Reporter's Notebook Comments

• "The report says the truth. The Argentine government is totalitarian and almost demagogic. The levels of corruption in Argentina have not diminished.
  
  The press is a government accomplice. There are prizes and punishments to be had through official publicity. The hard journalistic investigations that were published in the 1990s, during the presidency of Carlos Menem, do not exist now.
  
  Where has investigative journalism been going in Argentina? Nobody knows. In general, the watchdog guardian of society has slept because its food comes from the government.
  
  It is not the same for all the media. Nevertheless, not all the mass media respond to the government. There is a small group of media, among them the important newspaper "The Nation" that publishes very critical editorials against the administration of Kirchner. There are not a lot, but in other cities outside Buenos Aires, many small media outlets, including radio and TV, are making very big efforts to conduct investigative journalism, in spite of the obstacles. This group is the minority and working alone, but they are marking an important road.
  
  The report refers to the public access to information law, Ordinance 1172/03. It is not a law and it is not an Ordinance. It is a decree, and it does not have the same force of a law. And although Kirchner signed it, supposedly guaranteeing free access to government documents, in truth the ordinance is not fulfilled. In fact the law is pending. The law of access to information was not approved, and its harshest critic was the president's wife, senator Cristina Fernandez of Kirchner. And she did only criticize: she wanted to change the original spirit of the law project.
  
  The report forgets to mention that the government puts all opposition under the magnifying glass. Any person considered an enemy by president Kirchner is investigated by the state's investigative systems: journalists' and opponents' telephone conversations can be tapped; e-mail privacy can be be violated and the intelligence services provides the president reports on the public and private lives of the opponents. When a citizen makes a severe criticism against his government, the president immediately sends out an offensive, attacking the adversary very hard.
  
  My criticism of the report is that its vision is centralized in Buenos Aires. Argentina cannot be generalized, the country is large with many diverse regions. In some cases the provinces encounter similar situations; in others it is different. There are provinces with feudal-like political systems where the governor acts as the "owner" of the province. But there also are cities in other provinces where the mayors (even the same political party of Kirchner) have been dismissed because of proven corruption."
  
  
• "The reporter's notebook fairly addresses the situation in Argentina. Through well-chosen examples of the covered period, the report makes it very clear that the fight against corruption is far from being a component of the developmental strategy of Kirchner's administration. On the contrary, it appears that Kirchner's administration is building its political and economic power by trading rents to some pressure groups (public and private) in exchange for political support, while weakening formal institutional constraints through either gross disrespect or biased enforcement, according to what the circumstances demand.
  
  When a government spends time and energy in boycotting acts of emerging candidates, in controlling the activities of its own staff, in using its intelligence agency for discrediting independent journalists and in sending threatening messages to the business people sympathizing with the opposition, what is at stake is the quality of the democratic system. Political and business corruption in such a scenario is a non-democratic means of power concentration.
  
  All these opaque activities are carefully covered by a widely advertised discourse dealing with the massive human rights violations of the 1970s. In my view, and taking into account the small size of our organized civil society, overacting human rights concerns is a way for the administration to keep civil society organizations quiet and slow on demanding more transparency.
  
  Finally, on the factual side, I would like to add the reform of the Judicial Council. Despite opposition consensus, wide press reports and several public hearings with the civil society, the administration managed to pass a law amending the composition of the judicial council. The new composition will give the executive the necessary majorities to block accusations to those judges that they want to preserve, and more votes to engage accusations against those they would like to impeach."
  
  
• The report is a balanced, an accurate description of the situation in Argentina, detailing a few specific cases as well as providing an institutional analysis of some of the agencies which are meant to combat corruption. One plausible conclusion is that the institutions in place do not function in a very effective way, and that there is still much room for improvement.