Argentina and US participants in its politics

The more I learn about Argentina, the less surprised I am at seeing indications that Americans in both official and private roles play major roles in Argentine internal politics.

Also, I'm learning more about who to take seriously writing about Argentina and who not.

Uki Goñi is the author of the strangest of A strange trio of articles from Germany's "Jungle World" on Argentina that I wrote about a few days ago.

As I wrote there, his article included the claim, presented as though it were straight fact, "Argentina is today a one-party state, like Mexico in the times of PRI rule. Since eight years ago there has been only Peronist governments, governors, mayors."

As I discussed there, this is a plainly false and ridiculous claim that any high school student with a web browser and a bit of patience could quickly determine was not true.

But Uki Goñi is good enough for the New York Times, which just ran a piece of his, How Argentina ‘Suicides’ the Truth 02/10/2015. He makes this claim about the charges the late prosecutor Alberto Nisman made against President Cristina Fernández (CFK): "The countless hours of phone intercepts on which they were based revealed a conspiratorial underworld unlike anything a prosecutor had dared reveal before."

This is plainly ridiculous. Period. (See Gareth Porter for a cogent description in English.)

The New York Times also recently ran a good article on the AMIA/Nisman case earlier by Argentine journalist and human rights activist Horacio Verbitsky. Not they run a piece of opposition propaganda fluff - ugly fluff - from this Goñi guy.

Another passage in Goñi's Times article gives an idea of his perspective. (I discount his actual reporting by a factor of at least 99%.) He writes, "Santiago Kovadloff, a 72-year-old philosopher who, in the aftermath of Mr. Nisman’s death, has emerged as the country’s moral compass..."

Now, I don't recall having heard of Kovadloff before. But maybe that's just me. Actually, he seems to be more of a literary type than a philosopher, but words seem to have flexible meanings for Sr. Goñi. But his biography at his blog, which apparently doesn't include actual blog posts, says he got a philosophy degree at the University of Buenos Aires, so I guess that counts. He writes opinion pieces for La Nación, a hardline conservative paper that is the traditional mouthpiece of the Argentine oligarchy.

Maybe Uki Goñi gets some of his bad ideas direct from Kovadloff, who wrote this sneering and FOX-News-level partisan comment in 2013 of kirchnerismo, the brand of Left Peronism identified with CFK and her late husband and predecessor as President, Néstor Kirchner:

El kirchnerismo es, desde su origen, un ejercicio inflexible y despiadado del poder. Hacer de la República una gran Santa Cruz significa convertir a la Nación en un escenario definitivamente vertebrado por un poder supremo no sujeto a ningún control, que es lo mismo que decir adueñado para siempre de la ley.

[Kirchnerismo is, from its origin, an inflexible and implacable exercise of power. To make the Republic into a big Santa Cruz {the province where Néstor was Governor} would mean to convert the nation into a stage definitively structured by a supreme power not subject to any control, which is to say, seizing control forever of the law.]

That statement is as ridiculous as those that have defined Goñi's work for me.

Santiago Kovadloff appears to be a philosopher of the Sean Hannity school of political theory.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the investigation into the apparent suicide of Alberto Nisman goes on. (La jueza ordenó cotejar un ADN hallado en el departamento de Nisman Página/12 11.02.2015)

Visión 7 - Causa Nisman: La jueza ordenó analizar otro perfil genético TV Pública argentina 10.02.2015: