Argentina President Misterious

BUENOS AIRES – An Argentine prosecutor found dead in mysterious cir- cumstances last month had drafted a request that President Cristina Fernández be arrested for conspiring to derail his probe into the deadly bombing of a Jewish center, the investigator into his death said Tuesday.

The papers were found in the trash at Alberto Nisman’s apartment while his property was being scoured for clues over whether the father-of-two committed suicide or was murdered.

He was found in a pool of blood with a single bullet to the head on Jan. 18.

“The drafts are in the file,” Viviana Fein, the lead investigator into Nisman’s death, told a local radio station.

The request for Fernández’s arrest, which the prominent pro-opposition daily newspaper Clarin said Nisman drafted in June, was not included in his final 350-page submission to the judiciary delivered days before his death.

Instead Nisman called for Fernández to face questions in court.

On Monday, Fein’s office had denied the existence of the document containing the arrest request and the government denounced a Clarin story about it as “garbage.”

Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich even dramatically tore up a copy of the paper in his daily news briefing. But on Tuesday, Fein backtracked, saying there had been a misunderstanding between her and her office, and the documents did exist.

“They are properly incorporated into the case file, nothing is missing,” Fein said of the papers on Tuesday.

Nisman spent almost a decade building up a case that Iran was behind the 1994 attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) that killed 85 people. Iran’s government has repeatedly denied the allegation.

Nisman had been due the day after his death to answer questions in Congress about his allegations that Fernández sought to cover up Iran’s involvement in return for Iranian oil. Fernández has called the claim “absurd.”

Argentine judges are proving reluctant to take on a case some are calling a “judicial hot potato.” Two judges turned down hearing the case on Monday, including one who is already presiding over separate charges of attempts to derail the investigation into the 1994 bombing.

The other cover-up charges involve ex-President Carlos Menem, who ruled the South American country from 1989 to 1999.

Fernández, who had come under fierce criticism for her handling of Nisman’s death, is currently on a trip to China.

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Ricardo Castillo Story

Echoes of old hatred still linger in the U.S-Cuban community. They are hurt and alarmed at the fact that on July 20 the U.S. and Cuban governments will set up formal embassies as a start to thaw the Cold War between the two nations.

Surely old timers still think the Marxist-Leninist Castro revolution is alive and well. Certainly it has survived the ideals of Lenin and Mao. But both Russia and China welcomed long ago the winds of economic change and the fact that individuals, not governments, are the prime source of social evolution.

Contrary to the reticent old Cubans (“the marielitos,” given the 1981 mass migration of Cubans to the United States from Cuba’s Mariel port), everyone in the Mexican-U.S. diplomatic corps is celebrating the moves made both by Raúl Castro and Barack Obama to start the process towards amicability.

It’s good to see that President Obama does not eye Cuba as the backward nation most Republicans who oppose the diplomatic move want to see.

Cuba is a poor nation but the upside is that in their dictatorship the Castro brothers deemed education as the prime target and, as a result, Cuba is the only Latin American nation that boasts a 100 percent literacy rate. Not bad for a third-world nation.

In the midst of the U.S.-Cuban diplomatic war, no nation has tried harder to see what today has come to fruition as Mexico has been the go-between for decades. It’s odd to see nowadays that neither the United States nor Cuba needed Mexico to bring them together. But it’s good to see regardless.

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