Argentina faces yet another self-inflicted crisis from its wayward President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who has just announced plans to disband Argentina’s intelligence agencies after prosecutor Alberto Nisman was about to name her and her foreign minister as being complicit in seeking to derail an investigation into Argentina’s worst terrorist incident — an attack on a Jewish centre in 1994.
Kirchner has had a highly combative personal style of government based on paternalistic interventionism since 2007, when she won office after her husband came to the end of his term as president. She took on the farm workers, ordered huge sums of private savings into the state pension system, forced the Central Bank to implement some eccentric national debt repayments and more recently nationalised Repsol’s, the Spanish oil company, assets in Argentina.
The new crisis goes back to the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish centre, AMIA, in which 85 people were killed. In 2006, Nisman formally accused Iran for the attack and subsequently Nisman accused Kirchner of colluding with Tehran to derail his investigation in exchange for Argentine access to Iranian oil. He was found dead on January 18 and despite the on-going investigations, Kirchner made an accusation that Nisman was killed by rogue intelligence agents to embarrass her. Till now, she has shown no interest in reforming the intelligence agencies, which gives rise to the most lively suspicion that her new proposal to reshape the agencies has nothing to do with the agencies and more to do with her desire to hide something.
