In a fiery inauguration speech, Argentina's interim president, Mr Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, said yesterday his country would suspend payments of its $132 billion foreign debt - effectively heralding the biggest sovereign default ever.
The 54-year-old lawyer is a disciplined provincial governor with a wide smile and backslapping manner who inherits a chaotic, financially-crippled government haunted by massive riots over the last week.
Credited with making San Luis province, which he has run since the last dictatorship ended in 1983, an oasis of fiscal discipline and growth, Mr Rodriguez Saa will be president until elections in March. He belongs to the populist Peronist Party.
Mr Rodriguez Saa seems to relish the mammoth task ahead of him and his easy style is in sharp contrast to the aloof and uninspiring Mr Fernando de la Rua, who quit the presidency two years early on Thursday amid looting and riots in which at least 27 people were killed.
In a move likely to strike a chord with a country worn down by four years of recession and relentless austerity plans that cost Mr de la Rua his job, Mr Rodriguez Saa said money for debt payments, around $19 billion a year, would be diverted to help Argentina grow again, create jobs and alleviate poverty.
He slapped a $3,000-a-month limit on government salaries, which will go down well in a country where legislators are insulted in the streets by Argentines who have an average pay of $600 and are increasingly skeptical about all politicians.
While inexperienced in federal government, Mr Rodriguez Saa won praise for balancing the budget and bringing jobs and industry to San Luis, a green but poor province. Ask many Argentines about what they know about the governor and they often say two things - his good record in San Luis and a sex video scandal in which he said he had been framed.
Other analysts say he is a typical provincial strongman, only experienced in running a tiny isolated fiefdom by issuing favours and backroom deals ill-fitting with the complexities of leading Latin America's third most important economy.
He is a strong opponent of devaluing Argentina's peso, which has been pegged to the US dollar for over the last decade.
Mr Rodriguez Saa is seen as a more centrist member the Peronist Party, which has its roots in working class movements of the 1940s but moved to embrace free-market polices under Mr Carlos Menem's presidency in the 1990s.
In a party with many better known figures hungry for winning the presidential elections in March, he is the candidate of consensus who leapt at the chance to run the country while others shied from such a difficult task.
"He's not a guy who has many enemies within the party," said a spokesman for a key Peronist senator.
"His nomination pleases almost everybody, and that's hard to do. The hope is that he can earn the trust of the country at a very difficult moment."
Some investors feared the interim president might be a sacrificial lamb put forth to bear the cost of painful reforms needed to drag Argentina from a recession, but analysts said Rodriguez Saa did not fit the bill.
"I think he sees himself as a likely candidate in March, and he's unlikely to accept the interim job unless he thinks he can gain from it," said Mr James Neilson, a political analyst.