Tinfoil hats at the ready please

February 10, 2015 5:50 PM

The Cast
New Yorker: - What happened to Alberto Nisman?
El Pais : - Argentinean prosecutor drafted arrest warrant for Fernández de Kirchner.
WSJ : - First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?
NYT : -Reining In Argentina’s Spymasters.
Grauniad : - Argentina investigates mystery DNA found at dead prosecutor's home.
Arutz Sheva : - Aide Who Gave Gun to Nisman is Fired.
Bloomberg : - Who and where is Antonio Stiuso?
Grauniad : - The shady history of Argentina’s Intelligence.
posted by adamvasco (19 comments total)

Argentine writer Uki Goñi (author of The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina and previously discussed on Metafilter) has a good piece in the New York Times today as well: How Argentina ‘Suicides’ the Truth (Feb 10, 2015)
posted by Auden at 6:18 PM on February 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's too damn obvious for any tinfoil hats, which is perhaps the only shocking thing of this whole thing, you'd think they'd be more subtle nowadays.

My grandma always insisted her phones were tapped, and always lowered her voice when talking politics; i stopped laughing dismissively at those comments a long while back, heh.

Anyway, see also Yabrán, Cabezas, Carlitos Menem, Cattaneo, etc. There's a long list...
posted by palbo at 6:18 PM on February 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

So that hedge fund owner who is caused the recent default should be a bit nervous eh?
posted by humanfont at 6:53 PM on February 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

That last link from Auden's comment has good context.

Oh, and adamvasco, your two Guardian links seem to be typos; the first goes to an error page, and the second looks like it's supposed to go to your first. Maybe get the mods to clean it up?
posted by mediareport at 7:21 PM on February 10, 2015

adamvasco, your two Guardian links seem to be typos

Dear Adam,

I'm afraid we've had to revoke your license to make Grauniad jokes- you're taking it far too literally.

Sincerely,
Dept. Of Dated References
posted by zamboni at 7:30 PM on February 10, 2015 [9 favorites]

That New Yorker piece is full of details I hadn't read before, like the leaked Wikileaks cables that show Nisman for years "obsessively consulted with the American Embassy. He went to the Embassy with advance tips on his investigation, he shared knowledge about judges’ leanings, and he showed Embassy officials drafts of his arrest orders and made revisions based on their comments."

And while the whole thing is bizarre, this stands out:

The government’s erratic response to Nisman’s death created further confusion. The journalist who first reported the death, Damian Pachter, left Argentina for Israel last Saturday, claiming that his life was in danger. Inscrutably, the government posted Pachter’s flight information to its Twitter account, and said that it was trying to protect the journalist.
posted by mediareport at 7:40 PM on February 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here's another article to add to the list, written last week by Greg Grandin in The Nation: How Did Argentina’s Alberto Nisman Really Die? (February 3, 2015). I haven't read all the links in this post yet, but this Grandin article has been the most interesting and informative thing I've come across so far.
posted by Auden at 8:03 PM on February 10, 2015

Inscrutably, the government posted Pachter’s flight information to its Twitter account, and said that it was trying to protect the journalist.

There was an early article that directly quoted the government official saying this, which has to rank as one of the most ridiculous things I have read this year. It was pretty close to "we had to target the journalist in order to save him," and had just as much credibility.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:51 PM on February 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

This, this is real power. From the Bloomberg article:

There are few known pictures of [Stiuso]. In 2004, former Justice Minister Gustavo Beliz showed a black and white image of him. The minister was quickly removed from office and he exiled himself abroad for years.

posted by Joe in Australia at 12:35 AM on February 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

The CFK government has always had a fairly loose relationship with the truth and have always been of the "if you're not with us you're against us" school of propaganda. Any disagreement with their worldview is vigourously condemned as a attempt at destabilisation of the state.

So the contradictory buffoonery that immediately followed the announcement (the initial assertion within less than 24 hours that it was suicide only to switch 2 days later to declare it was murder as part of a plot against the President) came as no surprise and every day came with new details. Was the flat door closed from the inside or not? Why did it take 3 days to discover the existence of a service access door?

The existence of the discarded document asking for CFK's detention was reported in Clarín (hated by the Government) on a Sunday - it was denied that evening by the prosecutor. The following morning the Chief of Staff appeared on live TV and ripped up a copy of Clarín to demonstrate the accuracy of their journalism. That very evening the same prosecutor announced that she had misspoke and yes, that document did, in fact, exist.

And let's not forget that in the middle of all this, the President of Argentina went on a trade mission to China and managed to insult one-fifth of the world's population in 140 characters.
posted by jontyjago at 1:13 AM on February 11, 2015 [9 favorites]

This is making it all very difficult to quietly dispose of the Falklands.
posted by Devonian at 4:40 AM on February 11, 2015

And during all this madness the president has the gall to make fun of the Chinese pronunciation of Spanish and tweets, "vinieron sólo por el aloz y el petloleo?" she changes the L and the R, "they came for the lice and petloleum" This is when she is actually negotiating with them rice in exchange for petroleum.
posted by Che boludo! at 7:31 AM on February 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this roundup; as someone who lived in Argentina for a few crucial years (and still roots for the albiceleste), I find its inability to find a decent way to become a modern democratic country heartbreaking, and I'm hoping (without much real hope) that this latest catastrophe will catalyze some useful reaction.
posted by languagehat at 7:33 AM on February 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica :Argentina’s History of Assassinations and Suspicious Suicides.
He concludes that Nisman was "Another victim of a labyrinth that leads not to justice, but to new labyrinths".
posted by adamvasco at 4:38 PM on February 11, 2015

I blame it on separatists from Uqbar.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:45 PM on February 11, 2015

Uh-oh. Shit just got real.
posted by jontyjago at 10:25 AM on February 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Just because the other CIA threads are closed :
1000 Americans Dead Because of US Torture Program
posted by jeffburdges at 1:18 PM on February 22, 2015

The government of Argentina is pushing its anti #Nisman march. "Fatherland or CIA + Mossad Mafia." This is real.

I didn't see it at first, but if you look at the letter "M" in "MAFIAS" it has a a CIA seal with the word "Mossad" dangling in front of it. I think the other letters also contain symbolic images: I see money, a pair of scales loaded with dollar bills, and some stuff I can't contextualise.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:33 PM on February 22, 2015

Nisman's charges have been thrown out.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:12 PM on February 26, 2015