Nothing Suspicious Here
Headline:
"Draft of Arrest Warrant for Argentine President Found at Dead Prosecutor’s Home."The new revelation that Mr. Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for the president and the foreign minister further illustrates the heightened tensions between the prosecutor and the government before he was found dead on Jan. 18 at his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. He had been scheduled the next day to provide details before Congress about his accusations against Mrs. Kirchner.
If you put it in a movie they would say you were being unrealistic and cartoonish.
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ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised. I spent part of my childhood in Argentina and was there when General Ongania took over in a coup. We kids were quite terrified tho he didn't butcher people the way Videla and his thugs did. Nevertheless, we knew that this was NOT a country where anyone could be sure of waking up the next morning if they criticised the government. Still isn't. We loved the place, but it's not a safe place for anyone digging up dirt on the powerful...
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ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised.
Those of us who have lived in Argentina are not surprised that Evita III might have been practicing some thuggery one usually associates with military regimes. Funny thing about that.
While one would like to believe that the thuggery that the Videla Junta practiced was an anomaly within Argentine society of the 1970s, a prescient article that VS Naipaul wrote in 1972, years before the Dirty War was in full swing, suggests that in Argentina of the 1970s, it wasn’t just the military that had an “anything goes” attitude towards achieving political goals. At the time of the article, Argentina had a military government. The next year Juan Domingo Perón returned to Argentina and got elected. In 1976, a coup overthrew Isabel Perón and the Dirty War heated up. From The Corpse at the Iron Gate, published in the New York Review of Books in 1972.
These lawyers had been represented to me as a group working for “civil rights.” They were young, stylishly dressed, and they were meeting that morning to draft a petition against torture. The top-floor flat was scruffy and bare; visitors were scrutinized through the peep-hole; everybody whispered; and there was a lot of cigarette smoke. Intrigue, danger. But one of the lawyers was diverted by my invitation to lunch, and at lunch-he was a hearty and expensive eater-he made it clear that the torture they were protesting against wasn’t to be confused with the torture in Perón’s time.
He said: “When justice is the justice of the people men sometimes commit excesses. But in the final analysis the important thing is that justice should be done in the name of the people.” Who were the enemies of the people? His response was tabulated and swift. “American imperialism. And its native allies. The oligarchy, the dependent bourgeoisie, Zionism, and the ‘sepoy’ left. By sepoys we mean the Communist Party and socialism in general.” ……..
“There are no internal enemies,” the trade union leader said, with a smile. But at the same time he thought that torture would continue in Argentina. “A world without torture is an ideal world.” And there was torture and torture. “Depende de quién sea torturado. It depends on who is tortured. An evildoer, that’s all right. But a man who’s trying to save the country-that’s something else.
The leftists that Naipaul interviewed had a very plastic attitude towards torture: "Depende de quién sea torturado." It depends on who is tortured.” According to those two leftists Naipaul interviewed, torture was good if our guys do it, bad if the police do it against us. Which doesn’t sound very different from the military gorilas’ point of view. Sounds to me as if a lot of the guerrillas and guerilla supporters were brothers under the skin to the right wing torturing military gorilas.
And given that the Kirchners showed their tolerance for left-wing terrorism by placing a number of ex-Montoneros in the upper reaches of their government, one should not be surprised that Evita III tried to make a deal with terrorist Iran, or that she may well be at least complicit in Nisman’s murder.
More information on former left-wing terrorist Montoneros in the Kirchners' governments. From a 2005 WSJ article: The Other Villains in Argentina's Dirty War.
ReplyDeleteThe Kirchner government is packed with former Montoneros, one of the most ruthless Argentine terrorist groups of the 1970s whose bloodthirsty rampage around the country for six years was a precursor to the military government. …
No civilized person could possibly embrace the excesses of the military and Mr. Márquez makes it clear that he mourns what happened to his nation. His accounting of terrorism's toll includes the brutality of the militant fascist group AAA. But he also demonstrates no ambivalence about the leading role played by the Montoneros in sowing terror and chaos…
The final official terrorist tallies for the decade from 1969-1979 were over 21,000 attacks, 1,748 kidnappings and 1,501 murders. Given this brutality and its enormous cost to Argentine society, it is remarkable to count the number people populating Mr. Kirchner's government who Mr. Márquez says are ex-Montoneros, including the Secretary of Human Rights Eduardo Duhalde, Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa, Undersecretary of the Presidency Carlos Kunkel, Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Jorge Taiana and Secretary of Consumer Affairs Patricia Vaca Narvaja. Miguel Bonasso, who wrote a book about his Montonero past, is a Peronist congressman and a close Kirchner ally. Horacio Verbitsky, a close Kirchner consultant, was a ranking member of the Montonero intelligence apparatus.
One of Mr. Kirchner's closest allies is Hebe Bonafini, a militant Argentine activist who declared her "happiness" when thousands were murdered at the World Trade Center
Evita III, a.k.a. La Presidenta Cristina Kirchner, showed her plastic ethics by trying to prosecute economists who disagreed with the government's fudged inflation statistics. [Why do I call the inflation statistics fudged? A kilo of yerba mater which I bought several years ago at $4 now costs $10-15, which is far above the announced inflation for Argentina.]
Nisman had evidence that Evita III tried to make a deal with Iran. You send us oil, we send you grain, we can forget all about this. From what I have read, while the Kirchners were left wind Peronists back in the 1970s, they did not belong to the terrorist Montoneros. However, the Kirchners' appointments of former Montoneros in the upper reaches of their governments shows that they both tolerated terrorism. Should we be surprised at Evita III trying to make a deal with terrorist Iran? No. Should we be surprised that Evita III may be complicit in Nisman's murder? No, though Iran had plenty of reasons to do it themselves, without any advance warning given to Evita III.
That would not be "left wind Peronists," but "left wing Peronists."
ReplyDeleteThat whole story is just proof of the old saying "truth is stranger than fiction".
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