A Death in Argentina

[Woodsman]

Curious goings on in Argentina. There's been a murder, the cloak and dagger gangsters are under suspicion and La Presidenta seems to thinks shuffling chairs and writing a new mission statement will do the trick.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/wo...to-israel.html

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-...216%2C2.219%2C

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...alberto-nisman

Might it take a bit more effort to get this fox out of the hen house? Surely they'll need a multiple of counselors to get to the bottom of it. Will the truth set them free or will it be vaja con dios amigos?

It's been two decades since the AMIA bombing. The recently departed prosecutor had been working on the case for the past ten years. Think we'll have more clarity sometime around Christmastime 2035, maybe?

[GRG55]

Re: A Death in Argentina

Curious goings on in Argentina. There's been a murder, the cloak and dagger gangsters are under suspicion and La Presidenta seems to thinks shuffling chairs and writing a new mission statement will do the trick.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/wo...to-israel.html

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-...216%2C2.219%2C

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...alberto-nisman

Might it take a bit more effort to get this fox out of the hen house? Surely they'll need a multiple of counselors to get to the bottom of it. Will the truth set them free or will it be vaja con dios amigos?

It's been two decades since the AMIA bombing. The recently departed prosecutor had been working on the case for the past ten years. Think we'll have more clarity sometime around Christmastime 2035, maybe?

During the first year I lived in the Middle East I had occasion to make several trips to Syria (not as a tourist). For this somewhat sheltered Canadian it was my introduction to a state run by thugs.

There are many aspects required to achieve that status, all of which I know you will understand better than most. The obvious and crudest ones are constant surveillance, a Ministry of Information (which informs only the few), intimidation of citizens, Presidents For Life and a military that directly controls a material part of the invariably moribund national economy.

Some of these (control of information) are difficult to maintain. Some (the surveillance state) are expanding rapidly now. Both catalyzed by the same technology and social changes.

I sense "thug states" are proliferating, and this commonality is most responsible for the affinity they exhibit (e.g. Russia, Iran, Syria) and amplifies their efforts to draw in others (Turkey as one example).

[vt]

Re: A Death in Argentina

And the corrupt government blames:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/wo...sman.html?_r=0

[don]

Re: A Death in Argentina

Suspicion Is Cast on Aide in Death of Argentine Prosecutor

Diego Lagomarsino, said Wednesday that he had given Alberto Nisman a pistol.

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s government on Wednesday cast greater suspicion on an aide to Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor whose mysterious death this month has shaken the country, by describing the aide as an intelligence operative — adding to its assertions that rogue spies were involved in the events around Mr. Nisman’s death.

“This kid’s situation is starting to look worrisome,” Aníbal Fernández, the president’s chief of staff, told reporters here Wednesday morning, referring to the aide, Diego Lagomarsino, 35.

Mr. Lagomarsino worked in the prosecutor’s investigative unit as an information technology consultant and lent Mr. Nisman the .22-caliber Bersa pistol used in his death, investigators say.

Before Mr. Nisman was found dead in his apartment this month, he made the explosive assertion that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had tried to reach a secret deal with Iran to shield Iranian officials from responsibility in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina, which killed 85 people.

Mr. Nisman had contended in a 289-page criminal complaint that the Argentine government sought the deal as part of a trade pact with Iran. He died the night before he was scheduled to testify about his accusations to lawmakers.

Speaking at a news conference at his lawyer’s office on Wednesday, Mr. Lagomarsino said he regretted lending his gun to Mr. Nisman. Mr. Lagomarsino said the prosecutor had asked him for the weapon because he had lost trust in the police sentries assigned to protect him after making his accusations public against Mrs. Kirchner.

“ ‘I’m more scared of being right than not being right,’ he told me in other words,” Mr. Lagomarsino said.

Viviana Fein, the lead investigator into Mr. Nisman’s death, made it clear on Wednesday that Mr. Lagomarsino was not suspected of killing the prosecutor. “At the moment, there is no element whatsoever implicating him in a premeditated crime,” Ms. Fein said.

Investigators have not determined whether Mr. Nisman committed suicide or was killed, but Mrs. Kirchner’s government has suggested that Mr. Nisman was being manipulated by an ousted spymaster at the country’s main intelligence agency, the Intelligence Secretariat.

In a televised speech on Monday night, she said that she would send a bill to Argentina’s congress to dissolve the agency, proposing to replace it with one with less surveillance powers.

On Wednesday, Mr. Fernández, her chief of staff, asserted that Mr. Lagomarsino, had been observed carrying out “intelligence services” at protests over a 2004 nightclub fire that left 194 people dead.

So far, Mr. Lagomarsino has been the only person charged in connection to Mr. Nisman’s death. He has been accused of providing a firearm to someone not licensed to use it.

Mr. Fernández said Mr. Lagomarsino was seen photographing people at the protests; he did not say for whom or what agency Mr. Lagomarsino could have been working at the time.

Maximiliano Rusconi, Mr. Lagomarsino’s lawyer, also put in doubt Mr. Fernández’s remarks about his client and intelligence services, saying that while Mr. Lagomarsino likes photography, he had never been to a protest march.

The claims and counterclaims come amid a furor over whether the ousted spymaster helped Mr. Nisman craft the criminal complaint accusing Mrs. Kirchner of secretly trying to reach the deal with Iran.

While authorities have already barred Mr. Lagomarsino from leaving the country, Ms. Fein said she was not planning on summoning Mr. Lagomarsino for more testimony.

In a speech on Monday night, Mrs. Kirchner accused Mr. Lagomarsino of being an opponent of her government, based on an analysis of his Twitter account. She connected him to Clarín, a powerful media group with which the president has long sparred. She based her argument on an assertion that Mr. Lagomarsino’s brother works at a law firm with ties to Clarín.

A spokesman for Clarín said that Mr. Lagomarsino never had any ties to the media group, including one of Argentina’s influential daily newspapers.

The government also had pointed to Mr. Nisman’s returning sooner than expected to Argentina, on Jan. 12, from a trip to Europe as evidence that he had been manipulated in a plot against Mrs. Kirchner.

But in a confusing twist on Wednesday, Ms. Fein said that Mr. Nisman’s original plans had been to return on Jan 12. Her assertion contradicts a mobile phone message attributed to Mr. Nisman and reportedly sent to his friends, in which he said he was suspending his trip.

Mrs. Kirchner’s office, through the presidency’s Twitter feed, pointed to the message from Mr. Nisman just minutes after Ms. Fein’s remarks.

Ms. Fein also said that the security register of Le Parc, the luxury block where Mr. Nisman lived, had “grave irregularities.” She said visits, including Mr. Lagomarsino’s, appeared to have been noted inaccurately.

Many Argentines contend the government is trying to shift the focus of the investigation to Mr. Lagomarsino.

“She had been preparing the ground for this,” Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst, said of Mrs. Kirchner. “Hypothesizing about murder and then accusing Lagomarsino.”

Mr. Berensztein argued that Mrs. Kirchner’s approach fit a common strategy of tackling scandals here. “She applies the same model to every problem,” he said, referring to issues like Argentina’s debt battle with foreign creditors. “Reduce it to a simple conflict: her, the good person, against all the bad ones.”

Others here are also taking issue with Mrs. Kirchner’s handling of the crisis, including the plan to dissolve Argentina’s intelligence agency. That decision came after a power struggle with Antonio J. Stiusso, the powerful spymaster ousted from his post last month by Mrs. Kirchner.

While Mr. Lagomarsino did not refer on Wednesday to the government’s claim that he was involved in intelligence activities, his lawyer said that Mr. Lagomarsino did not know Mr. Stiusso.

Jonathan Gilbert reported from Buenos Aires, and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro.

[vt]

Re: A Death in Argentina

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/argentinas...163849907.html

Argentina's Fernandez dents credibility by playing victim




BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - President Cristina Fernandez hunkered down in her presidential residence for a week before speaking about the mysterious death of a state prosecutor who claimed she sought to whitewash Iran's alleged involvement in a 1994 bomb attack on Argentine soil.
When she did, Argentines were left in little doubt who she viewed as the victim in the scandal.
It was not Alberto Nisman, whose body was found in a pool of blood with a single bullet to the head a day before he was to detail his investigations, and to whose family Fernandez offered no condolences.
It was herself, the target of a murky plot to smear her name orchestrated by rogue agents kicked out of a spy agency that she said had failed to act in the interests of the country.
"Twenty one years after the attack and today somebody comes up with a baseless claim that we wanted to derail the investigation," Fernandez said in her hour-long televised address, dressed all in white and seated in a wheelchair.
"Let them say what they want, let them make any allegations they want, let judges summon me, I'm not bothered."
Nisman's death has triggered one of the biggest political crises of Fernandez's seven-year rule and may bolster the opposition's chances of a win in October's presidential election.
Fernandez herself is barred from running, but some officials close to the president worry her handling of the scandal is denting the government's credibility.
"This is going to hurt us," said one government source close to the presidency who is not authorized to talk publicly. "How badly, we don't know. Only she decides what she is going to do."
Fernandez, who has been recovering from a fractured ankle in her residence, speculated in a rambling post on Facebook that Nisman's death might be suicide. Days later she wrote that he had been murdered.

Her inconsistencies have helped fan conspiracy theories, some pointing directly to her. A poll by the local political consultancy Management & Fit showed 63 percent of respondents believed Fernandez's image would be significantly weakened.
The day after Nisman's death, protesters marched on Fernandez's official residence. Some banged on the gate shouting "murderer".
"She's not in the habit of recognizing her errors, be it Nisman or inflation. And so she stays inside," said Roberto Lavagna, a former economy minister under Fernandez's late husband predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, now working with opposition presidential hopeful Sergio Massa.
Whitewash claim
The week before his death on Jan. 18, Nisman had accused Fernandez of opening a secret back channel to Tehran to clear a number of Iranian suspects and whitewash the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center as part of a grains-for-oil deal.
The government calls the claim "absurd". It says Nisman was duped into making his allegations and then killed when he was no longer useful to the spies who led the conspiracy against the president.
The mysterious circumstances have re-ignited debate on the murky relationship between the government, intelligence services and the judiciary and stoked a long-held mistrust of political leaders in the run-up to this year's election.
It has also piled pressure on the leftist government as it grapples with a debt default and a stagnant economy.
"This affair should strengthen society's preference for change in this year's election," said political analyst Ignacio Labaqui at Medley Global Advisors. "It negatively affects the chances of any of the government's presidential aspirants attracting independent voters."
In her TV address, Fernandez unveiled surprise plans to dismantle the powerful SI intelligence agency, which she portrayed as sinister and accountable to no one.
In the "dirty war" directed by Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976-1983, the agency spied on Marxist rebels, labor unions and other leftists. Since democracy was restored, successive governments are widely believed to have continued using the agency to snoop on opponents.
Fernandez said a new, more transparent agency would be created. Oversight of wiretapping would be handed to the prosecutor general.
But her opponents are skeptical, with some suspecting Fernandez wants to hand control of a new intelligence agency to loyalists. They argue the step is more about protecting herself than democratic reforms.
"Everything she does is about her," said Federico Pinedo, head of presidential aspirant Mauricio Macri's opposition PRO bloc in the lower house. "She has control of Congress and can do whatever she wants."
It is not the first time Congress, dominated by allies of Fernandez, is being asked to hurriedly push through legislation.
In September, lawmakers passed a bill revising how Argentina would pay some foreign debt in a bid to skirt U.S. court rulings over its defaulted bonds. Argentina is, the president has said, the victim of "economic terrorists" in its lengthy legal battle with U.S. investors.
The new law failed to fix the default and instead reinforced their belief that Fernandez had no intention of negotiating with the U.S. creditors she has branded "vultures".
"Fernandez has her own way of functioning which very much relies on her own intuition and certainties, as opposed to evidence and realities that she prefers to ignore," said Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein.
(Additional reporting by Sarah Marsh, Nicolas Misculin and Brian Winter; Editing by Kieran Murray)

[don]

Re: A Death in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES — Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor whose mysterious death has gripped Argentina, had drafted a warrant for the arrest of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, accusing her of trying to shield Iranian officials from responsibility in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center here, the lead investigator into his death said on Tuesday.

The 26-page document, which was found in the garbage at Mr. Nisman’s apartment, also requested the arrest of Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister. Both Mrs. Kirchner and Mr. Timerman have repeatedly denied Mr. Nisman’s accusation that they tried to reach a secret deal with Iran to lift international arrest warrants for Iranian officials wanted in connection with the bombing.

The new revelation that Mr. Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for the president and the foreign minister further illustrates the heightened tensions between him 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.

“It would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” said Sergio Berensztein, a political analyst, about the impact of the warrants if they had been issued. He acknowledged that previous legal cases had shaken Argentina’s political establishment, but he emphasized that this case involved a request to arrest a sitting president.

“It would have been a scandal on a level previously unseen,” Mr. Berensztein said.

Mrs. Kirchner, who is on a visit to China, issued a stream of updates on Twitter about strengthening ties between Buenos Aires and Beijing but did not comment immediately on the confirmation that Mr. Nisman had considered seeking her arrest. She and the foreign minister have previously pointed to statements by Interpol's former director that the Argentine government did not lobby it to lift the Iranian arrest warrants.

Viviana Fein, the prosecutor investigating Mr. Nisman’s death, confirmed on Tuesday morning that Mr. Nisman had prepared the draft of the warrant requesting the president’s arrest. Confusion about the document had emerged when Ms. Fein had initially denied its existence, after the newspaper Clarín published an article on Sunday about the draft.

Mrs. Kirchner’s cabinet chief, Jorge Capitanich, tore up the article before reporters on Monday. But then Ms. Fein corrected her earlier statement and confirmed the existence of the draft, which Clarín said was prepared in June 2014, more than six months before Mr. Nisman went public with his accusations against the president.

“The words I should have used are, ‘It’s evident that there was a draft,’  ” Ms. Fein said in comments broadcast on Argentine radio.

The draft of the arrest warrants was not included in a 289-page criminal complaint against Mrs. Kirchner, the foreign minister and prominent supporters of the president that Mr. Nisman filed. Mr. Nisman accused them of derailing his decade-long investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association, commonly called AMIA, which left 85 people dead.

Two judges have refused to take the case made by Mr. Nisman, raising the possibility that his complaint could languish in Argentina’s legal system if another judge is not found to continue it. A federal chamber is expected to decide who should take the case.

Mrs. Kirchner and senior officials have criticized Mr. Nisman’s complaint, disputing his findings and contending that agents from Argentina’s premier intelligence services were involved in preparing it. In the uproar around the prosecutor’s death, Mrs. Kirchner announced a plan last week to overhaul the intelligence agency, following a purge of its leadership in December.

Meanwhile, the investigation into Mr. Nisman’s death is proceeding as theories swirl in Argentina about whether it was a suicide or a killing. Mrs. Kirchner has suggested that Mr. Nisman’s death is part of a plot to tarnish her government.

Underscoring the tension surrounding the death of Mr. Nisman, who was buried at a Jewish cemetery last week, anti-Semitic posters began appearing in central Buenos Aires this week. They read: “The good Jew is the dead Jew. The good Jew is Nisman.”

Julio Schlosser, the president of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations, said, “These posters represent a current of anti-Semitism seeking to insult the prosecutor Nisman, who worked and dedicated his life to the AMIA case.” He added, “It is also a provocation to the Jewish community.”

[santafe2]

Re: A Death in Argentina

“It would have provoked a crisis without precedents in Argentina,” said Sergio Berensztein...

“It would have been a scandal on a level previously unseen,” Mr. Berensztein said.

Of course. The Dirty War was nothing compared to this. Only 10s of thousands were "disappeared".

Two judges have refused to take the case made by Mr. Nisman...

Also known as the two judges who want to live to see their grandchildren.

[vt]

Re: A Death in Argentina

Ex spy chief missing?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...ing-is-missing