The last time that Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman made international news, he was needlessly provoking a crisis in bilateral relations with the United States over a routine military-training exercise. A few weeks earlier, Timerman had accused the U.S. government of operating “torture” schools both at home and abroad.

Now, thanks to the Argentine weekly publication Perfil, Timerman is receiving attention for his position on Iran. According to Perfil, which obtained a classified document, Timerman met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his foreign minister, Walid Moallem, back in January and suggested that Argentina “would be ready to freeze the investigations of terrorist bombings attributed to Iran in 1992 and 1994, in exchange for renewing and improving trade relations between the countries, which at their height reached $1.2 billion a year.”