Argentine official’s death fuels conspiracy theories
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Argentina has been awash in theories about who pulled the trigger to kill prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who accused President Cristina Fernandez of conspiring with Iran to cover up responsibility for the bombing of a Jewish community center. The president did it. No, it was the Argentine spymaster plotting against her. Maybe it really was a suicide, the tragic fall of a man whose case was coming undone. Or was it Iran, the Israeli Mossad, the CIA?
Whether in hushed conversations in cafes, at corner news stalls or at a lonely beach town hot-dog stand, much of Argentina seems to have an idea about how Nisman, the crusading prosecutor, ended up on his apartment floor with a gunshot wound to the head the night before he was scheduled to testify about his accusations to lawmakers.
“It has to either be the armed faction of narco-Nazi-jihadist international terrorism, or it has to be the Jewish-Marxism mafia that also involves the CIA, Israel and the Mossad,” said Carlos Wiesemann, 65, a hot-dog vendor in the coastal city of Pinamar, weighing his list of suspected forces while drinking whiskey with a friend.
Indeed, the obsession with Nisman’s death — and the expansiveness of the theories to explain it — has grown so intense that some Argentines are poring over the case in one of the country’s most intimate sanctuaries: the psychotherapist’s office.
“All my clients are talking about the case,” said Maria del Carmen Torretta, 67, a psychoanalyst who treats about 15 clients a week in Villa Ballester, a suburb of Buenos Aires. “People are tired and scared,” she said. “It’s a red-hot issue.”
The loss of Nisman is the latest installment in a Latin American tradition: landmark political deaths that spur an array of clashing theories, often for decades.
“Many people are in anguish over Nisman’s death and they’re grasping for ways to explain it,” said psychologist and author Diego Sehinkman. “If Argentina were a patient, it would appear to have a disorder involving repetition compulsion over traumatic unsolved deaths.”
Much like John F. Kennedy’s assassination in the United States, suspicious deaths have become staples of political debate in the region, sometimes pushing the courts and the authorities to go to great lengths to resolve them.
Fernandez made it clear in January that she believed Nisman, the prosecutor, had been killed, pointing to three previous episodes, two from 1998 and one from 2003, in which “cases of suicide were never cleared up.”
Fernandez and her inner circle have rejected Nisman’s accusations of wrongdoing and cast suspicion in his death on a range of figures, including the assistant who lent Nisman the gun and the ousted spymaster who worked with Nisman to compile the allegations against the president.
Though neither Kirchner nor her government has accused anyone of murder directly, she has described Nisman’s death as part of a plot to smear her, saying “They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead.”
But given that Nisman’s 289-page criminal complaint accused Kirchner of trying to reach a secret deal with Iran to derail his investigation into the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center, which killed 85 people, many Argentines argue that her government is the logical place to look for suspects.
“This is a country where mafias can artfully make a murder look like a suicide,” said Ana Rosa Di Serio, 65, a newsstand operator who said she believed that government officials supporting Fernandez had Nisman killed, though without the president’s knowledge.
Others reject that theory, siding with the government.
“It doesn’t suit the government to have a death in an election year,” said Claudia Rumolo, 55, the owner of Mordisquito, a bar lined with bookcases in downtown Buenos Aires, referring to the presidential election later this year. “A rogue branch of the Intelligence Secretariat did it, responding to opposition sectors nationally or abroad.”
Confused yet? The theories get far more complex.
While investigators have still not ruled whether Nisman was killed or took his own life, few of the theories heard on the streets accept suicide as an explanation.
One claim involves a local assassin targeting the prosecutor with the help of Venezuelan spies. Some bloggers have cast suspicion on what they describe as the Chinese mafia. A rabbi put forward a complex interpretation of the Torah, pointing to a codified reference to the surname “Nisman” to deduce that the prosecutor was pressured by others into killing himself.
“I don’t know who did it, but I’m sure we will never find out,” said Marcus Macias, 29, an attendant selling snacks and soft drinks at a kiosk.
“These things happen everywhere,” he said. “The Nisman case is just like Kennedy.”