“Concordances and divergences”, this is how the great Argentinian daily The Nation summarizes the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to Buenos Aires, Saturday November 16 and Sunday November 17.
Organized just before the G20 summit in Brazil, this visit to the country of the ultraliberal Javier Milei aimed, beyond business ties, “to reaffirm the good understanding between the two presidents who met last July in Paris during the opening of the Olympic Games”, explains the newspaper, which mentions a dinner “friendly and relaxed” last night. This Sunday, after a bilateral meeting, the two men greeted side by side from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, seat of the Argentine presidency.
Nevertheless, “the French president's program included other themes, such as concern about climate change, which Argentina downplays, and a tribute to the missing French people of the last dictatorship, a gesture which contrasts with the vision that those in power have events in Argentina during the 1970s”.
“Message against negationism”
With his wife, Emmanuel Macron went on Sunday morning to the Santa Cruz church where, “as is planned in the traditional program of any French dignitary visiting Argentina, they laid flowers in tribute to around twenty French people who disappeared and were murdered during the last Argentine military dictatorship [1976-1983]notably the nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, who disappeared in December 1977”. At Casa Rosada, however, it was argued that “it is a private and non-bilateral activity”, relay La Nación, “a way of discreetly distancing this homage”.
More than other titles, it is the left-wing newspaper Page 12 who particularly underlines this homage, seeing in it “a message against negationism” et “in favor of memory, truth and justice – pillars that are under attack from the government of Javier Milei”. “This parish is emblematic, explains the Argentinian daily, because it was there that Alfredo Astiz, an organizer of the repression visited by deputies from Javier Milei's camp, reported the French nuns and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who were to be kidnapped […] then thrown into the sea alive.”
“The Angel of Death”, sentenced to life imprisonment, received a visit from six deputies last July in prison, which aroused great emotion in the families of the missing French people, further recounts Page 12. Before concluding: “It remains to be seen how Milei will digest a gesture like this, as he continues to radicalize his line internationally to position himself as an antagonist of rights.”
