Argentina reels after president accused in sordid tale of spying and murder

When he ran to be its president back in 2003, Néstor Kirchner promised to transform Argentina into “a serious country” if elected. He said he wanted a break from the corruption in public life which marked the 1990s when the criminality of President Carlos Menem’s inner circle produced a series of scandals that could have been lifted from the pages of a cheap thriller but left an all-too-real body count.

But 12 years after Néstor led the family into power his widow and successor, Cristina Kirchner, faces having her last months as president dominated by another mysterious political death, this time of a leading public prosecutor who accused her of conspiring with Iran to cover up its role in the world's deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the Nazis.

The shooting dead of Alberto Nisman on January 18th left many Argentines accusing their president of murder. There is no proof for such a claim but the case has exposed a brutal internal struggle between the government and its own spies that once again highlights the chronic instability of Argentina's institutions and the ferocious nature of its political disputes.

Grim irony

A grim irony is that Nisman was investigating Argentina’s darkest episode from the 1990s – the bombing of the AMIA Jewish centre in 1994 in which 85 people were murdered and the subsequent involvement of officials including Menem in covering up the role of Iran in the attack.

It was Néstor who put Nisman in charge of the case after previous prosecutors were accused of involvement in the cover-up. He died of a gunshot the night before he was to testify to congress that President Kirchner and her officials had, as part of a controversial agreement with Iran in 2013, secretly agreed to help senior Iranian officials avoid responsibility for the AMIA bombing in return for preferential oil deals.

The news of Nisman’s demise just before he was to publicly detail his accusations against the president plunged the government into crisis, with people taking to the street, accusing Kirchner of involvement in the death. At first she claimed the prosecutor committed suicide. But when that hypothesis failed to gain traction she said he was the victim of a plot by elements in the country’s intelligence service and claimed he had been fed false information by spies to implicate her in the AMIA case and then eliminated in order to smear her.

The finger of suspicion has been pointed at the former director of operations in the country’s intelligence service, Antonio Stiusso, who was fired in December. He lost his job in part because of the fall-out from the deal with Iran. Up until then the spy agency had worked with the CIA and Mossad to build the case against Tehran. But after the 2013 deal the Kirchner administration abandoned its criticism of Iran and, to the fury of its agents, started to imply they had been duped into naming leading Iranians as the intellectual authors of the AMIA attack which was carried out by Hizbullah.

Despite admitting she has no proof for her claims against the spies, President Kirchner said she will abolish the country’s intelligence secretariat, long considered to have been beyond the full control of its nominal political masters.

But Stiusso, who is believed to have fled the country, has in turn implied he was set up by the head of the army, Gen César Milani. His influence has grown in recent years within the Kirchner government, unhindered by an investigation into his part in the disappearance of a conscript during the country’s dirty war. Now he is set to have a strengthened role in intelligence matters following the shake-up, despite a ban on the military’s involvement in domestic spying.

Turf war

As well as exposing this brutal turf war, the affair has further inflamed Argentina’s already highly polarised politics. When Nisman was buried on Thursday in a Jewish cemetery near the graves of several of the AMIA victims, mourners again accused the president of murder. But her own militants have warned of chaos if anyone tries to “touch Cristina”. Her administration has already clashed with the prosecutor investigating Nisman’s death and also accused the friend who lent him the gun used to kill him of involvement with Stiusso’s spies and even links to the Clarín media conglomerate, an old enemy of the administration.

Likely to ensure the affair continues to dominate the news in coming months is the trial in June of Menem for obstruction of justice in the AMIA case. Among the charges Nisman laid against the former president was that he accepted a $10 million bribe to keep Iran out of the investigation.

Meanwhile a new prosecutor will now take up his accusations against President Kirchner. She says Nisman’s claims are “absurd” but the months leading up to her leaving office in December look set to be turbulent ones as Argentina’s dark political past comes back to haunt it once again.