USSR2 File: Argentina's leftist president, Chavez ally Kirchner meets Medvedev, Putin in Russia; Moscow, Buenos Aires form strategic partnership

- Kirchner's Moscow Trip Follows Russian Security Council Chief Patrushev's October Visit to Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela, Formation of "Security and Defense" Pact with South American States

- Exporting Hugo Chavez's Socialist Revolution: Bolivarian Continental Coordination Replicates Functions of Cold War-Era Revolutionary Coordinating Junta

Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, wife of the previous president Nestor, began a three-day working trip in Moscow yesterday, where she met Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev, a Soviet Komsomol graduate, and KGB-communist dictator Vladimir Putin. The new relationship between Moscow and Buenos Aires is described as a strategic partnership by state-run Itar-Tass and includes the following joint projects: 1) Kremlin-owned Gazprom plans to build a US$1.5 billion transcontinental pipeline across South America in cooperation with Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela, all of which are part of Latin America's Red Axis, 2) Russia and Argentina will establish a visa-free regime, and 3) the two countries will cooperate on nuclear energy programs. In 1974 Argentina fired up its first nuclear reactor and currently maintains two such facilities for electrical output. Buenos Aires has been a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1995.

Bilateral trade between Russia and this important South American nation has expanded more than five times in as many years to over US$1.6 billion, although the balance of trade now leans in Argentina's favor. With the global credit crunch as pretext, states Novosti at the link above, Medvedev and Kirchner restated appeals for reforming the world financial system (along socialist lines, of course) and the creation of a "fair world order" to "curb inequality." Argentina also expressed support for Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization.

A fourth area of cooperation between Russia and Argentina includes "security and defense cooperation." This past October, according to Kremlin-run Interfax, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council and former chief of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB), travelled to Argentina, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Upon conferring with the leadership of these countries--Presidents Cristina Kirchner, Rafael Correa, and Hugo Chavez--Patrushev proposed forming a security and defense arrangement with these states. "Patrushev's meetings with the leadership of Argentina and Ecuadorian and Venezuelan presidents showed that everything is ready for activating bilateral and multilateral cooperation in various spheres, including the strengthening of defense capacity and national security," a statement released by the Russian Security Council explained.

The Kirchners represent the left wing of Argentina's ruling Justicialist Party, founded by military strongman Juan Peron who died in 1974, and are reliable allies of Venezuela's communist dictator Hugo Chavez. The first Peronist regime (1946-1955) was instrumental in organizing the "Ratlines" that spirited fugitive Nazis from Europe to Argentina. An admirer of Italy's Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, Peron chose the "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism, creating Argentina's unique brand of corporativism, social democracy, and nationalism, called Peronism, that some political analysts do not hesitate to describe as "fascistic." Ousted from power twice, between 1955 and 1973 and then again between 1975 and 1989, the Justicialist Party has since controlled the Argentine state. Other, smaller parties also claim to embody the Peronist legacy.

On her Moscow trip President Kirchner invited Medvedev and Putin to visit Argentina in the near future. During the last week of November, as previously reported here, the Russian "president" completed a four-nation tour of Latin America, including Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Cuba. In Caracas, Medvedev attended a summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. There he conferred with the visiting communist presidents of Bolivia and Nicaragua, Evo Morales and Daniel Ortega, respectively. Ortega (pictured above with Medvedev) is a long-time Soviet ally who is slated to visit Moscow on December 17, the first such trip since the Cold War. At the ALBA summit Medvedev proposed that Russia join the Havana-Caracas-led socialist bloc of nations, which does not presently include Argentina. Nevertheless, where the communist wing of the Justicialists, ejected from the party in 1974 and known as the Montoneros, failed to topple Argentina's military dictatorship during the late 1970s, the social democratic wing of the same party has effectively prostrated Argentina to the twenty-first-century incarnation of the Communist Bloc.

In a related story, US authorities have accused Hugo Chavez of exporting his socialist Bolivarian Revolution throughout Latin America by throwing Venezuelan petrodollars at foreign presidential candidates in order to secure allies in the region. In at least one case involving the Kirchners, they actually convicted middlemen involved in such transactions. In 2007 Comrade Hugo funnelled millions of dollars to Cristina Kirchner's presidential campaign via Venezuelan nationals Franklin Duran, Guido Antonini, Carlos Kaufmann, Rodolfo Wanseele Paciello, and Moises Maionica. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on Duran's conviction by a federal jury in Miami and the money trail that connects Chavez and Argentina's ruling party:

Hugo Chávez's Bag Man
Guess who's on the Argentinian government's campaign donor list?
November 4, 2008

A federal jury in Miami yesterday convicted Venezuelan Franklin Duran of acting illegally on behalf of his government inside the U.S. If there were any lingering doubts about the danger that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez presents to democracy in the Western Hemisphere, this verdict puts them to rest.

The mischief began in 2007 during Argentina's presidential campaign season. The Peronist candidate was Cristina Kirchner, wife of President Nestór Kirchner, who also happened to be a good friend of Mr. Chávez. In August Guido Antonini, a Venezuelan businessman traveling on a Venezuelan state oil company plane, was caught entering Argentina with $800,000 in cash. Argentina let Mr. Antonini go and he returned to his home in Miami, where he was met by the feds and spilled the beans about the destination of the money: Mrs. Kirchner's campaign.

Mr. Chávez wasn't aware that Mr. Antonini was talking to U.S. authorities and, according to court testimony, gave an order to his intelligence chief to silence him. Duran owed his fortune to "business" dealings with Venezuelan officials, and so he was apparently chosen to call on Mr. Antonini in Miami with both cash and threats. Mr. Antonini agreed to wear a wire to that meeting, so the Miami jury was able to hear convincing evidence. What made things worse for Duran is that his partner in the crime, Carlos Kaufmann, had already pleaded guilty to the cover-up and testified at the trial.

The trial also revealed that Mr. Antonini was not the only one carrying cash. He testified that he was told that there was another $4.2 million on the flight and that there had been other shipments of cash to Argentina. Mrs. Kirchner won the election in October 2007, as other allies of Mr. Chávez in the region have also done in recent years. It is reasonable to wonder how many of those victories were also underwritten by Venezuelan taxpayers.

Pictured here: A new resource at this blog is "Exporting Revolution in Latin America 2009," permanently linked under the Exclusive Maps section, in the right column. Although denied by the organization's leadership, the Venezuela-based Bolivarian Continental Coordination (CCB) appears to provide an umbrella for South America's revived, 21st century leftist insurgents. These include the pro-Chavez Communist Party of Venezuela, Communist Party of Chile, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and, in Peru, the revived Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. On December 8 the Jamestown Foundation reported that Sendoro Luminoso (SL) was plotting to attack the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, held last month in Lima: "Actual SL documents captured from one of the group’s camps, and reportedly authored by Shining Path leader “Artemio,” characterized the APEC Summit meeting as being attractive to the group because of the media coverage that an attack would garner." Ironically, President Medvedev, figurehead for the neo-Soviet terrorist state, was in attendance. The CCB website is linked here.

From an historical viewpoint, the CCB replicates the functions of the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR) founded in 1973 and consisting of guerrilla armies from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay. The JCR was targeted for destruction by the region's US-backed military regimes of the day under Operation Condor.