After three years of negotiations, Alberto Fernandez got the alleged photo in the White House with his American peer Joe Bidenthe one that the vice president could never remove Cristina Kirchner with Barack Obama (of whom Biden was vice) in the Oval Office when she was president. A triumph in the internal that vindicates the relationship with the world of the president, one that, however, is plagued with potholes in the management of the Foreign Ministry.
Probably no other minister received as many interpellation requests as santiago cafiero. The last one, in mid-March, following the escape of a former Ecuadorian minister who was taking refuge in the Argentine embassy in Quito. It is that in this year and a half that the official closest to Alberto Fernandez wears like chancelloreverything happened. They opened “the door to Latin America” to Putin weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraineparticipated in a act with a fugitive Iranian of the Argentine Justice and even they got the wrong flag in the visit of an ambassador.
Strain
The diplomatic crisis between Ecuador and Argentina escalated so quickly that Alberto Fernández decided to intercede: he sought to calm down by talking on the phone with officials of the president William Lasso, but he didn’t get it. It all started when coffee notified his counterpart in Quito, Juan Carlos Holguín, that the former Minister of Transportation of Rafael Correa, Maria de los Angeles Duarte -condemned for corruption-, had left the Argentine embassy where she was in asylum. Shortly after it was learned that she was in Venezuela.
No one can answer how Duarte managed to leave the country, but the Ecuadorian government suspects the collaboration of the Argentine embassy. “In the worst case, there was complicity,” said Holguín, who declared the Argentine ambassador “persona non grata” gabriel fuks and finished his mission. Although from Argentina they tried to lower the tension with the words of the spokeswoman Gabriela Cerruti, who said that there are “close and brotherly relations with Ecuador”, the Foreign Ministry had to react in a mirror. Cafiero had to expel the Ecuadorian ambassador in Buenos Aires, Xavier Alfonso.
Due to this accumulation of untidiness, the opposition once again requested the interpellation of the chancellor in the Chamber of Deputies. The PRO block denounced “a serious negligence or even complicity of the Argentine authorities with the fact, unleashing a serious diplomatic conflict between both countries.”
Mistakes
After observing a series of mistakes, in Together for Change they described Cafiero as “improvised”. “He was never interested in foreign policy”, added the former foreign minister of Mauricio Macri, George Faurie. It is that the political scandal in Ecuador is preceded by a series of foreign policy management errors. Like when Alberto Fernández met Vladimir Putin in Moscow. February 2022 was just beginning when the President offered his host that Argentina be his “gateway” to Latin America. The world was already talking about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would happen just 20 days later.
A month earlier, the Foreign Ministry had made another serious mistake. The Argentine ambassador in Nicaragua, daniel capitanichparticipated in the oath of President Daniel Ortega, regardless of the presence in the act of Mohsen Rezai, a defendant in the AMIA attack. Once again, the opposition put Cafiero’s office on the ropes. And the Government had to react: “Rezai is the object of a claim by the Argentine Justice for having had a key participation in the decision-making and planning of the attack committed on July 18, 1994”, says the sentence that was drafted late .
2022 was full of controversy for the chancellor. In March of that year, he made headlines again after giving a speech at the Expo Dubai International Fair. Showed a lackluster level of English and even exhibited some filmstrips in which misspelled words appeared. The discussion landed him in the mud. Upon his return, he replied to the journalist Jorge Lanata: “I think he is stupid,” he said. And then he insulted him in English: “Dickhead.”
Months later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would once again be in the news for a blooper. It is that they received the Swiss ambassador, Hans-Ruedi Bortis, but they put the Danish flag on him. Cafiero found out about the mistake in his portfolio in Paraguay, where he was preparing to participate in the Mercosur Summit, but he was still the target of criticism.
But the foreign minister’s disputes are not only with the opposition. Even Felipe Solá, the former minister whom he replaced, was encouraged to publicly correct him. It was after the official said that he found it “harmful” that during the presidency of Mauricio Macri there was no Argentine ambassador in Venezuela. “Argentina was deprived of having first-hand information, of having a link with Argentines who are living there, and with Argentine businessmen who develop businesses,” Cafiero said at the time. He alone put it in evidence: “The country never broke relations with Venezuela.
It has a business manager who always kept us well informed. It is incredible that you are not aware of being chancellor, ”she crossed it. In the San Martin Palace they look at Cafiero’s management with indifference. The last episode at home was because the air conditioners did not work in the middle of the heat wave and that caused a fight between the staff. The President’s trusted man only accumulates reproaches
