export more value-added products to China, not only commodities. And we can buy from them some of the infrastructure we need.

Twitter: @LallyWeymouth

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