Marcelo gazes blankly from his chipped blue cot at the children's hospital in Tucumán, a city of a million inhabitants in north-west Argentina. His stick-thin limbs stir feebly. The skin around his ballooning abdomen is taut. "He doesn't speak," Marcelo's mother says. "He's seven, and he can't talk or walk."

A healthy weight for a seven-year-old is 22 kilos: Marcelo weighs ten. He is one of 20,000 children in the province of Tucumán who are starving because their parents can no longer afford to feed them.

"This is not Africa," says Dr Oscar Hillal, deputy director of the hospital. "This is Argentina, where there are 50 million cattle and 37 million people - but where we have a government which is totally out of touch with the people's needs."

The Centre for Child Nutrition Studies, which advises the World Health Organization, reports that one Argentine child in five is suffering from malnutrition.

children eating

Becky Branford, from whose BBC report we plagiarize Marcelo's story, says he doesn't have a disease, but in a sense she is wrong. In an astonishing statement last November, Aníbal Fernández, production minister in the Duhalde government, said that Argentine children were dying because of "a sick society and a ruling class that are sons of bitches - all of them, myself included".

Fernández is also wrong, however. He claims too much. Not all of Argentina's woes can be laid at the door of its corrupt elite. It takes two to tango, and in Argentina's international creditors they have found able and willing partners.

Read part 2