Argentina’s president revealed last night how she’ll try to defy US courts that have ruled against her government in a decade-long, billion-dollar legal fight over debts that have been unpaid since the country’s world-record, $100 billion default.

Rather than comply with Friday’s unanimous ruling ordering her government to pay $1.4 billion in cash to a group of plaintiffs she calls “vulture funds,” President Cristina Fernandez is proposing another debt swap: offering new bonds to be paid in dollars in Buenos Aires to anyone still holding defaulted debt.

Fernandez made the announcement in a surprise address to the nation, saying the US federal appellate judges were unfair to label Argentina a deadbeat. She said Argentina has made $173 billion in debt payments since 2003 and will pay $2 billion more on Sept. 12.

“Rather than ‘recalcitrant debtors,’ we are serial payers,” she said.

The proposal she is sending to congress today is her long-awaited “Plan B” for answering court rulings requiring Argentina to first pay cash to a small fraction of “holdouts” who sued rather than join the more than 92 percent of bondholders who provided Argentina with billions of dollars in debt relief.