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February 12th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Alvaro De Lamadrid, a former regional president of the opposition Radical
Party, filed suit for abuse of office and influence peddling over what he
claims was the politically-motivated hand-out of $300 million in prime land.
But he hit an immediate obstacle – the prosecutor assigned to the case
happens to be Nestor Kirchner’s niece, who he says also received land grants
in her name.
“The case has made no step forward, none,” said Mr Lamadrid, who
wrote a book about Nestor Kirchner called The Emperor Penguin: 20 Years
of Brute Power (the former president was nicknamed “the penguin”
for his Patagonian roots).
“For the prosecutor not to recuse herself is to guarantee impunity for
Kirchnerism. It’s an embarrassment, a scandal, something that can’t happen
in any civilised republic, that a public prosecutor investigates her family.”
One manifestation of Mrs Kirchner’s wealth is clear. She is famously
passionate about her clothes and appearance and has deployed her glamour and
looks as part of her political armoury – as Evita once did.
Nicknamed the “Botox queen” by critics who believe her looks owe as
much to science as genes, she has used the family fortune wealth to finance
overseas clothes shopping sprees.
On the eve of her trip to the UN last September to denounce Britain over the
Falklands, she fitted in a visit with President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris –
and some retail therapy. According to media reports, the details of which
are disputed by her aides, she acquired 20 new pairs of Christian Louboutin
shoes for $110,000 and accessories from Louis Vuitton and Hermes.
Her extravagance rarely raised eyebrows for nearly a decade of boom under her
and her husband. But with the economic growth now slowing and inflation at
more than 20 per cent, her administration has recently been forced to slash
the lavish state subsidies that delivered the support of her working-class
power base.
When Néstor Kirchner became president in 2003, the couple’s fortune was
estimated at some 7 million pesos ($2.35 million at the time). Once in
office, the Kirchners’ fortune soared by a stunning 900 per cent in seven
years.
With 27 houses, apartments, stores and hotel businesses to their name, they
were worth more than 70 million pesos ($18 million) in 2010, the year of
Nestor’s death from a heart attack and the most recent for which assets have
been declared.
Typical are their financial interests in El Calafate, home of the famous
Perito Moreno glacier. A tiny town whose sole font of income is glacier and
wildlife tourism, El Calafate barely existed until, during Mr Kirchner’s
period as provincial governor, its outlook was transformed when the
government built an airport in 2000.
The quickly booming town ran a programme that sold small lots of inexpensive
land to local residents who intended to build houses or businesses. Some
3,000 had filled out the paperwork and were waiting for approval, Mr
Lamadrid says, but after Néstor Kirchner moved into the Casa Rosada
presidential offices in 2003 priorities changed.
Mr Kirchner, his wife, and some 50 other government functionaries found
themselves front of the line and were awarded large plots of land in
preferential locations at very low prices. In the most famous case, Néstor
Kirchner bought two hectares near the town’s old airstrip for $50,000, then
sold the lot to the Chilean Cencosud supermarket conglomerate for $2.4
million two years later.
“He made a profit of $2.35 million with no investment, without even
cutting the grass,” said Mr Lamadrid, 40, who ran a losing campaign for
mayor of El Calafate in 2007.
“Kirchner became a millionaire starting when he entered public office. He
enriched himself dramatically by mixing private and state business. Calafate
is an eloquent example. Until 2003, Kirchner had no property in El Calafate.
Now the Kirchners run 60 to 70 per cent of the economic activity in the town.”
Much of the town is typical of Patagonia, with dirt roads and non-descript
houses with wriggly tin roofs. But at Los Sauces, a hotel the Kirchners
built on one of the parcels of land they bought near the mountain waters of
Lago Argentino, the advantages of privilege are clear.
To preserve the aesthetics around the hotel, power cables were laid
underground, something not done elsewhere in town, Mr Lamadrid notes.
Reached by a coastal boulevard named after Nestor Kirchner, the elegant
hotel sits hidden behind high fences, with suites starting at $295 a night
plus tax.
Mr Lamadrid is not alone in trying and failing to draw attention in the courts
to the Kirchners’ operations. Several deputies from another opposition party
filed a complaint accusing the couple of illicit enrichment in the wake of
the El Calafate deal, but a judge ruled that they had committed no crime.
Manuel Garrido, the former national prosecutor for administrative
investigations who had been looking into the couple’s finances, said that he “was
obliged to resign in the face of the obstacles put in my path by Kirchnerism
in relation to the investigations I was conducting”.
But the fear of an economic downturn has Mrs Kirchner on the defensive
domestically. And conveniently, she has now seized on the Falklands as her
signature foreign policy priority, emphasising the discovery of lucrative
oil reserves in the islands’ waters.
It looks to some like the use of international sabre-rattling to distract the
citizenry from looming economic problems.
“Domestically, it’s critical for Cristina to have an issue that brings
together all parties to support her. This is a win-win policy in a moment
when she’s putting into place a divisive economic plan,” said Sergio
Berenzstein, an Argentine political analyst and pollster with the Poliarquia
consultancy.
It was in the late 1940s, after a century of little attention in Argentina,
that Evita’s husband Gen Peron launched a national propaganda push over “las
Malvinas”, putting the islands at the heart of the history and
geography school curriculum.
And Mrs Kirchner was in full Evita mode last week when she delivered a rousing
speech to veterans of the 1982 war against a backdrop of map of the islands
emblazoned in the Argentine colours of blue and white. She later emerged on
to a balcony of the palace to wave and pump her fist to roars from a
flag-waving crowd.
Argentina also last week renamed its new football season, which kicked off on
Friday evening, after the General Belgrano, the cruiser sunk by a British
submarine with the loss of 323 lives.
On the Falklands, meanwhile, islanders have seen the Duke of Cambridge flying
a yellow RAF Sea King rescue helicopter overhead at the start of a six-week
deployment that has enraged the Argentine president.
As tensions rise, Mrs Kirchner will whip up national sentiment further ahead
of Malvinas Day on April 2nd, the anniversary of the Argentine invasion.
And she will doubtless do so resplendent in yet another expensive sartorial
twist on her widow’s chic in honour of the husband with whom she formed such
a profitable union.
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