Brazil & Southern Cone - February 2011 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Argentina’s diplomacy ‘a la Timerman’

Never before had the US government been forced to sift through Twitter updates to separate the messages relating to its diplomatic row with Argentina from those relating to the row between the Argentine foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, and the local lingerie model Luciana Salazar. Neither could anyone have predicted that President Mauricio Funes, of El Salvador’s left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), which between 1980 and 1992 was an umbrella organisation for five left-wing guerrilla groups, would have to defend his left-wing credentials and the anti-US stance historically taken by his party to deny the Argentine accusation that El Salvador harbours a US training institute that teaches “torture techniques”. But then again, no one had had the pleasure (or shock) of Argentine diplomacy ‘a la Timerman’ until now.