Three men on motorcycles held up a man, a government official, carrying $90,000 in cash in a backpack in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina 13 January. The cash was withdrawn ahead of President Cristina Fernandez’ visit to the Middle East, where she is to visit Qatar, Kuwait and Turkey, beginning Sunday 16 January. Police were investigating why the official withdrew the cash so many days before the president’s visit begins and why he was taking it home.
Buenos Aires used to be widely considered Latin America’s safest metropolitan area, but crime has soared in recent years, and polls show that crime is citizens’ foremost concern.
Links to other sites: Clarin (Spa), Press Association
A gang of robbers made off with the contents of 136 safes from the cellars of Banco Provincia in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires, Argentina over the long New Year’s weekend. They are believed to have taken money and valuables worth $2.5 million.
The gang rented a building next to the bank in July and police believe they began building the 30m reinforced tunnel including lighting and ventilation 23 December. They worked only on the public holidays between Christmas and New Year. Security cameras captured the gang as they entered the safety box area 31 December and broke open the 136 safes. Police responded twice to alarms set off by seismic detectors on , but were unable to get into the bank because it was closed.
Links to other sites: Al-Jazeera, La Nación (Spa),
A Qantas flight from Sydney to Buenos Aires with 199 passengers on board has had to return to the airport safely after crew detected smoke coming out of one of the control panels in the cockpit. The Boeing 747 took off Monday, 15 November, and one hour into the flight, passengers noted that the plane made a complete turn and the plane started ditching fuel. There were no lights and no intercom announcements. After landing, the pilot went down the aisle and explained the problems encountered personally.
It is the second time since a mid-flight engine failure caused an Airbus A380 to return to Singapore 4 November that Qantas has had to abort a flight out of safety concerns. The entire Qantas A380 fleet is still grounded while engine-maker Rolls Royce endeavours to repair a defect to the Trent 900 engines. There are 37 A380 superjumbos equipped with the Trent 900 engines.
Links to other sites: Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald
Emilio Eduardo Massera, a leader of the military coup against Isabel Perón’s government in Argentina, has died, aged 85. He died in the Naval Hospital in Buenos Aires of a brain hemorrhage 9 November.
Massera, known as “Almirante Cero”, was head of the Navy when the junta led by Jorge Videla took power in Argentina in 1976 to face a growing left-wing insurgency. He personally took charge of a secret detention centre at the naval mechanics school, ESMA, in a quiet Buenos Aires suburb, where suspected leftists were tortured and killed. The military government’s anti-insurgency quickly spun out of control, with innocents being kidnapped for ransom and killed for their property. Some 30,000 people are believed to have been “disappeared”, as it came to be known, in Argentina’s “Dirty War”.
He was sentenced to life in prison in 1985 for crimes against humanity, but was released by President Carlos Menem in a 1990 amnesty. Massera was charged in 1998 with stealing political prisoners’ babies and and putting them up for adoption, a crime not covered by the original amnesty, and put under house arrest. The Supreme Court reinstated his life sentence in 2007, but he was considered incapable of facing further prosecution after suffering a stroke in 2002.
Links to other sites: BBC, Canadian Press, La Nación (Spa),
Scores have died in the southern cone of South America in a wave of Antarctic cold, and schools and some highways have closed. In Bolivia, 18 people were reported to have perished due to the cold, and in Argentina, nine homeless people died in the capital Buenos Aires. It has snowed in the main wine growing region, Mendoza, and on the coast, in Mar del Plata – the Argentines’ main summer holiday playground. Deaths have also been reported in neighbouring Uruguay and in Paraguay.
Consumers in Argentina have been complaining of low gas pressure for domestic gas, and a dearth of gas supplies. Distributors deny low pressure to domestic consumers, but up to 400 industrial plants throughout the country have had their supplies cut, as have service stations that supply liquified natural gas to the country’s car drivers.
Tomas Eloy Martinez, journalist and writer, has died at age 75 in Buenos Aires. He was born in Tucuman, in the country’s far northwest, and took up journalism there as a proof reader, then moved to Buenos Aires. In the early 1970s, the country’s politics became increasingly radicalized. Eloy Martinez investigated a massacre of leftists in 1972 on a military base in Trelew, south of Buenos Aires, and wrote a book about it. This earned him the attention of the Triple A right-wing death squad. He fled Buenos Aires and settled in Caracas, Venezuela where he founded El Diario de Caracas.
In 1985 he moved to the USA and headed the Spanish studies department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His most famous book, Santa Evita, about the life and times of Eva Perón, has been translated into over 30 languages. His latest novel, Purgatory, was published in 2008. He wrote for Argentina’s La Nación, Spain’s El Pais, and the New York Times op-ed pages. He was awarded the Ortega y Gasset lifetime achievement in journalism prize in 2009.
Links to other sites: El Pais, La Nación, New York Times
Felix Luna, historian, writer, politician and songwriter, has died in Buenos Aires, 5 November. He was 84. Born in Buenos Aires in 1925 to a well-connected family from La Rioja in Argentina’s poor northwest, he studied law, but soon turned to writing. He won his first prize for a short story in 1957, and wrote more than a score of books.
He was acclaimed as an historian, and explained Argentine history to the Argentines, notably in A brief history of the Argentines, but also in the first person account, Soy Roca, of a divisive 19th century politician and general, Julio Roca. In 1967 he founded the history magazine, Todo es Historia, which is still sold on newsstands around the country.
He entered into a fruitful partnership with composer Ariel Rodriguez in the 1960s, and wrote the words to music like the Misa Criolla, a mass using the idioms and language of folklore in the aftermath of the second Vatican Council, and Mujeres Argentinas, sung by Mercedes Sosa. His haunting tribute to the Swiss-born poetess, Alfonsina Storni, Alfonsina y el mar, is one of his most lasting contributions to popular musical culture.
Iran’s new government contains one woman, Marzieh-Vahid Dastjerdi, as health minister, the first in the Islamic Republic’s history. The parliament approved most of the cabinet proposed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently re-elected president, although it rejected two other women.
The new defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, is a hardliner and former chief of the elite Quds force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He is wanted by Interpol and the Argentine government for his alleged involvement in the 1994 explosion of the headquarters of Amia, a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. He received the most votes from parliament. CNN, Reuters, Clarin (Spa)
Honduras ordered all members of the Argentine embassy in Tegucigalpa to leave the country within three days, Tuesday 18 August. But Argentine foreign minister, Jorge Taiana, on a trade mission in Mexico, said he had not been informed of the deadline, and his diplomats were staying put. The Honduran ministry of foreign affairs said it was expelling the diplomats in line with “strict reciprocity” for the expulsion last week of the Honduran ambassador in Buenos Aires, who stated publicly that she approved of the forced removal of Manuel Zelaya as Hondura’s president last 28 June. The interim government of Honduras said its relations with Argentina would be conducted through the Argentine embassy in Israel. Honduras previously expelled Venezuelan diplomats, most of whom have stayed because President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela says he will not take orders from the interim government. BBC, Clarin (Spa), CNN, La Nación (Spa)
A pit filled with an estimated 10,000 human bones is being excavated in La Plata, south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, near a former detention centre, possibly giving the first solid proof that many of the country’s “disappeared” population really were killed by the military dictatorship during the late 1970s and early 1980s. BBC
