THE ESSENTIALS OF DEMOCRACY

 

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Voltaire, as quoted by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in "The Friends of Voltaire" (1906, pub. S. G. Tallentyre)

Note: All of the journalists pictured here are staunch critics of the non-democratic tactics of the current Argentine government. Only by defending their right to dissent, no matter what our own political or philosophical positions might be, can we defend and protect our own democratic, civil and human rights.   

 

As I reflected on the subject of this editorial essay, researching and poring over the events of the past several weeks, I reached the conclusion that perhaps the most succinct truth at which one could arrive is that the time for fearing that Argentina might be headed for the de facto establishment of a “popular” dictatorship may be over. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, in recent weeks we have witnessed clear signs of the impending demise of democracy in the thirtieth anniversary year of its reestablishment by the hand of President Raúl Alfonsín, the first and, arguably, last genuine democrat to lead Argentina following more than seven years of murderous military rule from the mid-seventies through the early eighties.

Jorge Lanata, shocking revelations.

Clearly, democracy was undermined with the Constitutional Reform introduced by the government of Peronist Carlos Menem, which, despite any beneficial amendments introduced, was all about the illegitimate re-election of the former president, a move that allowed him to remain in power for a full decade—ten years steeped in corruption and marked by scandal, and by botched and fixed privatizations and sellouts that cost the country dearly. And it is clear too that a politically manipulated popular coup that toppled his successor—Radical Party leader and former Buenos Aires Mayor Fernando de la Rúa—further undermined democracy by demonstrating that even a leader from a normally ultra-democratic Radical Party was capable of confiscating the private property (and life savings) of the country’s population, that  certain sectors of Peronism weren’t above exploiting and encouraging chaos and insurrection in order to keep any other legitimately elected party from remaining in office and that the vast majority of Argentines were still willing to stand by and do nothing when violence and de facto tactics were employed to wrest power from the hands of a legally elected administration.

Democracy also trembled and quaked to its foundations in the chaotic game of musical chairs that followed the De la Rúa government’s fall. Since in the midst of the political and financial crisis with which the Radical administration was faced Vice President Carlos “Chacho” Alvarez had resigned before the final break-up, once ousted, De la Rúa was first repla

Nelson Castro, criticism with class.

ced by Senate President and opposition Peronist politician Ramón Puerta, on December 20, 2001. Just three days later, in circumstances that were less than clear to the public at large, San Luis Governor and Peronist politician Adolfo Rodríguez Saá was appointed by Congress to replace Puerta. But that ill-fated presidency only lasted a week, with Rodríguez Saá citing “lack of political support” for his resignation, which he tendered on December 30. Puerta was asked to step in temporarily once again, but this time refused. So, Rodríguez Saá was ultimately replaced by Lower House President (and Peronist politician) Eduardo Camaño, who convened a special session of Congress to elect a new president. It was thus that, on January 2, 2002, the presidential sash was placed over the shoulder of Peronist leader and former Buenos Aires Governor Eduardo Duhalde—the self-same Peronist candidate who had lost the presidential elections to De la Rúa in 1999.

Duhalde served out the rest of what should have been De la Rúa’s term—a little over fifteen months—and called early elections in September of 2003. He himself was not in the running but remained a heavyweight figure in the Peronist Party and his backing was bound to give a major boost to whomever he chose as his favorite to win the elections. Well-known and popular former race-driver and long-time Santa Fe Governor Carlos Reutemann was Duhalde’s first choice, but turned his Peronist colleague down. In the midst of a still confusing and hostile political climate following the 2001 political debacle, Duhalde was looking for someone either highly popular or largely unknown as his heir. After Reutemann said no, his choice fell to Néstor Kirchner, whose less than savory reputation was a matter of record in the deep Patagonian south, but who, as the obscure governor of the sparsely-populated Santa Cruz Province was a political unknown in much of the rest of the country. 

Luis Majul, tireless investigator of the man he
called "The Owner"

Of the five candidates—in addition to Kirchner, former President Carlos Menem, economist Ricardo López Murphy, former President-for-a-week Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, and anti-corruption crusader and Congresswoman Elisa Carrió—Kirchner came in second to Menem with a scant 22 percent of the vote compared with Menem’s 24 percent. Neither of the leading candidates had enough votes to win without second-round voting, but fearing defeat in the run-off, Menem dropped out of the race, thus permitting Kirchner to win by default and by the skin of his teeth, as perhaps the least voted-for president in the country’s history. And so began what has become known as the Kirchner era.

While Néstor Kirchner sought, in his four-year term, to give at least the impression of serious government, maintaining renowned and internationally respected technocrats like Roberto Lavagna and Martín Redrado in key economic cabinet positions, and tending to respect their advice, international experience and authority, as well as winning liberal praise at home and abroad by rescinding laws introduced by Alfonsín and Menem to protect all but the highest ranking officers of the military dictatorship from prosecution,  it has since become fairly clear that his ulterior motive was to create a political empire in which he and his wife and current President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner would attempt to pass the administration back and forth between them indefinitely, with the help of populist measures, an acquiescent opposition and an increasingly loyal following within the Peronist movement. It has also become fairly clear, through detailed investigations carried out by journalist Jorge Lanata and other reporters, that the Kirchners have sought to reconstruct the same corrupt boss-rule model of government on a national scale that made them all-powerful and untouchable in Santa Cruz Province. Lanata’s meticulous probe has shown just how deep-reaching this kind of corruption has been and the huge price the country’s citizens have paid—among other things, in vastly overpriced public works and the kickbacks that they have engendered, in currency-by-the-bale spirited out of the country in money laundering operations, in expropriation scams and fixed public tenders, in juggled statistics and outright prevarication to try and belie the economic devastation that such practices have wreaked, etc.

Far from reining the government in and forcing it to conform to the dictates of democratic government and the rule of law, revelations of corruption in high places and ever more vocal criticism in the press and through massive anti-government demonstrations seem only to have emboldened President Cristina Kirchner, her zealously accommodating ministers and secretaries and members of the quasi-fascist-model youth movement called “La Cámpora”—led by the Kirchners’ son, Máximo—whose members the President is reported to refer to as “my little soldiers” and which has infiltrated every level of government bureaucracy. It is as if, faced with the revelations of corruption and abuse of power demonstrated by some of the country’s top reporters, Mrs. Kirchner and her cohorts have been somehow liberated, and are bent on demonstrating that they have no sense of shame whatsoever.

Alfredo Leuco, blunt critical analysis

On the contrary, it would appear that, now that the jig is up, in terms of the scandalous revelations of private investigations that have emerged in recent weeks, the Kirchner government as a whole and President Kirchner in particular, are set on showing just how autocratic and uncompromising they can be. Nor is this surprising, since the President and her circle are born of a bastardized political philosophy that emerges from a volatile mix of the callous disregard for democratic principles often demonstrated by her party’s founder, General Juan Domingo Perón, and the terrorist gang philosophy of the 1970s neo-fascist Montoneros guerrilla organization—to which Cristina Kirchner has claimed to have belonged, despite this claim’s having proven more wishful thinking and fantasy than fact.

Joaquín Morales Solás, meticulous editorial logic.

In regard to this last, more “Monto-never” than Montonera, back in those days, Cristina and her husband are widely and convincingly reported to have already been busy building their power base and fortune as intermediaries in foreclosure operations handled through their Santa Cruz law offices, in connection with the now infamous Central Bank Circular 1050. This measure was introduced by the military government that overthrew President Isabel Perón in 1976, and pegged mortgage loans to the dollar-peso exchange rate, which, following a sharp peso devaluation in the latter years of the regime, resulted in such soaring increases in loan payments that people all over the country were forced to hand their homes over to key banks and realtors. In other words, far from fighting the military—despite their alleged Peronist Youth membership—it would appear that the Kirchners knew precisely how to make peace with the regime and their consciences, exploit that dark era and use the dictatorship to stunning advantage in accumulating a sound base for their eventually vast fortune.

Perhaps this early bent for “ethical flexibility,” accommodation in benefit of personal gain and hypocrisy for the purposes of political and economic expediency explains a great deal about how a ten-year-long administration that has founded its now waning popularity on relatively meager social handouts and a reputation for being the paladin of Argentine human rights stands accused of some of the worst and most all-pervasive corruption and abuse of power since the fall of the former ‘Proceso’ dictatorship. The extent of the de facto power that this government has gained was patent this past week in ever stronger rumors of plans by Kirchnerists to stage a hostile takeover of the major multimedia group (Clarín) that is currently partnering with Lanata. And more telling still is Lanata’s apparent fear that the government has so manipulated the law that it could actually get away with such a takeover, thus silencing the principal medium against advancing Kirchnerism and gagging the journalists whose investigations have established proof of corruption and abuse of power at the highest levels. Lanata’s worst fears were clear in a plea he made to his enormous viewing audience at the end of his show, Periodismo para Todos a week ago:  "I want to ask a favor of all of you,” he said. “I want to ask you to do something. If this happens [the silencing of Clarín], if they wipe us out with a signature from one day to the next, do something! Don’t just let it happen. And I’m not asking that you do something for me. I’m asking you to do it for yourselves!”

I couldn’t agree more and add a request of my own to anyone who reads this. Don’t just keep accepting corruption and abuse in Argentina as inevitable. Don’t keep considering uncompromising professionals like Lanata (Nelson Castro, Joaquín Morales Solá, Alfredo Leuco, Luis Majul, et al) to be naïve, self-interested, crazy or all three. Don’t keep thinking there’s nothing you can do, that it’ll all go away on its own, or that whatever the government does doesn’t affect you personally (all you have to do is go to the supermarket and witness week to week inflation or try to buy dollars to save a little of your purchasing power from devastation in order to know that’s not true). Remember that the ruling party feels empowered by your apathy, that the traditional opposition is as acquiescent as it is because it doesn’t feel your hot breath on the back of its neck, that new reformist movements don’t emerge to cleanse the political scene because they find no backing among a self-defeating people, that corruption is always eventually found out but that silence is what allows it to continue, that a free press is only possible when a free-thinking people insists upon it, that freedom of expression isn’t a privilege but a right and that demanding it, exercising it and fighting for it is the only way to maintain it, and that without it, there can be no democracy.

Democracy is a state not unlike pregnancy or life itself. It exists or it doesn’t. There is no such thing as “somewhat democratic” and being democratic means playing within certain rules, not bending the law to fit whatever party or ruler happens to be in power, respecting and zealously upholding checks and balances and the three branches of government, honoring and defending the position of the minority even when it is diametrically opposed to your own, and defending freedom of expression and of the press as a means of safeguarding democracy from tyranny. 

Tyranny and censorship are mutually self-sustaining and if enough people do nothing to take part in, protest for and defend by all means necessary the search for truth and justice, then they can only blame themselves for having the autocratic rulers and the power-fawning media that they deserve.     

THE BEFORE AND AFTER OF A 'HAVING IT ALL' REGIME

“Vamos por todo...¡por todo!

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

 

 

Dark humor from a Facebook

site called

"Si-no-te-gusta-vaffanculo"

Authentic democracy filled the streets of major cities all over Argentina on the evening of Thursday, April 18, while tyranny stalked the halls of the national Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers. The A18 protest was, like its 8N predecessor, a spontaneous civic demonstration organized from computer to computer through the social media and without partisan links. A number of opposition politicians respectfully joined the protesters but from the uncomfortable low-profile position of tolerated guests rather than organizers, since demonstrators have made it abundantly clear ever since the first of three progressively stronger protests less than a year ago that they are as disappointed with the lukewarm opposition as they are furious with the rabidly self-absorbed ruling political movement.

In an outpouring of genuine democratic zeal, millions of people of all political colors poured into the country’s streets—over a million participating protesters in the nation’s capital alone—to reject what their supposed political representatives were ostensibly doing in their name and in the name of “democratization”: seeking to introduce “reforms” that would give an already autocratic Executive Branch even greater discretionary power, to the detriment of the Judiciary, the rule of law, the rights of the individual and those of the “fourth power” (the media and their role as the guardians of free expression in representation of the people). But that wasn’t all—as if that were not enough—that the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets were protesting. They were also decrying encroaching corruption that, in the last decade, has become so shockingly flagrant that it can no longer be hidden from view. In that sense, the revelations aired the previous Sunday night—and that continued last night—by investigative

In Buenos Aires alone, over a million people turned out

for the A18 protest.



broadcast journalist Jorge Lanata proved a major catalyst for the 18A protests and clearly marked a “before and after” in terms of any doubts anyone might have had about links between blatant criminal activities and the powers that be.

If opposition politicians were relegated to a secondary role in the A18 event, however, they were indeed showing greater activism than usual with regard to the “reforms” that a now embattled administration was seeking to ram through its rubber-stamp majority in Congress with the pace and power of an express train. Two days before the mass protest, members of opposition political movements gathered before court buildings in Buenos Aires to protest the government-sponsored judicial “reform” bills, by holding up a sky-blue and white national banner bearing the inscription “Sin justicia, no hay futuro” (without justice, there is no future)—a noble thought and slogan, but not strictly true. Without Justice there could indeed be a future for a despotic government bent on ruling in perpetuity and on protecting its circle of influences—just not for democracy, representative governance or civil rights.

The protesting politicians also certified their opposition by signing a document rejecting what they unequivocally termed as the government’s “attempt to control Justice.” Among the opposition politicians involved in the pre-A18 protests were representatives of the centrist Radical Party and Peronist Opposition Front, the center-left Civic Coalition and the conservative PRO movement. Joining them were also numerous attorneys, former prosecutors, constitutional law experts and other jurists.

The President, for her part, remained true to form and acted as if she had never heard the revelations of crime and corruption within her inner circle that Lanata reported in chilling detail and with documented evidence to back up his claims. The task of defending her ivory tower walls she left to her surrogates in the press, like Mauro Viale and a once serious investigative reporter, Rodolfo Graña, who, of late, has become an unabashed cheerleader for the K regime and a pitbull sent to attack its enemies. In all cases, pro-K mouthpieces limited themselves to hammering the messenger rather than presenting any sound evidence to refute the Lanata team’s impeccable two-year investigation.

One usual spokesman for the Kirchners, however, did break ranks when it came to the Judicial "reform" bills. As head of the Center for Legal Studies (CELS), writer and former Montonero urban guerrilla Horacio Verbitzky, who not only usually follows the government's script but also often writes it, surprised many observers by sharply criticizing the bills for restricting the civil rights and legal recourse of citizens.

Federico Elaskar, former owner of SGI -

a.k.a. "La Rosadita"

Meanwhile, the public got a taste of what the proposed government-sponsored “reforms” will mean to Argentine civil rights when the corroded wheels of justice failed to creak into action on the heels of Lanata’s investigation. Despite the fact that his televised reports provided compelling information linking a Puerto Madero finance firm called SGI—and nicknamed “La Rosadita” due to its geographic proximity and alleged connection with the Casa Rosada (Government House)—and its former owner, Federico Elaskar, to massive money laundering, the first part of the week passed without a single judge’s daring to invoke his/her own authority to order the premises searched. This, despite the fact that neighbors of Madero Center—the building where the company has its office, and where not only Vice President Amado Boudou but also President Kirchner reportedly own property—went onto Facebook and Twitter to report boxes apparently containing documentation being carried from the building. It wasn’t until Thursday, in the very midst of the A18 mass protests, that police descended on the finance firm’s offices, making a great show of the raid, despite the fact that if they’d found anything of relevance to the Lanata investigation, it would have been a miracle, since those implicated in corruption in high places, had been given all week to make sure anything incriminating—more incriminating, that is, than the documentation Lanata had already made public—was long gone.

Two generations: The Kirchners, mother and son, Cristina and Maxi; the

Báezes, father and son, Lázaro and Martín. Close ties.



Perhaps one of the principal virtues of Lanata’s investigation is that it has taken corruption out of the realm of generality and put names and faces with events, as well as specifying the connections between political and economic powers in the Kirchner era. He has introduced us to Santa Cruz strongman Lázaro Báez, who over two decades and on the strength of his relationship with former governor and president Néstor Kirchner—as attested even by Kirchner’s former lieutenant governor, Eduardo Arnold—went from being an obscure provincial bank teller to, first, running the bank, and then, acquiring a bankrupt construction company and turning it into a major State contractor, as well as accruing interests in oil, media, aeronautics and land (some 250,000 hectares, most of which he bought with cash).

Leonardo Fariña, a compulsive talker.

We also met the flamboyant and singularly indiscreet Leonardo Fariña, who distributed vast amounts of cash that the alleged Báez-Kirchner partnership flew out of Santa Cruz in amounts weighty enough to be considered air cargo. We met Federico Elaskar, who admitted to helping Fariña set up as many as 50 offshore phantom companies through which to launder vast sums of money, before being forced out of business by another nefarious face in the chain, that of Daniel Pérez Gadín. And we also met Fabián Rossi, whose business contacts, allegedly gained through his relationship with Argentine Ambassador Jorge Arguindegui in Panama, allowed him to help Báez set up ghost operations in foreign tax havens.

As Lanata was revealing how in a country where foreign exchange regulations are so tight that Argentine tourists aren’t permitted to legally change enough pesos into dollars or euros to take a business trip or brief vacation abroad, friends of the ruling family have been moving foreign currency out of the country by the bale, another story was being told: that of Santa Cruz Province under the 12-year governorship of Néstor Kirchner. A province so remote and sparsely populated that for the vast majority of Argentines it might as well be another country, it would have been a good case study to have analyzed before the election of Kirchner to the presidency in 2003, when he was an unknown politician who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had observers seen how the Kirchners had their own province sewn up so tight that nothing happened without their say so, it would have been easy to see what was in store for the nation under their power structure model. In fact, many of the key players who have accompanied them in Santa Cruz have remained with them throughout their decade at the head of the national administration. And the President’s latest moves to tie the hands of the Judiciary are simply part of the Santa Cruz model of total control. With 125 seats in the Lower House of Congress belonging to ever faithful rubber-stamp Kirchnerist deputies, the effort to keep this affront to democratic rule from passing has boiled down to bringing as much opposition pressure as possible to bear on just 12 deputies whose past performance has marked them as swing voters. The “reform” bills would give the Executive virtual control over the naming and removal of judges, and, among other things, would also make it virtually immune to any legal recourse that citizens could take against it to protect their rights. Until now the Kirchner government has had to find ad hoc ways of shoving a stick into the wheels of justice, such as allegedly naming temporary judges and prosecutors to replace ones it fears might rule against it. If its bills pass into law, it would be able to handle such manipulation of the Judiciary pretty much as it pleases and within a “legal”—if morally illegitimate—framework.

The 12 mavericks on whom an independent Judiciary depends.

A little over a year ago, on February 27, 2012, at a rally in Rosario commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the first raising of the Argentine flag, Cristina Kirchner stated, in a nutshell, the essence of her government’s plan: “Vamos por todo...¡por todo!” (“We’re going for it all...for all of it!”) she shouted, gesticulating to a clump of her FPV (Frente para la Victoria) political movement gathered in the crowd before the reviewing stand in Argentina’s third largest city. It wasn’t part of her own speech. It was, instead, a sort of battle cry that she issued, without a microphone, in the middle of Socialist Mayor Mónica Fein’s speech, obviously startling the mayor, as the president’s fans drowned Fein out with their shouts of approval for their jefa’s words and gestures. It was a show of power and disrespect. It was Cristina trying to demonstrate to the mayor that she, not Fein, owned the street, that even if Fein was at the mike, the crowd belonged to the Kirchner regime and so did the country—but in ways that clearly have had little to do with democracy or constitutional administration.

As political news commentator Joaquín Morales Solá pointed out this past week, Jorge Lanata’s investigation has brought to the fore what everybody in politics and serious journalism already knew: basically, that Argentina currently reeks of corruption as it never has before—which, after the era of Carlos Menem in the nineties, is saying a mouthful—and that the deeper meaning of “going for it all” carries with it a barely veiled and underlying threat and project of perpetuity in government, the creation of a popular dictatorship capable of protecting the burgeoning Kirchner estate and its friends and partners in power.

Jorge Lanata

As Morales Solá tangentially points out, Lanata’s investigation has been a mere catalyst, a wake-up call, a way of whacking people—including a somnolent opposition—over the head with what, in voluntary blindness, they’ve been tripping over on a daily basis for the past ten years. If most people living in Argentina were honest with themselves, they would have to admit that they have long since seen the signs of advancing tyranny and crippling corruption within the power structures that are seeking to control every aspect of life in this country. But why did it take the unique head-on style of a Jorge Lanata to wake people from their lethargy even as their democracy, their freedom and their well-being are being wrested from their hands? The late Argentine physician and world-renowned heart specialist René Favaloro once said, “After so often seeing incompetence triumph and dishonor prosper, after so often seeing injustice grow, after so often seeing power in the hands of bad people burgeon, Man eventually becomes disheartened with virtue, laughs at honor, and is embarrassed to be honest.” Perhaps the answer to my question lies within this wise man’s simple yet crystal-clear observation.

Some people still cling to the idea that Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s original plan of passing the presidency back and forth between them ad infinitum died along with the late former president, and they cling as well to the hope that the presidential elections of 2015 will no longer contain a Kirchner as a candidate, since it is—currently at least—unconstitutional for any president to serve three consecutive terms. But astute and highly respected political analyst Nelson Castro said it all when he reminded the country this past week that for Cristina Kirchner and her entourage, “a ‘re-reelection’ is a matter of life and death.” Clearly, without a means of retaining their hold on power and the judicial immunity that goes with it, the President and her entourage would become common (if vastly wealthy) citizens, who could be called upon to answer for all charges and allegations against them.

The latest advances by the President and her rubber stamp majority in the Senate against the necessary checks and balances of any truly democratic society should have left no doubt in anyone’s mind about their intention to “go for all of it” by also controlling the Judiciary and thus sealing their future impunity. And if they manage to get away with it by also carrying the Lower House of Congress, then there should also be no doubt about what their next move will be: a rubber stamp constitutional “reform” aimed at “legalizing” the President’s illegitimate, totalitarian ambitions and perpetuating her administration in power.                

ARGENTINA DERAILED

Plaza Once Station (photo by José María Pérez Núñez

CC by SA 2.0 creativecommons.org via Wikimedia

Commons: Ciudad Gris/La Estación)

Argentina this past week marked the first anniversary of the Plaza Once Rail Tragedy. I’ve placed this case title in caps because I think it deserves them. And the reader will note that I’ve used the word Tragedy, rather than “accident”, since while there may have been nothing premeditatedly intentional about it, there can be little doubt that what happened in the Plaza Once railway station in Buenos Aires on February 22, 2012, was not the result of an accident, a quirk of fate, a momentary lapse in human concentration or an isolated error in judgment. It would appear ever more clear, rather, that this horrifying train wreck was the outcome of long years of incompetence, negligence, indifference and worse, that inexorably culminated in the deaths of 51 passengers and the injury of more than 700 others. If the Once Rail Tragedy could ever be referred to as an “accident” it could only be within the context of “an accident-waiting-to-happen”.

It is also hard to separate that tragedy from a general attitude of indifference on the part of the current national government with regard to its invested responsibilities as the country’s elected administration and its accountability for the well-being of the country, its economy, its currency, its world image, its infrastructure and, ultimately, its people.  In this sense, the Plaza Once Rail Tragedy might well be seen as a symbol of the chronic and unwarranted deterioration to which Argentina has been subject in the past decade and, particularly, in the last half of that period.

The Tragedy. The wreck took place on a Wednesday morning at about 8:30, on the Sarmiento western commuter line, when the train, operated by concession-holder TBA (Trenes de Buenos Aires), was loaded with some 1200 rush-hour commuters. As the train came into the Once de Septiembre Station (better known simply as Once) on track No. 2, it slowed to a reported 20 kilometers per hour, but was then unable to brake and crashed into shock absorbers at the end of the track beneath the station platform. The impact was such that it sounded to many passengers and passersby like an explosion, and the lead car telescoped into the one behind it. These two cars were even more packed with workers coming into the city from the western suburbs than the rest of the train, since morning commuters tend to favor the cars up front so as to save time by getting off and out of the station quickly, ahead of the rush.

There was an immediate attempt by the firm and the government to blame the gory incident on “human error”, claiming that the commuter train’s driver was at fault. But although this may briefly have led the early investigation off on a tangent, rail workers were quick to come to their companion’s aid and tell the press and anyone else who would listen to them about the deplorable safety conditions under which they were working and the general disrepair of TBA’s rolling stock.

It was the third worst crash in the long history of Argentina’s railways, and it was the very worst in more than three decades.

Although President Cristina Kirchner—in common with Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri and Buenos Aires Provincial Governor Daniel Scioli—immediately decreed a 48-hour period of national mourning, and issued a succinct message of condolences to families of the victims, her first reaction to the tragedy was silence. And not merely silence, but reclusion as well. She left the national capital for nearly a week and holed up in her remote southern home province of Santa Cruz, where she hosted a private meeting with her Paraguayan colleague Fernando Lugo, in her luxury boutique hotel, Los Sauces, in Calafate, before traveling to her home in Río Gallegos, where she headed up a birthday homage at the private mausoleum of her late husband and predecessor, former President Néstor Kirchner, who died in October of 2010 and who would have been 60 years old that Saturday. Her absence from Buenos Aires in the face of the train crash attracted particular attention since she had already spent the previous week “resting” in Santa Cruz and returned there almost immediately after the tragedy—not without first meeting briefly with her transport secretary, Juan Pablo Schiavi.

Cristina Kirchner - too little too late.

Too Little Too Late. The president reappeared in public the following week—at a rally to celebrate the first raising of the Argentine flag on February 27, 1812—in the northern city of Rosario, where, on the tail-end of a half-hour speech about the achievements of her and her husband’s administrations, she finally mentioned the Once Rail Tragedy, saying, rather vaguely, that she would “take all measures necessary” in the case. Considering the time she’d had to think about it, her pronouncement seemed meager at best. She also sought to deflect government responsibility by exhorting Argentine justice to complete its technical investigations “within the next 15 days”. (The judicial branch, of course, immediately said that it would take however long was necessary to investigate that case and would accept no pressure to finish up quickly).  Then, in barely lukewarm acceptance of a small quota of accountability, the president admitted that the Argentine rail system needed “to be reformulated” and grudgingly confessed that “if we haven’t done more, it’s because money has been lacking.”

But that wasn’t strictly true.  TBA was a private consortium that took over the Sarmiento and Mitre commuter rail lines in 1995 as part of the decade-long privatization plan introduced by Peronist President Carlos Saúl Menem. At the time some private sources estimated that Argentina’s overall State-run medium and long-distance railways were losing on the order of a million dollars a day. That meant that international investors weren’t exactly tripping over each other to buy them. So consortia ended up being formed by local multi-interest groups and, in certain cases, international technical partners, as in the case of TBA. Still, the local operators—domestically perspicacious and good horse-traders that they were—argued that unless they raised ticket prices beyond what Argentine commuters could pay, it would be impossible to maintain the rail services. So as part of the clearly one-sided contracts that they negotiated, these companies not only were granted exploitation of the lines they dealt for, but also a pledge from the government to continue to pay massive subsidies for upkeep and to defray losses on ticket sales.

In retrospect it's hard not to suspect that subsidies were always what the “privatization” deals were all about, and, as long as we’re being suspicious, that precious little of those subsidies has ever been used for rolling stock and track upkeep. Otherwise, the Once Rail Tragedy never would have uncovered, for instance, just how disastrous the state of repair of some of the major commuter lines is. Furthermore, TBA wasn’t a stand-alone firm, but formed part of the Plaza Group (through its Cometrans holding group), majority-owned by the Cirigliano family of Argentina, and also of UGOFE (Unidad de Gestión Operativa Ferroviaria de Emergencia—or Emergency Rail Operations Management Unit), which also operated other rail services in the Buenos Aires area. TBA was also granted concessions for north-bound long-distance services, in total operating, according to unofficial estimates, about a thousand runs and carrying approximately 500,000 passengers a day.

Pino Solanas: A true swindle.

About a week after the Once Rail Tragedy, public pressure brought Federal intervention of TBA. In May of last year, three months after the disaster, the government revoked TBA’s concessions and placed them under the care of a consortium called UGOMS. But who is UGOMS?

UGOMS stands for Unidad de Gestión Operativa Mitre-Sarmiento (or Mitre-Sarmiento Operational Management Unit). It was formed on the same day that TBA lost its concession last year, and is a “temporary consortium” created especially to take over for TBA. It is made up of rail operators Ferrovías and Metrovías. According to filmmaker, socialist politician and Proyecto Sur Party Congressman Pino Solanas, on this first anniversary of the Once disaster, “the Ciriglianos continue to draw payment from the State—and with exaggerated surcharges—for the repair of train cars on the Sarmiento and Mitre lines, through their company, EMFER S.A, and they continue to operate trains through UGOFE S.A., which operates the San Martín, Roca and Belgrano South lines.” Solanas adds that “the brand new mirror company, UGOMS, which currently operates the Sarmiento and Mitre lines, is run by its partners, Ferrovías (EMEPA Group) and Metrovías (Roggio group).” 

Where Did All the Money Go? As described by Solanas, who is noted for uncovering government corruption, the repair contracts alone have been a succulent source of government subsidy income for the railroad concession-holders. The leftwing politician claims that no government audit has ever been carried out, for instance, to determine the final destination of “thirty-seven workshop-factories, thousands of railway cars, locomotives, machinery, equipment, and 60,000 spare part accounts.” According to Solanas, “the great majority of these assets have disappeared, without anyone’s ever having demanded their replacement.”   This is only part of what the congressman calls “a triangle of corruption” that includes, he alleges, “the Transport Secretariat, the National Commission for Transport Regulation, railway management and companies.” He adds that this apparent complicity is why no one has yet tracked the path of multi-million-dollar subsidies to find out “where all the money went that never reached the trains.”

In 2012 alone, rail lines serving the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area are reported to have received over 4.6 billion pesos in subsidies (or about US$980 million at the official government exchange rate). About 3 billion pesos of that is reported to have gone to UGOFE. Solanas describes both UGOFE and UGOMS as being “invented by the government as holding groups for the TBA, Metrovías and Ferrovías concessions, as a means of covering up a true swindle against the citizenry [since] by contract, UGOFE and UGOMS, are corporations created by the State and managed by private firms, which are compensated for their management services. In other words, they have no civil accountability whatsoever in case of any sort of accidents or labor suits, and as if that were not enough, any fines that might apply to them don’t come out of their pockets, but out of those of the citizens.”

The administration, for its part, has managed to dodge a direct hit in the case of the Once Rail Tragedy by using two successive transport secretaries, Ricardo Jaime and Juan Pablo Schiavi, as scapegoats. It has also tried to blame the situation of ineffectiveness and scandalous corruption surrounding the concession contracts on the 1990s administration of fellow Peronist Carlos Menem, but after a decade of Kirchners at the helm, this complaint clearly seems less than credible, especially coming from a government that overturned the Due Obedience and Full Stop amnesties that protected members of the former military regime of the 1970s and 1980s from trial, and that had no problem deciding to re-nationalize the oil industry and the flag-carrier airline, which had also been privatized under Menem. And this leads one to ask why the railroad concessions are being kept alive—if on life-support—when they have so obviously failed to solve the country’s rail travel problems and are still bleeding the government treasury as always.

Ricardo Jaime

Jaime and Schiavi. Successive charges that have been leveled against former Transport Secretary Jaime would appear to provide an inkling of a response. He came to national office in 2003 when Néstor Kirchner was elected president. He remained in that post under Cristina Kirchner’s administration until 2009, when his name had become so connected with scandal that he was forced to resign. He has had numerous court actions filed against him and has been variously accused of charges ranging from contempt of court to alleged kickbacks and from failing to comply with the duties of a public official, to alleged involvement in a money-laundering cover-up and abuse of office. 

Juan Pablo Schiavi

His connection with the Kirchners went back 20 years, when as city council president for the Santa Cruz oil town of  Caleta Olivia, he joined Néstor Kirchner’s bid to unseat fellow Peronist and provincial political strongman Arturo Puricelli as governor. For his loyalty, Jaime was awarded the post of  cabinet chief for Kirchner’s first governorship, and when Kirchner won a second term, Jaime was appointed to head the Provincial Education Council. When Kirchner reached the presidency in 2003, the transportation slot was waiting for Jaime in the ministerial cabinet of Planning Minister (and first-hour Kirchner loyalist) Julio de Vido.

It was by the hand of de Vido that Juan Pablo Schiavi (55), a man with a somewhat chequered political past, came to the Transportation Secretariat. Of Peronist extraction, Schiavi became involved in politics while still a teen, as a militant in the Peronist Youth movement and with alleged ties as well to the Montoneros urban guerrilla organization.  He didn’t take up his first real political post, however, until, at age 32, he was appointed advisor to the Peronist Bloc in the Buenos Aires City Council. During Peronist politician Carlos Grosso’s brief term as mayor of Buenos Aires (1989-1992) Schiavi served as Undersecretary of Maintenance and Services.

Despite his Peronist background Grosso’s mayorship—like Menem’s presidency— was marked by flourishing relations between the public and private sectors and was to produce some major transformations in the city, not the least of which was the Puerto Madero urban renewal project that turned the old port of Buenos Aires into a luxury residential, tourist and entertainment haven. But it was also a municipal administration that generated wide-spread scandal and accusations of gross corruption surrounding not only the swift privatization processes that Grosso’s policies spawned but also his government’s handling of public funds. These accusations brought a wave of formal complaints and lawsuits, the pressure of which eventually forced Grosso to resign. By the time Grosso had dealt with all of the charges against him, his name was so tarnished that he retired entirely from politics, despite his managing to see most of the cases against him dropped, filed for lack of evidence or thrown out of court.

While Schiavi was in his post in the Grosso government, one of his jobs was to oversee trash collection contracts, which is where he met Mauricio Macri, who, 20 years later, was to become mayor of Buenos Aires and an archenemy of the Kirchners.  Back then, Macri was heading up SOCMA, the business conglomerate founded by his father, Franco Macri, one of whose companies was the trash management firm MANLIBA. Schiavi forged ties with Macri and with SOCMA executive Daniel Chaín, and, with Chaín (later Human Development Minister for the City of Buenos Aires), eventually formed a partnership, working together through the 1990s.  One of that partnership’s projects was the remodeling of some thirty train stations.

Schiavi was to later take part in Macri’s two bids for mayor (the first of which he lost to Aníbal Ibarra), but had a falling-out with Macri over his association with liberal economist Ricardo López Murphy. In the meantime, he returned to government when Ibarra was suspended and impeached because of accusations surrounding an infamous nightclub fire (República Cromagnon) in which 194 people died. When Ibarra’s Vice-Mayor and replacement, Jorge Teleman took over, he asked Schiavi to take up the post of Municipal Planning and Public Works Minister, a job he held from 2006 until the following year, when Macri, with whom he remained estranged, won the mayoral elections. During that year, however, Schiavi had managed to nurture a good relationship with Federal Planning Minister Julio de Vido, who placed him in charge of the Railroad Infrastructure Administration (ADIF), a State company whose job was supposed to be promotion of railway renewal.  But the ADIF obviously met with little success in complying with its express aim.  Be that as it may, when scandal forced Jaime to resign from the Transportation Secretariat post, it was Schiavi who de Vido tapped to take his place.

Planning Minister Julio de Vido

The de Vido Connection. While, as I said earlier, top government officials have done their darnedest to use Jaime and Schiavi as circuit-breakers to keep the Once Rail Tragedy blowback from hitting them smack in the face, it’s pretty hard to miss the fact that they had to have known full well what their subordinates were doing. It would be at least naïve to think that they wouldn’t be keeping a close eye (for their own individual interest if nothing else) on a post  that was the key to activities involving billions in subsidies.

Says Solanas: “For such a swindle, shouldn’t Planning Minister Julio de Vido—who has had the Transport Secretariat under his ministry since 2003, and who had Ricardo Jaime at the head of it for six years—be held accountable? And isn’t the president principally responsible for the administrations of her ministers? Everybody, including Cristina [Kirchner] knew about the reports of the Federal Auditor General, the National Ombusman and the [other] claims lodged,” he says, regarding the deplorable state of the railroads and the safety issues involved. “And yet,” he says, “de Vido was absolved in the case and the party of the concessions, subsidies, swindles and complicities carries on.”

Elisa Carrió: Impeach Cristina.

Meanwhile Civil Coalition Congresswoman Elisa Carrió—another noted crusader against corruption—said this past week that she would be presenting a request for the impeachment of President Cristina Kirchner, based, she added, on the administration’s responsibility in the Once Rail Tragedy. She said that she was also seeking charges against de Vido. Carrió announced the move after a Federal  Court brought more serious charges against Jaime and Schiavi and confirmed pursuit of charges against Sergio and Mario Cirigliano (who head the group that owns TBA). Carrió said that “reading the court’s decision convinces me that the crimes with which Schiavi and Jaime are charged are the same ones that correspond to Julio de Vido and Cristina Kirchner.” The congresswoman opined that it was impossible “for Cristina Kirchner not to have known about the illicit association that her husband led and, in any case, she maintained it during her own mandates, and it is on this that the request for impeachment for misconduct is based, on the calamity of crimes produced around public transport subsidies since the beginning of Néstor Kirchner’s administration.”

The Once Rail Tragedy cannot be taken out of the context of the Kirchner administration’s overall policies and their increasingly pernicious effects.  It is symptomatic of a situation in which Argentina could almost be said to be held hostage by the policies of an administration whose main focus from the outset has been staking and perpetuating its own claim to power at the expense of the rest of the country. The administration’s radical foreign policy that has isolated Argentina from the opportunities that could put it on the road to its rightful place as a genuine regional and world  leader, its disdain for the tenets of the kind of healthy economy it should be enjoying, its thoughtless dilapidation of the country’s foreign reserves, its failure to identify and deal with corruption, its hostility toward any and all sorts of criticism, its aversion to accountability and readiness to lay blame elsewhere, and its failure to recognize the democratic principle of the minority’s right to have its say are all symptoms of a greater and graver illness, one for which the Once Rail Tragedy stands as a public symbol.

QUEST FOR TRUTH OR FOREIGN POLICY WHITEWASH?

July 18, 1994, the scene of destruction at the AMIA heaquarters

in Buenos Aires.

Over the course of the past week or so, scores of headlines in the Argentine media have been devoted to what the Kirchner government has rather grandly called the “Commission for Truth”, the outgrowth of a deal cut between the administration and the unitary, theocratic government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. There are numerous ins and outs to the accord but the basic idea is that the Kirchner government has surrendered to the flat refusal by Ahmadinejad and his predecessors to honor any of Argentina’s extradition requests to bring the alleged perpetrators of the 1994 Islamic terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish mutual association in Buenos Aires to Argentina for questioning and possible trial, by agreeing, instead, to send a judicial commission to Iran to question suspects there.



Photo: Jewish Virtual Library.

The Crime.  On July 18, 1994, a massive explosion reduced the headquarters of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in mid-town Buenos Aires to rubble. The explosion was the result of the detonation of a terrorist bomb set in front of the AMIA building. So powerful was the blast and the damage done that investigators have yet to determine without a doubt, after nearly two decades, whether the approximately 275 kilograms (more than 600 pounds) of explosives were packed into a van parked directly in front of the targeted building, into a dumpster that had been left in front of a building under construction across the street, or both. But in subsequent investigations carried out by the FBI and the Mossad (Israel’s secret service) it has been established, almost without a doubt, that the suicide trigger man for the blast was Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a 29-year-old Hezbollah militant, who probably used a remote control device from the van to detonate the explosives. (The identification was made on the basis of witness testimony and migration data from the triple border crossing that Argentina shares with Brazil and Paraguay, where the terrorist is thought to have entered the country, since local investigators are alleged to have “lost” a human head found on the blast scene that very likely belonged to Hussein Berro, and that could otherwise have been used for DNA testing). The massive blast not only caused the total destruction of the five-storey AMIA headquarters, but also demolished buildings all around it, causing severe damage to an estimated one thousand apartments, businesses and offices in the immediate area and breaking windows in other buildings within a six-block radius. It was the worst bombing in Argentine history and is ranked among some of the worst radical Islamic terrorist attacks in the world.

The suicide bombing was obviously timed to do the greatest human damage possible, with the explosives going off at approximately 10 a.m., in the busy mid-town district.  Eighty-five people perished on the scene and another 300 were injured, many seriously. At least 18 of the fatalities were passersby and people from other buildings. The attack came only two years after another bombing by Islamic extremists in Buenos Aires, that time perpetrated against the Israeli Embassy, on the north side of the downtown area. That bomb attack destroyed the embassy building, killing 29 people and injuring approximately 250 others.

The Probe. The investigation of both Islamic terrorist attacks on the Jewish community in Argentina—at about 250,000 people, the largest in Latin America and the seventh largest in the world—was plagued from the outset by intrigues, disconnects and cover-ups. Indeed, neither ever led to a single conclusive conviction.

The worst by far, however, was the probe into the AMIA bombing.  Early work by detectives with the apparently impossible-to-avoid help of both US and Israeli agents quickly led to the conclusion that such a major terrorist attack never could have been pulled off without local collaboration. But the investigation began to stall when it pointed to the possible collusion of several Buenos Aires Province police officers and of a lawyer turned used car salesman called Carlos Telleldín who was alleged to have provided the Renault Trafic van that the suicide bomber used in the attack. Investigation of the AMIA case was handed over to Federal District Court Judge Juan José Galeano. The former attorney had been appointed to the federal court the previous year, allegedly with a behind-the-scenes nod from Hugo Anzorreguy, who headed up the Argentine Intelligence Bureau (SIDE) under the presidency of Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999). 

Families of the victims, seeking justice in the midst of corruption and

political intrigue.

Early on, the case hinged on Telleldín, the inconsistency of whose testimony made his level of involvement and reliability difficult to gauge but who linked police to the case, saying that he had been pressed into providing the van by former Buenos Aires Provincial Police Captain Juan José Ribelli. Ribelli, several other police officers and Telleldín were all ordered held by the judge, but the case itself languished in Galeano’s court. And finally, in September of 2004, the judge handed down a decision absolving all detainees in the case.

But the following year, hidden-camera footage was released on national television that implicated the judge in payment of a US$400,000 bribe to Telleldín (who was in jail for ten years while the court dragged its feet without convicting him) to change his testimony. The judge tried to resign in order to avoid trial, but his resignation was “neither accepted nor rejected” by the administration of then-President Néstor Kirchner, clearing the way for Galeano to be impeached and removed from his post in disgrace by a nine-judge jury of his peers. In addition to bribery, the impeachment proceedings accused Galeano, among other things, of destroying and/or tampering with evidence (such as a document identifying the engine-block number of the vehicle used in the bombing and which allegedly linked Telleldín to the case) and manipulating witness testimony.

But by then, subsequent probes and Galeano’s own testimony in the impeachment proceedings had involved SIDE chief Anzorreguy in the bribery scandal and, called upon to answer the charges, Anzorreguy (released from his secrecy vows by Néstor Kirchner, who called the failed AMIA investigation “a national disgrace”), quickly pointed an accusing finger at his former boss, ex-President Carlos Menem, who, he said, had authorized the bribe.

In late 2006, the subsequent Argentine prosecutors in the case, Marcelo Martínez Burgos and Alberto Nisman, who had centered part of their investigation on an Iranian connection, formally charged the government of Iran with directing the attack and accused the Hezbollah militia of carrying it out. The theory behind the prosecutors’ probe would appear to link the AMIA bombing to a much more far-reaching issue than a random terrorist attack. If they were correct, the bombing was a kind of warning to the Menem government after a decision by Buenos Aires to at least temporarily suspend the promised transfer of nuclear technology to the Iranians. While this hypothesis has been much debated, it would certainly appear to be in line with what is now the very clear intention of Iran’s radical leadership to gain access by any and all means to ever greater nuclear technology and material, so as to eventually achieve atomic warhead-manufacturing capability. However, Menem himself—whose family has long been prominent in the Argentine-Arab Community—has advanced the theory that the bombing was a vendetta for his support of the United States in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) against Iraq. 

Local trails led back to Menem.

Last year, Judge Ariel Lijo charged former President Menem and a group of alleged co-conspirators—including Galeano, Menem’s brother Munir, Anzorreguy, and the former SIDE director’s deputy Juan Carlos Anchezar and Metropolitan Police Chief Jorge “Fino” Palacios, among others—with obstructing the 1994 investigation and with protecting possible accomplices in the crime, and called for them to be bound over for an oral, public trial. Menem also stands accused of allegedly covering up the possible involvement in the AMIA attack of Syrian-Argentine businessman Alberto Kanoore Edul. Kanoore Edul, who died in 2010, was suspected of having made contact with Menem to seek to convince the president to use his influence to keep Galeano from progressing in the AMIA case.

One of the witnesses that Galeano interviewed while still on the case was known as “Witness C”. Reports in international news media indicated that this mysterious witness was allegedly a former Iranian intelligence agent called Abolghasem Mesbahi. “Witness C” is reported to have told the judge that the Iranian government paid ten million dollars into a Swiss numbered account belonging to “a former president,” in order to ensure that the AMIA investigation was blocked. When The New York Times published a report including this information, Menem moved quickly to deny the charge, but admitted to having a Swiss bank account.

Rogue Iranian leader Ahmadinejad

Despite long years of theories, accusations, lies, cover-ups, new probes and still more accusations, however, the AMIA case remains stymied and, as I said earlier, not a single conviction has been made to date.

The Policy: Yet Another Diversionary Maneuver?  While the administration of Néstor Kirchner gave every outward appearance of seriously seeking justice in the AMIA case, this latest move by his widow and current President Cristina Kirchner appears destined to once again cloud the picture regarding compelling evidence of Iran’s involvement in this heinous crime, whose perpetrators have gone untried and unpunished for the past two decades. It seems at least naïve, if not ill-intentioned, to try to convince the public that a criminal regime like that of Ahmadinejad, which has denied the existence of the Holocaust, rejected the right of the State of Israel to exist and is now threatening its neighbors with the possibility of nuclear war, besides being a declared enemy of the West and express archenemy of the Jewish people, could possibly be trusted to provide a venue in which to objectively question suspects in the AMIA case, especially when at least one of them is a ranking Iranian official.

Cristina: Admiration for Muammar Gaddafi...

Worse still, according to an article last weekend by former Foreign Minister—and erudite foreign affairs specialist—Dante Caputo, “memoranda of understanding [as the Argentine-Iranian pact is being called] are...used to formally agree on the wills of two or more parties, usually representatives of governments. The more elaborated and complex form is the treaty. Contrary to the memorandum, the treaty commits the will of the Nation, and non-compliance with it brings sanctions. Since they oblige not just the administration, but the Nation that signs them, treaties require the approval of the Legislative Branch...What was signed in Ethiopia, then, doesn’t require legislative approval. But curiously enough, the text signed indicates the contrary...”

Here, Caputo tacitly suggests that drafting a memorandum that includes a clause that promotes legislative approval by both countries is, by all appearances, a diplomatic subterfuge aimed at, well, turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse—or, in other words, a memorandum into a full-scale treaty.

...for the half-century Castro dictatorship...

Quoth Caputo: “If legislative procedure is undertaken, the memorandum will become a treaty and will be made law. Its legal validity will endure over time regardless of [changes in] administrations... Legislative approval of this agreement will signify, then, that Argentina, not just this administration, will have accepted impunity.”

The administration of Cristina Kirchner in general and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman in particular, are clearly being disingenuous when they and their “talking heads” (like erstwhile sports announcer and full-time Kirchner propagandist Víctor Hugo Morales) cry crocodile tears about how misunderstood the government’s intentions are in accepting Ahmadinejad’s rules and surrendering the sovereignty of the Argentine justice system whose repeated extradition efforts have been rejected and ignored. And the government’s barely veiled attempt to use the “good offices” of Timerman to attempt to convince the local Jewish community that an agreement with Ahmadinejad isn’t a veritable pact with the devil and that it will somehow end up being “good” for the families of the victims of the AMIA bombing in bringing them closure and justice in a case that has been abusively manipulated and has gone unsolved for two decades is clearly cynical if not plain cruel.

And an almost "carnal" relationship with the Chávez regime.

Furthermore, whatever one’s politics might be in the vast spectrum from far-left to far-right and everything in between, it’s hard to judge as wise or even vaguely on target such a policy at a time when the vast majority of emerging economies (including the biggest of all, China) are seeking to modernize, Westernize and become the potential powers of the future in a rapidly transforming world in which the emerging economies are precisely the ones that are seeing the dawning of a new day and in which they will be the stars. You needn’t go further away than neighboring Brazil to see just how erroneous the Kirchner administration’s policy is. Already having had a leg up on Argentina when the two South American giants became Mercosur trading partners twenty years ago, Brazil has thrived and is currently acceding to the position of a true world economic and diplomatic power, particularly thanks, in recent years, to the creative pragmatism of the former Lula da Silva administration that quickly allayed early fears of a harshly anti-business leftwing regime and proved not only to have the necessary negotiating skills to make Brazil grow without surrendering its wealth to foreign powers but also to carve a high-ranking place for itself on the world political and economic stage (so high, in fact that the country has long been a candidate to occupy one of ten permanent seats on the UN Security Council if the respective initiative can ever achieve the clout it needs to overcome resistance from the five powers that have dominated the Council since the institution was founded following World War II).

The concept behind this projected commission appears to form a coherent part of an erroneous foreign relations policy on the part of Argentina’s current government that is obviously bent on removing the country completely from the Western mainstream (where historically, socially, politically and economically it should surely be) and aligning it on the world stage with as many rogue dictators, authoritarians, autocrats and assorted other marginal miscreants as possible. The administration’s almost carnal relations with the Chávez regime in Venezuela, its fawning reverence for the five-decade-long Castro dictatorship in Cuba, its express admiration for the murderous and long-reigning former regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya, and its latest unsavory and shamefully accommodating pact with anti-Western authoritarian hardliner Ahmadinejad all bear clear witness to this trend. It is a policy that unequivocally demonstrates, as critics including myself have pointed out from the start, that the Kirchners (and particularly Cristina Kirchner) have shamelessly used the cause of human rights to gain domestic and international recognition, while formulating an overall policy bent on disdain for Western democracies and their principles abroad, and the undermining of basic rights like freedom of expression, the right to privacy and private property, free transit, and respect for the law and legal security within Argentina itself.