Martin Edwin Andersen

Intrepid essayist and editor; skilled and dynamic analyst;

experienced public-private manager

Some background on the "suicide"

of AMIA prosecutor Alberto Nisman

The AMIA tragedy is the legacy of the government of U.S.

"extra-NATO" ally and Henry Kissinger client Carlos Menem,
who as president claimed that the late death squad organizer
and former Federal Police chief Alberto Villar was the law
enforcement model the country should embrace.
(Dr. Kissinger, who previously gave a "green light" for the
military dictatorship's dirty "war" in which the majority of
victims tortured and murdered were Peronists, was a guest of
honor at Menem's 1989 inauguration.)
A month before the bombing, I stood virtually alone in
Washington when I warned in a Washington Times Op-Ed that
under Menem (who had previously offered me three extremely
lucrative jobs in Buenos Aires and Washington, all of which I
turned down), Argentina had turned into a "way station for
international arms traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists."
Obviously the warning wasn't heeded.
(Nor was that I gave a decade earlier, in October
1985, at a meeting with U.S. embassy staff and other
journalists at the American Club. Ostensibly we were
gathering to meet a new U.S. commercial attache,
and us reporters were asked to give our opinion of
President Raul Alfonsin's new economic program.
After my colleagues gave their views, I was asked to
speak.
I started by saying that I really hadn't believed that
we were all called to the American Club to expound
on our ideas about economy. I then explained that a
neo-Nazi destabilization attempt was about to
happen in Buenos Aires, to be kicked off by the
bombing of a synagogue within 48 hours, all meant
to create a crisis that would put mid-term
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parliamentary lessons in jeopardy and end up with a

call by right-wing Peronists in cahoots with factions
in the armed forces for the military to come in to
"restore" democracy.
Thirty-six hours after my warning, a bomb did go off,
at a Jewish elementary school, the first of several
that exploded around Argentina and which caused
President Raul Alfonsin to have to proclaim a 60-day
state of emergency. After Alfonsin's Radical Party
won a broad victory at the polls, a well-known
Peronist who ran for office in Buenos Aires province
claimed their defeat was due to electoral fraud and
demanded the armed forces take control, before he
himself fled to dictator Alfredo Stroessner's
Paraguay--Stroessner being an important ally of
Carlos Menem.)
The Kirchners--who portrayed themselves as opponents of the
military regime that took power in 1976--not only did business
with Argentina's "dirty war" dictators. They were also in bed
during his presidency with the USG's favorite, the highlycorrupt Menem, whose time in office saw a number of people
involved in high-profile insider scandals committing "suicide"
just before they were to be questioned.
Curiously, the Kirchners are also the patrons of supposed
Argentine "good government" journalist and human rights
crusader Horacio Verbitsky.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, in fact Verbitsky--known
publicly at the time of the military coup as a leftwing
Montonero guerrilla intelligence chief--was an "efficacious
collaborator" during Argentina's neo-Nazi military regime,
someone who lived without problem in Buenos Aires in the
midst of the so-called dirty "war."
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In the 1990s and almost until today, Verbitsky was feted in

New York, Washington and other places far from Argentina for
his journalistic anti-corruption crusade against the Menem
government--whose financial misdeeds at least have been
matched, if not exceeded, by the Kirchners.