Two recent dispatches from Buenos Aires highlight the travails of Argentine president Cristina Kirchner, whose foolish populism and economic mismanagement have created serious headaches for her government.
On February 4, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S.-Argentine relations had “hit a new bump” after remarks by Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman. Speaking to local media, he blasted conservative Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri for sending a pair of police officers to study at the Salvadoran campus of the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA), which was created by the United States during the Clinton administration. Timerman likened the ILEA to the Georgia-based School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. Army-run training facility that has been unfairly denigrated because of the human rights violations committed by some of its graduates during the era of Latin American military rule. “In the past, they were dedicated to training the military in coup techniques and courses in torture and persecution of political enemies,” Timerman said. “It seems to me that these are limits that we shouldn’t cross.”
