Argentina President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner Dissolves Intelligence Secretariat, Replaces It With New Agency in Hour-Long Speech [Watch]
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner announced to her people that she would dissolve the country’s intelligence service and replace it with a new agency and methods. However, she has already garnered objections from the opposition.
In an hour-long speech, Fernandez de Kirchner addressed Argentina following the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman. In the speech, available also on her website, the Argentine leader announces she will dissolves the nation’s Intelligence Secretariat (SI), formerly known as SIDE, and replace it with the Federal Intelligence Agency.
“This issue of the national intelligence system, is not a problem of 2003; it is a pending debt to democracy from 1983,” she said referring to the year Argentina’s military dictatorship, which used the SIDE to spy on “subversives,” ended.
The new Federal Intelligence Agency will have two head; both will be nominated by the president and approved by the senate.
Any government official who contacts intelligence agents outside formal channels will be punished, Fernandez de Kirchner added in her speech.
The bill also places all phone-tapping operations, the OJOTA department, under the attorney general’s office purview, removing it from SI oversight. This department enacts court-ordered phone-taps for criminal investigations.
According to the Buenos Aires Herald, Attorney General Alejandra Gils Carbó learned of her new authority with the rest of the nation, as Fernandez de Kirchner gave her speech.
“We’ll accept the responsibility, but we want to hold talks with human rights organizations. We are only going to carry out that task if we do it in a democratic and a participative way,” Carbó’s spokesman told the Buenos Aires Herald.
Aside from her reforms for Argentina’s intelligence apparatus, Fernandez de Kirchner revealed more about her suspicions, alluding to rogue agents who began operating independently in 2013. The Buenos Aires Herald’s sources say “what ended up creating the division with the intelligence services was the Memorandum of Understanding signed with Iran to unlock the investigation into the AMIA.” The constitutional court declared it unconstitutional in May 2013.
Despite her reform efforts, some in the opposition have criticized Fernandez de Kirchner’s decision to reform the intelligence agency. The Buenos Aires Herald reports an opposition coalition in the lower house has signed an agreement on the matter.
“The project to reform the SI is an attempt to further politicize intelligence organisms. Its goal is to distract attention from the main problem [referring to Nisman’s case],” the agreement states.
It was signed by Mario Negri (UCR), Darío Giustozzi (Renewal Front), Federico Pinedo (PRO) and Margarita Stolbizer (GEN).
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