Guillermo Moreno

Guillermo Moreno (born 15 October 1955) is an Argentine politician.

In 1970, the Moreno family purchased a house in the neighborhood of Villa Lugano.

During the years that followed, Moreno began to be politically active.

He is said to have been an active member of the left-wing group Peronist Youth, which is most well known for its resistance to dictatorships in Argentina, although some acquaintances have said he was an Catholic activist.

By 1982, he had become firmly a Peronist activist.

After democracy returned to Argentina, he opened a hardware store, Distribuidora America, in the town of San Martin, and completed his degree in economics at the Argentine University of Business (UADE).

His first government position was Under-Secretary of Production in the Buenos Aires City Government, under mayor Carlos Grosso, in the early 1990s.

He was one of the members of the Calafate Group, a think-tank created by Kirchner and others as a forum to foster ideas that would reverse the neo-liberal policies of the 1990s.

He later became an assistant to the Trade Secretary during the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde (2002–2003).

Moreno was linked with economists Eduardo Curia, Pablo Challú, and Daniel Carbonetto and with union leader Omar Viviani.

He was also an advisor to the Argentine Workers Movement (MTA).

He later served as an advisor to Pablo Challú at the Ministry of Domestic Trade and as an official in the Ministry for the Protection of Competition, both under the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde.

Moreno became close to Néstor Kirchner before Kirchner became president in 2003.

He served from 2005 to 2013 as Secretary of Domestic Trade, a position to which he was appointed by President Néstor Kirchner and in which he remained under the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner until his resignation, in the midst of scandal, in November 2013.

In Kirchner's government, Moreno served as Secretary of Communications for a few months in 2005.

Moreno was named Secretary of Domestic Trade by Néstor Kirchner in November 2005.

Graciela Bevacqua, the chief statistician overseeing the formulation of consumer price data at INDEC, the National Statistics and Censuses Institute, accused Moreno in 2006 of having requested the names of the stores surveyed in the calculation of the retail price index.

She refused, on the grounds that the Secrecy Act forbade her to disclose such information to him.

Moreno's removal of Bevacqua from her post, and his firing of other officials who refused to understate the inflation rate, made him the target of nationwide criticism.

He allegedly followed these moves by having phones tapped and using other surveillance methods to control internal disagreements at the bureau.

Bevacqua recalled in a 2009 interview that Moreno had called her into his office on May 29, 2006, and had angrily criticized her statistical methodology and accused her of being “unpatriotic” for not disclosing to him the requested details about the inflation rate.

“I’ll do it like in the old Peronist days,” he shouted, threatening to “delete” official data at will.

After leaving INDEC, Bevacqua recounted, she was unable to find other work because of pressure exerted by her superiors, apparently on orders from Kirchner and Moreno.

He remained in the post after Kirchner was succeeded in the presidency by his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in 2007.

Moreno was seen at an event running his fingers across his throat, indicating Lousteau was playing a fatal game: the minister indeed lost his job, while Moreno has gone from strength to strength.” Miguel Jorge, Brazilian Minister of Development and Industry, said in a 2007 interview that he had no interest in further meetings with Moreno, who had put a revolver on the table during a negotiation, apparently in order to intimidate his counterparts.

According to a 2010 article in Mercopress, Moreno made it an “unwritten rule” that Argentinian supermarkets must not import goods from Brazil that were also made in Argentina.

When a leader of the textile firm, Kowsef SA, criticized Argentina's prohibitive tax level on textiles and refused to meet with Moreno, the government accused Kowsef of running illegal-immigrant sweatshops.

A 2011 Financial Times (FT) article stated that Moreno was widely viewed as “Argentina’s de facto economy minister.” Moreno, wrote the opposition-aligned Infobae news website in 2013, “is the man who drives the economy of Argentina.”

At the time of his resignation, Bloomberg News described Moreno as “the most feared government official” who had spent eight years “controlling prices and imports using strong-arm tactics that earned him a reputation as a bully.”

Moreno's parents were Victoria and Mario Antonio Moreno Bravo.

He grew up in the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires.

Moreno has been described as “mak[ing] decisions…with an iron hand” and as having a “a style of permanent confrontation.” Néstor Kirchner “liked to say tongue in cheek that Moreno was as gentle as Lassie, the famed collie of movie and television.” “Moreno has no magic recipe or even particular policies,” stated the Financial Times in 2011.

“But in general, what he says, goes.” Moreno's “methodology is intimidation,” the FT added, noting that “he has been rumoured in the past to carry a gun and he took boxing gloves to a meeting of shareholders of a key newsprint company in which the state has a stake in a bid to show who was boss.” The newsprint company was Papel Prensa SA, which is controlled by Grupo Clarín SA, Argentina's largest media conglomerate.

The FT maintained that “many businessmen prefer silence to crossing with him – perhaps remembering Martín Lousteau, a former economy minister, who defied him over farm export tariffs.

As part of an attack on the newspaper Clarín, which he accused of presenting a distorted view of the Kirchener government, Moreno displayed balloons reading “Clarín lies” during a 2012 visit to Vietnam.

Also in that year, he handed out small cakes to members of Congress decorated with the same words.

The Telegraph reported in October 2013 that Moreno had ordered major Argentinian retailers the previous February not to advertise in media owned by Clarín, or in La Nación and Perfil.

The Wall Street Journal reported that he was the subject of a criminal investigation into charges that he had given these orders.

Moreno reportedly pressured Argentina's leading importers to boycott U.S. companies.

He was found guilty in March 2014 of abuse of authority and was economic attaché at the Argentinian embassy in Rome.