After the attack against Vice President Cristina Kirchner, the head of the AFI, Agustín Rossi, stated this Saturday that “vice-presidential custody did not fail” and detailed that they did not have “any alert” about a possible attack against any member of the Government.
“The vice-presidential custody did not fail. I think that the custody operations and what the Security Minister has been doing [Aníbal Fernández] I was very attentive, because there had already been an episode, I don’t want to compare it, but there was tension with everything that happened with the City Police last Saturday with the placement of the billboards. They were very attentive. It was a custody that was alert for the events that had happened last weekRossi stressed.
The striking statement by the spy chief comes amid questions within the government itself regarding the role of presidential custody, in charge of the Ministry of Security coordinated by Aníbal Fernández.
It is also surprising that he says that there were no flaws in the operation when a person fired the gun centimeters from the forehead of the vice president who, according to several officials who share the Cabinet with him, is miraculously alive, because the bullet did not come out.
Diego Carbone, head of Cristina Kirchner’s custody. Photo: Federico López Claro
In statements to CNN Radiothe national official specified: “From the AFI we did not have any alert. From the information I have and what could be traced, nothing appears on social networks or anywhere that could infer that an attack was planned on anyone, least of all the vice president, “he pointed out.
“The custody of the vice president had been increased. It is very difficult to evaluate a security operation without knowing how it was designed and planned.. Sometimes one withdraws the custody himself, because what they try to do is that one does not submit to a hypothetical situation of risk. If I am the object to be cared for and I tell him ‘you stay here because I want to walk only 100 meters’, they will leave you, “he argued.
In this framework, the former Minister of Defense explained: “This that Cristina does of rapprochement with the people is also done by other political leaders of the ruling party and the current opposition, that will deserve a reflection on how that continues. Everyone has to be a little more vigilant with security issues because we don’t have them.”
Referring to the attack, Rossi assured that it is “a shocking event in Argentine political life” and said that it will not “take a real dimension of what happened until there is a certain distance” from the event.
“Reasonably, Argentine politics has to feel the impact. This will mark the politics of the coming years,” he concluded.
For his part, the former head of the SIDE Miguel Ángel Toma said that “I have read Agustín Rossi’s statements. It seems to me that he is reiterating what he once said about the Venezuelan-Iranian plane, that it was a reconnaissance flight. An absolutely fallacious and superficial excuse. It seems to me that it repeats more or less the same meaning when justifying the function of custody.”
“Both the external security and the immediate and personal security of the Vice President were in charge of the Federal Police. They cannot blame the City Police,” Toma told the Milenium radio program Dato sobre Dato.
“These people are trying your own medicine. As a result of what happened with the ARA-San Juan when the AFI at the time made an environmental report for a deployment by President Macri in Mar del Plata, the opposition at that time used that to denounce a kind of illegal espionage on the relatives of the ARA-San Juan. What the AFI was doing is what the intelligence structure usually did, which, faced with a risk of an eventual threat in a presidential movement, did an environmental one,” recalled the former PJ deputy who now supports Together for Change.
“This is having a criterion about the risk or threat that will affect the presidential figure. They did the preliminary intelligence and in a coordination mechanism with the custody, the analysis was increased and any type of threat could be better perceived. When that was used from an ideological and political point of view, Cristina Caamaño arrives at the head of the AFI and makes the resolution that the intelligence structure does not do more environmental issues, “she said.
“This reduced the ability to prevent or avoid an event of this nature. It lacked the element of broader context that intelligence can provide to have a better level of custody and security, in this case of the Vice President,” added Toma.