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Argentina's president just gave her most delusional speech yet
Reuters The president of Argentina is living in an alternate reality, one that once seemed to bear some resemblance to the world we live in but no longer does.
In a speech on Sunday, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner completely detached from reality in two ways. First, she speculated wildly about Israel's connection to terrorist attacks in Argentina. Second, she claimed the economy was on the upswing — something one Financial Times journalist was only too happy to call her out on.
In her speech, Fernandez said a prosecutor who died under mysterious circumstances had actually complimented her in documents found in a safety box in his apartment. That prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, was found dead just before he was to testify that the Argentine government had helped to cover up Iran's involvement in a decades-old terrorist attack in Buenos Aires.
She also asked Israel to answer questions about the attack Nisman was investigating — it killed 84 people at the Jewish center AMIA in 1994 — and another attack against the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992.
"Those documents say the exact opposite of what he said in his report ... The case should be called Nisman vs. Nisman," Fernandez said. "Which Nisman do you believe, the one who accused without proof on January 14, 2015 or the Nisman ... who uplifted my actions in the United Nations, who recounted ... every single one of my speeches and recognizes that textually is it not the best to get the accused to sit in front of a judge in Tehran and be interrogated because if they're not interrogated there can be no justice?"
Marcos Brindicci/Reuters Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman during a meeting with journalists in 2013. She went on to say that she didn't believe Nisman wanted to accuse her at all — that in fact he only wanted to bring the case to the international stage and was using her name to do so.
Nisman's death worsened an already tenuous political and economic situation in Argentina. Inflation is high, capital flight is rampant, and the head of Fernandez's cabinet just left her administration.
In this climate, Nisman's death crossed an invisible line. Argentines remember vividly the violence and lies of dictatorships past, in which people disappeared and children were taken from parents who dared to question the government.
Fernandez is not a dictator — she is out of office at the end of 2015 — and despite her attempts has not been able to change the constitution to run again. Still, the Nisman case is a terrifying flashback to those times.
Wikipedia Remains of the AMIA after the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.
No one has ever answered for the catastrophe Nisman was investigating, and it is becoming increasingly likely that no one will ever answer for Nisman's death either. Last week an Argentine judge ruled that the country would not investigate Fernandez for the latter incident.
And so, to put the Argentine collective consciousness at ease, Fernandez pointed to Israel.
"In 1992, the Israeli embassy was attacked, 29 people died, 249 were injured," she said in her speech. "This was an attack on the territory of Israel, because the embassy is Israeli territory itself. It's always caught my attention, and I still can't understand why the state of Israel is upset over the attack on AMIA and not one on its own embassy."
It's unclear what she meant by that, but that's the point. The Fernandez tactic is to obfuscate, to sow the seeds of conspiracy theories in Argentina's fertile ground. Since Nisman's death theories have abounded — connecting his murder to things as far-fetched as Charles Manson and Nazis. That is what corruption in society does; it makes it impossible to trust and thus impossible to find truth. Fernandez's rhetoric capitalizes on that chaos.
Edgard Garrido/Reuters
Nisman is hardly the only example of that chaos in her speech either. Argentina's economy is in horrible condition and investors have been shying away for years, in part because The Republic has been recalcitrant about paying its debts.
When Joseph Cotterill, a journalist for the Financial Times, tweeted at the president, sarcastically congratulating her for the fact that Argentina's bonds were finally trading above par, she responded with more fiction in her speech.
She said the bonds were increasing in value because of the country's resilience after it was ruled in "selective default" of payment to bondholders last fall.
Cotterill had the perfect response:
Thanks for the mention in your speech, @CFKArgentina. But I fear that the bond's price is going up the less time you have left in office.
— Joseph Cotterill (@jsphctrl) March 1, 2015
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