BUENOS AIRES, Argentina?Argentine President Cristina Kirchner signed a decree Monday to use $4.187 billion of central bank reserves to pay down sovereign debt after an earlier effort ran into heavy opposition.

Kirchner is tapping in to foreign currency reserves to pay off a hefty chunk of the debt due this year to Argentina's international lenders and holders of bonds on which the country defaulted in 2001.

An earlier proposal to use $6.569 billion faced opposition from then-central bank chief Martin Redrado, who was subsequently sacked by the president, sparking a major political and court row.

Kirchner, who is trying to restore Argentina's standing in international credit markets and with multilateral lenders to avoid punitive interest rates, defended the strategy even though she had to back down from her earlier plan.

"The default is still one of the main problems facing Argentina in terms of funding," said the president, who argued that Buenos Aires must pay rates in the capital markets of 14 to 15 percent.

But the new plan quickly drew criticism as well.

"With the new decree, the president again ignored the Congress," said Juan Carlos Moran, an opposition party lawmaker and critic of the previous debt payment effort.

The president called for the creation of a new congressional commission to monitor payments using bank reserves.

In a 90-minute speech, Kirchner said Argentina had managed to get its debt ratio down to among the five lowest in the world.

The ratio of debt to gross domestic product fell to 39.5 percent in 2008 from 129.3 percent in 2003.

In 2005, the government of Nestor Kirchner, the current president's husband, renegotiated 76 percent of the country's arrears from the 2001 default on $90 billion in debt, the largest in history.