Argentina's President Mauricio Macri gives a statement after an Argentine prosecutor asked for an investigation into President´s role in offshore companies. AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko
Since the election of Mauricio Macri in November 2015, Argentina has found itself at the sharp end of an assault by Latin America’s New Right. This is the same New Right that in Brazil has just voted to impeach an elected President, in what amounts to a parliamentary coup, by a congress where corruption and criminality are rife. Macri, like his Brazilian bedfellows, the head of the lower chamber Eduardo Cunha and the Vice-President Michel Temer, has a liking not just for offshore companies and channelling public money to friends and associates. The co-owner of Fleg Trading, Kagemusha, Opalsen S.A. and Macri Group Panamá, involved in more than a dozen front companies in tax havens, also follows the example of his counterparts in Russia, Ukraine, Syria and Qatar implicated alongside him in the Panama Papers, in using the judiciary to persecute opposition and block free speech.
In contrast to what has happened with Putin, Assad and Poroshenko, the Argentine news outlets affiliated to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have downplayed the President’s involvement in the offshore accounts scandal. With the approval of their international partners, the dailies La Nación and Clarín kept Macri’s dirty secrets under wraps until after the presidential elections. What’s more, his government was given a month’s warning about the publication: plenty of time to come up with PR and legal strategies to divert attention away from the shocking revelations.
