A bitter internal feud has broken out in Argentina’s ruling Peronist movement in advance of primary elections tomorrow after a prominent journalist accused one of President Cristina Kirchner’s closest colleagues of involvement in the drug trade.
On his popular Sunday night programme Journalism for Everybody, Jorge Lanata accused the president's powerful cabinet chief Aníbal Fernández, who is seeking his party's nomination for the governorship of Buenos Aires province, of trafficking in ephedrine, a chemical precursor used in the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine.
The programme also carried an interview with Martín Lanatta, one of the men condemned for the murder of three businessmen from the pharmaceutical industry in 2008, in which he claimed the triple homicide was carried out on Fernández’s orders while he was minister of justice.
He also claimed he went with a Mexican drug trafficker to the politician’s house to deliver between $2 million and $3 million in proceeds from the sale of ephedrine. “The trade [in ephedrine] ended up dominated by Fernández and the intelligence sector,” said Lanatta from the jail where he is serving a life sentence.
Responding to the programme, Fernández directly accused rivals within the Peronist movement of being behind the accusations in a bid to sabotage his chances in tomorrow’s primary contest.
He pointed the finger at Julián Domínguez, the speaker of the lower house of congress who is running against him, saying if the opposition had been behind the attack it would have waited until after the primary had concluded. Domínguez denied involvement.
“The fact Aníbal is the victim of a media operation does not give him the right to accuse me,” he said.
Kirchner defended Fernández in a televised address on Wednesday in which she compared those allegedly behind the accusations to the death squads that eliminated political opponents during the military dictatorship.
Illicit fortunes
One of Argentina’s most respected journalists, Lanata is the founder of several newspapers and magazines and in recent years has led the investigation into the huge illicit fortunes accumulated by the circle around Kirchner.
A staunch Kirchner loyalist, Fernández is no stranger to controversy, being linked to football hooligans in his home town of Quilmes where in 2007 a Peronist rival accused him of ordering a gun attack on his house in order to intimidate him.
During his years as interior and then justice minister Argentina saw a boom in the volume of ephedrine imports after Mexico's decision to clamp down on the drug in a bid to tackle growing methamphetamine production.
Argentina’s ephedrine imports jumped from 4,500 kilos a year in 2005 to 19,000 kilos in 2007. When a Peronist senator moved to ban imports in 2008 Fernández, who then served as interior minister, warned the senate that any measure would violate the human rights of the country’s sick.
Controls were eventually imposed but several officials have since been charged with facilitating the illegal importation of the drug. Since the Kirchner family came to power in 2003, drug trafficking and consumption has exploded in Argentina and is blamed for the steep rise in crime in major urban centres.
Presidential hopeful
The feud between the two Peronist candidates for the Buenos Aires governorship forced the current governor
Daniel Scioli
to cancel plans to attend final campaign rallies this week with the two rivals lest the split harm his own chances of becoming president.
The former powerboat champion is leading the race to succeed Kirchner in October’s general election. But he will be wary of inter-Peronist feuding in his province, which is a bastion of the populist movement and home to 37 per cent of Argentina’s voters.
His team is worried that should Fernández secure the party’s nomination for the governorship his controversial personality might depress the Peronist vote in the key district come October and harm his chances of victory in the presidential contest.
Tomorrow's primaries are expected to confirm the outgoing mayor of Buenos Aires city Mauricio Macri as Scioli's main rival for the presidency.
A son of one of Argentina’s best known industrialists and the former president of Boca Juniors football club, Macri is attempting to become the first right-wing candidate in the country’s history to win the presidency in free elections.
