As ill-conceived as it sounds

By Sebastián Lacunza
Editor-in-Chief

Diana Conti is confident.

“On Monday we will go all-in with a two-footed tackle against Nisman,” she said, uttering words that appear to be more appropriate for a bizarre wrestling show than Congress. The staunch Kirchnerite lawmaker appears to believe the match has already been won before AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman even visits the Criminal Legislation Committee of the Lower House tomorrow.

It’s a pity that Conti is thinking about attacking Nisman. Soccer rules say that a two-footed tackle is punishable with a red card and expulsion. If the opponent has a vulnerability, a better strategy is to keep calm until it becomes evident and then attack as strongly as possible within the rules of the game.

The decision to debate Nisman and Conti’s aggressiveness both help to exemplify the two sides of Kirchnerism. Firstly, the move to participate in the meeting with the prosecutor, convened at the request of PRO lawmakers, shows a smart political reaction at a time when the opposition is trying to make sure that the accusations against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner get the broadest airings possible by giving them the air of parliamentary legitimacy.

But on the other hand, a political scandal, which appears plausible based on Conti’s threat, would be a heavy-handed strategy — not just for the ruling party but for the political ecosystem as a whole.

It is time to listen to Nisman, whose investigation has shown more success in reaching certain television outlets than the courts. Although his arguments may very well be extravagant, they have institutional implications and cannot be ignored. In that light nobody should be surprised if the opposition tries to dismantle the Committee meeting or neutralize it, alleging a formal reason in the coming hours.

Rather than going in with a two-footed tackle, Conti and her colleagues would be better served by asking intelligent questions.

Nisman is a prosecutor who devoted the past 10 years to push the accusations against the Iranian regime and Lebanon’s Hezbollah for the AMIA bombing, almost completely based on information provided by intelligence services. The US Embassy was the one that pushed Nisman toward that approach, at the expense of probing any other possible foreign or local responsibilities, as was exposed in the WikiLeaks cables. That thesis is also favoured by the Israeli government and the leadership of the Argentine Jewish community. In particular, the latter tried to lobby before the Embassy in favour of former DAIA President Rubén Beraja, who was convicted and then acquitted of perjury charges to cover up the attack, among other judicial proceedings against him.

Nisman’s obedience turned sycophantic — as the Embassy appeared to believe — when the prosecutor called the Ambassador to apologize for one of the few occasions he failed to anticipate an important decision in the case. Following the Embassy suggestions to avoid “distractions” from Iran, he seemingly forgot to look for any local support that was evidently needed to carry out such a devastating slaughter in the neighborhood of Once, twenty blocks from the Obelisk, on July 18, 1994. Neither the identification of the target, the transfer of explosives nor operational logistics could have been possible without the complicity of local groups, which would not have been difficult to obtain in a country with infamous police corruption in addition to a residual structure of the last military dictatorship.

Nisman says that the president, once released from the scrutiny of her husband Néstor Kirchner when he died in 2010, negotiated impunity with Iran in exchange for greater bilateral trade. The corpus delicti, however, is nowhere to be found.

w The key Iranian requirement — according to Nisman — never took place. The Interpol arrest warrants for five Iranians and a member of Hezbollah were never suspended.

w Argentina’s exports to Iran began to grow in 2006 and they have been stabilized at between 800 million dollars and 1.4 billion dollars since 2008, official statistics show. The sales are mainly composed of soybean oil and other commodities, which are traded by Argentine or foreign private companies.

w Purchases of Iranian oil were another starting point of the plot denounced by Nisman. No news on that either.

w The re-started trade took place in a framework in which the European Union exported US$10 billion to Iran and the United States another US$ 200 million per year.

Nisman has wiretaps. In fact, that’s all he has. He wrote in his presentation before federal Judge Ariel Lijo and then expanded in several interviews that the audio files expose Argentine and Iranian gentlemen as they negotiated the terms of the agreement. In the role of providing ideas and contacts to the CFK administration, the agitator Luis D’Elia and his colleague Fernando Esteche appear, among others.

All in all, Nisman and some pundits consider that they have a case.

Let’s see. One thing is a president agreeing to protect the main suspects of the worst terrorist attack against her own country and another is a government with low-quality lobbyists. If the first case is proven, it is serious enough to warrant impeachment. The second, however, would hardly extend beyond mockery in some offices. At the end of the day, D’Elía, as vulgar as he seems, was never hidden from the official events at the Casa Rosada. A matter of the Kirchnerite menu.

Just like Nisman wouldn’t be comfortable if he were to be interviewed by a critical journalist, the courts don’t seem to be a better destination for his cause. That is why some relatives of AMIA victims insist that the prosecutor is seeking a way to leave the case through this explosive accusation after his allies in the Intelligence Secretariat (SI) were dismissed weeks ago.

Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral — who may have also read WikiLeaks— is responsible for the probe into the AMIA case. He took mere hours to distance himself from Nisman’s performance and accused him of basing his allegations on illegal, unauthorized evidence — the wiretaps. If so, the special prosecutor did not do anything besides laying the groundwork for a political scandal. As ill-conceived as it sounds.

@sebalacunza