Kirchner Administration Protects Terrorism

Septiembre 2005
By Maria Zaldivar *

With indignation and embarrassment I have followed the reaction of Rafael Bielsa, the Argentinean Foreign Minister and congressional candidate, to an article about Argentina that was published several weeks ago by The Wall Street Journal.
Members of the Peronist Party have, among others, the bad habit of authoritarianism. The Minister-Candidate showed off his talent for this when he attacked the columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady.
But why do I ascribe authoritarianism to the Peronists? Because they do not disagree, they disqualify; they do not debate, they criticize; they do not discuss, they accuse; they do not reason, they mandate; and many of them do not think, they obey. They simply obey.
The Minister-Candidate called Anastasia O’Grady everything but a liar. But unfortunately so, for his article is a clear reflection of Argentina under President Kirchner. In fact, the world today lacks Argentina as an ally in the fight for the cause of liberty not only because the nation protects terrorists, but also because Argentina at present harasses the members of our armed and security forces, because it defends the dictatorships of Latin America and sanctions the seizure of private property. Argentina today justifies the guerilla fighting of the 1970s because many of our current officials, such as the Minister-Candidate, were its protagonists and resisted the struggle against terrorism undertaken by the United States, these individuals having much more sympathy for the terrorism than they did for the latter country. In these ways, as well, the Republic of Argentina protects terrorists.
The Minister-Candidate has forgotten his past as a montonero, just as he forgot Hilda Molina in her Cuban paradise, just as he forgot, in the expediency of his visit to Havana, to receive Cuban dissidents. These are, in fact, acts of a coherent ideology, as not long ago Bielsa was heard to say, “It does not matter to me that human rights are violated in Cuba.” Yet we all know that Bielsa’s true motive is different: choosing between the human rights of some anonymous and only potentially threatening neoliberal and the reverential fear which he and his employer hold for Fidel Castro, Bielsa prefers to devote himself to avoiding the anger of the dictator. He would do exactly the same if Hilda Molina and a hundred thousand more were rotting away in one or in 300 Cuban prisons.
Abuse and misuse of power are constant features of the Argentinean political class of the last decades. Now, Bielsa has broken into the international scene with pure Peronist tactics: with the “squeezing” of journalism, that pressure which we who demand the chance to exercise freely our duty to inform suffer every day in this suffered ex-republic.
A clarification for your readers: we are many in Argentina who disdain the Peronist contempt for the law and our institutions, we are many who believe in liberalism as an optimal formula for cohesion, many also who deplore this pattern of officials with neither personal quality nor political ability.

* Maria Zaldivar is a television journalist with Canal Magazine, Multicanal and Direct TV in Buenos Aires Argentina.