Argentinian prosecutor found dead

[Posty Webber]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Heh, that's some turn of phrase you just conjured:

"May your mother rend your whore's garments in Hell".

[Posty Webber]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Or even better, "whore-garment".

Will use that.

[Posty Webber]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

~

[ursus arctos]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

It's not a great language for punchy slogans is it? I suppose that's why they have to compensate with greater enthusiasm.

Erm

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

The second one is pretty good, but the first one suffers from starting with an "El" you need lots of hard consonants. Pueblo just doesn't cut it either.

[Sam]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Nefertiti2 wrote:

This has appeared in Buenos Aires in the last couple of days, apparently.

It has indeed, I posted about it on the previous page...

[Sam]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

And this isn't related to the Nisman story, but it helps to perhaps provide a bit of an answer to the folk who asked near the start of the thread 'those in power there can't really be that stupid... can they?'

Argentine President jokes about poltical supporters only wanting 'lice and petloleum' during a diplomatic visit to China, and then calls it 'humour'.

I can almost guarantee at least 50% of the people getting so publicly angry about it would be brushing it under the carpet if it were their own favourite politician saying it.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

There's a New Yorker piece here which puts that China gaffe into the context of Kirchner's considerable recent form for idiotic behaviour in international diplomacy.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cristina-kirchner-misadventure-china?mbid=social_facebook

[Vulgarian Visigoth]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

To quote Pepe Mujica, 'Esta vieja es peor que el tuerto'.

[ursus arctos]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Clarin (the administration's media bete noir) is reporting that Kirchner is going to be formally charged with a cover up of Iranian involvement in the 1994 bombing.

[Sam]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Yep, someone else is picking up the case Nisman was going to present, essentially. Also, I've been really busy for the last week and didn't have time to mention this before, but another bit of background...

The Mayor of Tigre is called Sergio Massa, and was a Kirchnerite prior to the last legislative elections. At those elections, he announced he was breaking from Kirchner, and planned to run for the presidency on his own ticket in 2015. Shortly after that, his house was burgled.

Last week it was revealed that the man who'd broken in to Massa's house was a state intelligence agent.

[Sam]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Oh and the government are saying publicly that an impeachment would be 'anti-democratic' and that there's a coup d'etat in progress.

[ursus arctos]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

When you come for the Queen, you better not miss.

[Elvis Wilbury takes a turn]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Hmm, time to pick a fight over Las Malvinas.

[ursus arctos]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

Unsurprisingly, Kirchner's departure has led to developments in the case.

The death remains unsolved, and until last week, authorities had not even decided whether to define it as homicide or suicide. On Thursday, however, federal appeals court prosecutor Ricardo Sáenz said that “the evidence produced so far” showed that Nisman had been the victim of a homicide.

[Sam]

Argentinian prosecutor found dead

It's only been a year, ursus. Give them time, man! They haven't even got all the old cunts from the junta put away yet.

[ursus arctos]

This seems like the most appropriate thread for this development

https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/1565561152779603968?s=20&t=5hKbzV4W25di8rnCmJuZIw

[Satchmo Distel]

How the fuck did he get that close with a gun?

[ursus arctos]

One of several questions that pose themselves

He is reported to have been among a "group of supporters"

[ursus arctos]

The Argentine Football Association (AFA) responded by announcing the postponement of Friday’s Primera Division fixtures — games from the country’s top division.

In a statement, the AFA said: “The Argentine Football Association expresses its most vigorous repudiation of the events with vice-president of the nation, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.”

“All meetings scheduled for today are suspended.”

[Sam]

It's all most discombobulating. She lives in a flat in a building in a densely populated area in central BA, so they can't just shut down roads whenever she comes or goes, and she's often met by supporters, particularly at the moment as her corruption trial is reaching a conclusion. She's a populist – I find it hard to believe this could happen to certain other politicians here not because no one would want to try it but because they're harder to get to in the first place. There are various videos from TV cameras and from the phones of the crowd she was gladhanding when it happened, and he really does put the gun right in her face and pull the trigger (by my reckoning at least twice).

I considered starting a thread or looking for an appropriate one last night, but so much of the details flying around were going to be conjecture that I thought I'd wait.

What we know now:

• The perp was born in Brazil to an Argentine mother and a Chilean father. Last night there was speculation he was a hardcore Bolsonaro supporter who wanted to make a strike against the left, but that seems unlikely as we now know his family left Brazil in 1993, when he was 6, and he's lived in Buenos Aires ever since.
• His mum died a few years back and he took it hard. His dad seems like a lovely chap; so lovely that he was apparently expelled from Chile (he is Chilean, remember) last year.
• One of his school friends has done a few interviews today in which he says the perp found it hard to fit in, was often bullied until he laid one of said bullies out one day, and later showed a lot of interest in guns. Friend says he last bumped into him about ten months ago, when he said he was looking to buy a gun.
• The perp's social media shows some sadly increasingly standard horrendous politics, including being dead set against the idea of helping people out with social plans (a major tenet of Cristina's political platform when she was president). In other words if this was a false flag, they've really been playing the long game with it.
• There were five bullets in the magazine of the gun. It failed to fire because the one that was supposed to be loaded into the chamber got stuck part way in (or something. I don't know about guns, obviously).

The only time I've seen the Argentine media this united and on-message was when Maradona died. A couple of members of Congress seem likely to lose their seats after some staggeringly hateful social media posts in the hours after it happened. I doubt anyone in the press has disagreed with President Alberto Fernández, who said in his address to the nation on Thursday night that this is the most worrying thing to happen since the return of democracy (in 1983). All the same, a lot of people are convinced it was a false flag designed to get sympathy for Cristina right before she's found guilty of corruption in court. Never mind that the guy seems like the classic lone wolf arsehole who's spent too much time on sites like 4chan (no idea whether 4chan was involved this time, to be clear); never mind that if you were going to find someone who was prepared to ruin the rest of their life for your cause you surely, if only for diplomatic reasons, wouldn't pick someone who's also a national of two of your closest neighbours (one of which is a month away from presidential elections that could easily have been swayed if the bolsonarista theory had actually turned out to be true); and never mind that we only have to look at Alec Baldwin to know that if it were an act this could have gone very, very wrong.

And however long the investigation takes, and whatever the conclusions end up being, half the country is going to spend the rest of the century refusing to believe them. And as my girlfriend, who is no fan of Cristina's but has no time at all for the conspiracy angle, says, you can still imagine it turning out to be true, years down the line. We don't believe it is, but such is the level of mess things are that we can't 100% rule out the possibility.

My girlfriend's also been saying for a few weeks that with the discourse here from opposition politicians and from the media, something horrific was going to happen before long. One member of Congress said that the twelve years Cristina might go down for isn't enough, and that last year he'd introduced a project to bring in the death penalty for those found guilty of corruption, treating it as treason. He tweeted that on Monday last week, and in direct reference to Cristina's case.

[Sam]

Oh, and to put the AFA announcement ursus quoted above into context, in his address on Thursday night, the president announced Friday would be a public holiday, so that (and I'm paraphrasing, but this is much, much closer to what he actually said than you might assume) we could all spend the day thinking about peace. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the AFA made that announcement after the players' union and/or one of both of the referees' unions pointed out to them that it was a feriado, although obviously that wasn't how they sold the decision. Those games will be played on Saturday, anyway.

[ursus arctos]

Thanks so much for that essential detail and context, Sam.

Occam agrees with you.

One thing that can be hard for USians to appreciate is the degree to which major public figures in other countries simply do not have the 24/7 armed security details that have become bog standard here

[Sam]

As I remarked to you privately, even though the guy turns out not to be a died-in-the-wool bolsonarista, I hope Lula looks after himself between now and the election. The last thing human civilisation needs is for a copycat to have a go and take away our last slim hope of the Amazon being protected to some degree.

[ursus arctos]

I think that Lula was already being very careful. Brasil is a very violent country.

Le Monde is running a six part series on Bolsonaro, the bottom line of which is that the financial and industrial class have more or less abandoned him, and that he is left with environment-destroying agribusiness and the hard line elements of the military that have always formed his hard core.